Reply to best cheap car option

Forum Index » Cars and Transportation

Reply to "best cheap car option"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So we only drive a couple thousand miles a year.  We only have one car and in theory we could probably do without it but frankly having to find a zipcar every time I need to pick my kid up at a birthday party or something doesn't seem that fun.  We are not "car people"-- have no desire for an upscale car and no desire to spend time maintaining a car, but also not really looking to buy a very used car (partly because we don't want to worry about future repairs).  We have also found that if you drive a car as little as we do it eventually has as many, if not more, maintenance issues as if you drive it 10-15k miles a year.

Last time we just bought a car, kept it for about 12 years, and figured out it probably cost us $250/month.  I am wondering if this time we should find a lease that costs less than $200 a month, or just buy the cheapest car we can find (but it's kind of depressing to spend $15-20k on something you don't actually like), or buy used and hope we don't get too many maintenance issues.[/quote]

OP, what we've found is that if you buy a new car with excellent resale value, such as a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic, the depreciation for the first 3 years or so works out to about a hundred dollars a month - this is with normal mileage. If you only end up putting 6000 miles or so on the car in three years, then then resale value would be even higher. This is the route we would go if we were you.  With a new car you also get the benefit of warranty coverage, almost no maintenance - except for the oil changes, better safety/features, and generally greater peace of mind. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics