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Probably our car. It's a great car, I spent weeks researching the perfect car for us. I love it and I'm grateful every time I drive it, but we bought it on credit and it's way out of our price range to buy. It'll take us about 6 years total to pay it off.
I still understand my decision at the time, but it was driven by a specific chain of events that made it make sense, and in principle I'm against buying a car on credit, just buy an older reliable car you can afford.
Nah I’d say that’s a good purchase. I just bought a new car on credit too because I’ve had pretty bad luck with buying used cars before. They always required quite a lot of work to get running and then something breaks and repairs are needed again. Case in point the current car's AC system broke down a little while ago and after all the repairs that were done already I have a feeling that getting the AC repaired would mean I’ve paid more in repairs than to buy the car. And that’s just not worth it. So I decided to take out a little credit and just buy a new car instead.
It can be a good purchase and still be irresponsible, IMO. I love that car and it will serve us for years to come, I don't regret it. We could have gotten a much cheaper new car, for example, but at the time we decided our biggest value for money was the car we have now.
I understand and agree with your attitude to buying a car on credit. Two semi-objective justifications I can see are safety and quality-of-life.
Newer and better cars are safer, and you might not have even a minor collision throughout the whole lifetime of the car, but the (hopefully never) day a crash happens you'll be forever grateful to yourself you bought this car. And if you have some "smart" assistants on-board those actually can make you not end up in the accident.
From my experience I have realized that (within reasonable bounds) if spending more on something results in substantiality higher quality-of-life then it's a money well spent. Because you end up being happier, calmer and actually more productive if you don't have to waste your energy on inconvenient things.
Not sure if that makes you feel any better...
Some of the considerations we took when choosing the car, I totally agree. I don't regret the decision, the monthly payments are not a huge burden on us, fortunately, but it was still not the best financial move.
Wondering which car you ended up choosing.
A 2 year old Nissan Leaf from the stand. Meaning, it belonged to Nissan as a test drive car before it was ours.