Everyone bragging now how old their care is like fuel efficiency and safety didn't improve at all in decades. You don't have to buy new car each year but there a benefits to driving something modern.
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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I can buy a lot of fuel for what I saved by buying an old used car. Doesn't really help if I die in a wreck, but I'll die happier and not in debt I suppose.
A lot of people have payments that high and beyond because they bought more car than they could afford, saw a newer shinier one later, and rolled their loan/trade forward into an even worse situation. The amount of people with negative equity in a fucking car genuinely shocks me.
Holy shit. While I don't own a car and have no knowledge of my own in that regard, I've just looked at an article that tried to compare the cost of EVs to ICEs. They used brand-new cars at list price without subsidies for the comparison. But there were a lot of cars below the 1000 euro monthly mark. And those figures include fuel, maintenance, insurance, tax, price deprevation as well as monthly payments.
I think somewhere around the 45k mark it jumped above the 1000 euro monthly.
And how many households have 2 such payments?
I very much wish I could go car-free, but I have at least drastically reduced my vehicle usage over the past few years.
We're paying the last payment on my wife's car this month. We've been getting calls and emails from the dealership telling us what a prefect time it would be to upgrade. One night the gummies kicked in and I decided to reply to the clearly automated and canned email. It was dripping with snark, along the lines of "I'll never buy a car because an email prompted me to". Got a call the next day from the dealership where they apologized... and then went right into a sales pitch.
I bought a new Subaru two years ago and love it. But only days later they started sending me offers to trade in my new car for a brand new Subaru! They email two offers every week and I haven't unsubscribed because it's amusing to see the value of my car go down and occasionally up (its value increased in December before dropping again). Right now they're valuing my car, purchased for $28k, at $17k after 24 months of ownership.
Them offering 60% after 2 years seems pretty good for a dealership tbh.
People spending that much on a car have no one but themselves to blame. Even on a 36mo loan, you can get several perfectly nice models brand new for half that. Less if you're okay with a subcompact.
I’m spending close to $1,000/yr to keep my 2009 car on the road and that beats $1,000/month by a long shot.
My little paid-for econobox saves me so much money
I'm driving a car from 1992 and I dont even spend $1000/year on maintenance and gas.
Exactly. As long as I am spending less than $500/month on repairs, I am ahead of the game. Also helps that I can do all the repairs myself.
I drive a 2007 diesel pickup and the total expenses for the past 4 years average 313€/month.
and you probably don't need to deal with the trashy workmanship that is in these things these days, plus all the fancy useless crap they force on people that when they break, the whole car stops responding.
I'm here welding a patch onto the chassis rail of my almost-60-year-old shit box. I can't imagine spending a mortgage payment a month on a car.
A record share of Americans — more than 20% — agreed to pay more than $1,000 per month for a new car loan at the end of the year, according to car sales site Edmunds.
Agreed=we're convinced it was a good idea.