When to Junk a Car

My basic advice on cars is that you should buy them mildly used, two to four years old, and drive them until they are inert heaps of rust. This is based on the commonplace observation that used cars are generally a better deal for buyers, that is, that relative to new ones they are cheaper than really makes sense.

Whether this disconnect between new and used car prices is because consumers irrationally prefer new ones or irrationally fear used ones is a metaphysical question I am not going to answer. But the gap is there, and many personal finance types will advise you to buy used rather than new because of it. I don’t disagree, but there is an equally important second principle to be drawn from the new/used price anomaly. Besides “never buy new” there is “never sell used.”

We can all probably agree that buying a car new and selling it used two or three years later is just about the most wasteful way you can own wheels. But buying it as a three year-old and selling it at six is not that far behind. You capture the used car discount when you buy, only to give most of it back again when you sell.

Read more »

Of Course It’s a Good Time to Buy a Toyota

Here at the Curmudgeon house, there is no question which was the funniest Super Bowl commercial. It was the ad for the local Toyota dealerships. I think what they had in mind was drumming up traffic for their Washington’s Birthday Sales (a big tradition around here) by quoting from positive car reviews. But what they wound up doing was filling the screen with short phrases in big block letters surrounded with quotation marks.

"The Best"

"Highest Quality"

"Best Resale Value"

Even my 12-year-old understood the quotes in the ironic sense and nearly pulled a muscle falling off the sofa. I’ve been looking around the web for a video to embed, but sadly cannot find one. As of mid-week they were still obliviously running the ad.

Read more »

Mortgage, Car Loan, Credit Card: Pay Any Two

Imagine that you are in financial distress. You have a mortgage, a car loan, and credit cards, but cannot pay all three. Which gets paid and which gets stiffed?

Obviously, this is a lesser of evils situation, not an ideal one. Not paying any one of them will have negative consequences. Defaulting on the credit cards  will likely result in not being able to use them to buy more stuff. And the other two loans are secured, so not paying those bills could result in the loss of your wheels or roof over your head.

You might think that since shelter is so important, the mortgage would be the most likely bill to be paid. And since buying more stuff on the credit cards is less vital to a person in financial trouble, you might assume that credit cards would be the most likely to be defaulted on. Having your cards taken from you would suck, but not as much as having your car taken.

Not so. Last week Wallet Pop ran a post by Lita Epstein that looked at default data for these three types of loan. Credit cards do turn out to be more commonly defaulted on than car loans, but not by as much as you might have assumed. 1.1% of credit cards were 90 days delinquent in the third quarter. 0.81% of car loans were 60 days delinquent.

Read more »

The Big Dealership

It’s not turning car companies into government agencies that bothers me so much as turning the government into a car company. And not a car manufacturer, you understand.  I mean a car dealer. The kind with the big lot on the edge of town covered in balloons and promoted incessantly by radio commercials with catchy jingles.

This trend kicked off in March when the president announced new car warranties backed by the government. That was on top of an assortment of other incentives then in place to get folks to come on down and kick the tires, such as a temporary deduction for state sales taxes and tax credits (a. k. a. rebates) for hybrids.

The latest gimmick under consideration by our national dealership is a version of the old "we’ll pay you $1000 for any trade" scheme.  Working its way through Congress is a cash-for-clunkers promotion. Turn in any drivable car with mileage at least 10 MPG worse than what you are buying to replace it and Crazy Uncle Sam will pay you $4500. Hurry hurry hurry. At these prices these deals just won’t last.

Read more »

Never Sell a Used Car

Yet another blog post from the personal finance mainstream that I must grudgingly acknowledge is good and useful. This one is on the advantages of driving a car until it is an inert pile of rust, rather than trading it in for something new. Get Rich Slowly guest blogger Joel Berry describes the financial benefits of driving a 1995 Geo Prizm, which has got to be just about the least impressive set of wheels imaginable.

That you should always buy cars used rather than new is a common and cliched bit of advice. Like many cliches, it is generally true. But I have always been amazed that the relatively obvious corollary, that you should never sell a used car, is rarely mentioned.

The crux of the matter is a bit of insanity that we all take for granted without reflection. New cars lose something like 25% of their value the moment they get an owner and continue to depreciate rapidly over the next year or two. Step back and think about this. The physical attributes of the car do not change when it is driven off the lot and generally do not deteriorate very much at all in the first years. So why does the market price for the car plummet?

There are basically two explanations. The first is that people are crazy. They will pay good money for the new car smell. Or they think that a newer car will attract members of the opposite sex. Much as I am biased in favor of any explanation based on the mental deficiencies of my follow man, I do not think this is all that is going on.

There is an inherent information asymmetry in the used car market. The owner of a car knows its true condition while the buyer does not. So the market price for a particular used car is based on the average value of similar cars for sale, not the specific value of the car in question. An owner considering selling a car will compare what he knows the car really to be worth to what he could get if he sold it. If it is worth more than the going rate, he holds on to it, if it is worth less, he sells. Which means that the used cars for sale tend to be the bad ones, which in turn reduces the average selling price, which means even fewer good cars are for sale, and so on. This is from a truly seminal paper published in 1970 called The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.

On any rationally objective measure, used cars are cheap as compared to new ones. Moreover, and this is the point that most personal financial advisers miss, the average value of used cars that are for sale is far less than the average value of similar cars that are not for sale. So unless you have a real clunker, that car in your driveway is almost certainly worth more to you than you could get if you sold it.

It would be hard/impossible to get real numbers, but I am of the opinion that you take a bigger hit selling a used car than you do buying a new one, at least on a percentage basis. The optimal car strategy is to buy two- or three-year-old used cars and drive them until they are scrap metal. Which is what the experts recommend. But the real benefit is on the back end, not the bargain you get up front. Given the choice, and here is where I part company with the established wisdom, buying new and driving the thing until it stops running makes more sense than buying youngish used cars and selling them again when they are not so young.