[A4] Prospective A4 Buyer

[docwyte at comcast.net]

Car payments are stupid.  Don't buy a car unless you can pay in cash and walk off with the title in hand.  Obviously that hampers your ability to get a new car.  The answer is to buy one of the many very cool cars that have been made in the past.

Rocky makes some good points about leasing.  It works for him, but I think he's the exception to the rule.  When you're leasing a car, you're just renting it.  In general, you're upside down in a lease and at lease end, you turn it in and have no equity and lose your down payment.  

Take me as a counter point, I drive at least 20k miles a year on my daily driver.  That doesn't include the miles I put on my track car, on our beater Jeep or on my wife's car.  I live 4.5 miles from work.  I don't really leave the state (colorado), yet I pack the mileage on.  A lease just won't work for me, besides the fact that I can't seem to keep my cars stock.

My answer is to choose cars carefully and buy "deals".  I owned my S4 avant for about 1.5 years.  I played with it, had fun and sold it for a net ownership cost of less than $300 a month.  That's cheaper than leasing and I could mod the car and drive it as much as I wanted with no worries.  I'm about to pick up an UrS4 that I could part out for more than I'm paying for it.  

The key is to try to minimalize being upside down in the car, which is difficult since they're a depreciating asset.  When you lease, you're immediately upside down...

> get your payments at like 250-300 a month instead of 450ish!