Had the exact same thing happen to me. They wouldn’t give me a purchase price, just the payment. Was an old F150 4wd with a straight six and a four speed. In hindsight, I think it was probably one of those “buy here, pay here” lots.
That may be right. All I know is I’m not making twice as much money now as I was when gas was $2 and something a gallon. I don’t think my pay increases have kept up with new car prices either, considering a few years ago they were discounting well below MSRP and now they’re asking above that in a lot of cases. Ten years ago or so, you could get a pretty well equipped truck for $35k. Now I imagine the same truck is $15-20k more…?
Yes this is really good for me. I did have house payments, but I skrimped and paid it off very quickly. My philosophy is if you make payments, make payments to yourself and when it’s paid off then pay in cash what you saved for. I am overly extreme when it comes to this. There is nothing wrong with getting loans and enjoying things earlier in life. Because who knows someone like me could save for the good life and end up dying early. Thankfully that didn’t happen in my case. But I think everyone should at least make themselves aware of the actual costs it takes to live a little when they are young.
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My wife, before we were married, had the opposite experience. Got a signed deal on a used car. Dealership assumed she would finance through them. This was just as the credit crunch was waning in the 80s. I went with her, the credit manager showed us the loan contract, the “truth in lending” line showed an APR of 25+%, I questioned that, he claimed it was the “cumulative interest”. I said we would wait until the next day. She went to her bank, got a loan for much lower interest, lower monthly payments, shorter duration.
We walk in with a check for the amount on the deal signed by the used car manager. To say the least, they were not pleased, but had no choice than to sell her the car.
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You picked the largest and most expensive Jeep. Of course it will cost a lot. So do the Armada, Sequoia, Suburban and Expedition. I won’t check the trim levels to choose comparably equipped vehicles, but comparably equipped vehicles will set you back about the same amount. For the Grand Wagoneer, it might be more appropriate to look at the Lexus LX, Infiniti QX80, Lincoln Navigator, and Cadillac Escalade. They’ve been priced in that neighborhood for a while.
On the glass-half-full side, there’s some silver linings to the current high car prices
- Auto repair shops will get more business
- Auto repair techs will command higher salaries
- The high car prices generate a lot of sales tax, funding communities & schools
- Folks who had the foresight to learn how to repair their own cars are sitting pretty
- If you leased a car, the current market price may be considerably higher than the contracted return value
- If you have an extra car you don’t need, you can sell it at a premium price, money in your pocket
- Fewer cars on the road means fewer traffic jams
If new car prices remain this high I expect new cars will gradually become a corporate worker benefit. In other words you won’t own the car, your employer owns it, and lends it to you as one of your benefits. When you shop around for a new job, one of the questions you’ll ask, besides salary, insurance etc, is "If I agree to take this job, what make/model of new car will you provide? " That’s a common way new cars are put into driver’s hands already in some countries.
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Ummm…yay? 
For one thing this is a very upmarket SUV (or at least trying to be; I’ve heard it is quite nice). For another thing, the base engine on this vehicle is the 392 Hemi, good for 471 hp and there is an optional 3.0 I6 twin turbo, good for 510 hp. Both of these engines will jack up the price quite a bit.
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The problem with this is lack of privacy. Currently, people know that they have zero expectation of privacy when using an employer-provided cellphone, tablet, or computer, or while driving a company vehicle–even outside of working hours. In fact, some companies even go so far as to claim copyright/ownership of any “work” created on their computer or tablet, even if the “work” is outside of the employee’s job responsibilities and is being done on personal time.
If a company vehicle becomes your only vehicle, then this means that your employer can monitor where you go, how long you stay there, your driving habits, and perhaps even view/listen to/record you and your passengers with surveillance equipment, even outside of work hours. Some people may be A-OK with this, but I am definitely not. I know that my work truck contains GPS tracking and driving habit monitoring devices…which is why I use it ONLY for company business, and store it at the company’s shop when not in use. For family and household purposes, I drive my personal vehicles, which cannot be tracked (by an employer).
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“I also do this although I never buy anything with payments.”
Me, too. At 75, I’ve never made monthly payments for anything except a house, and that not since 2004.
I paid $75 in 1963 for my first car, a 1950 Chevy. Liked the feeling of driving what I owned so much, my second, third, etc, car was also bought with cash. I’ve never bought a new car in my life.
No payments for anything like a TV, appliance, furniture, of course. I can’t understand how anyone can live like that, and yet our three adult children do.
True enough. It’s pretty easy finding something else to buy w/the monthly car-payment money.
Like you I never bought a new car but I did finance two with the first one I lacked one more payment when it got totaled I got enough insurance money to put a good down payment with low payments on the next one it lacked two payments when it got totaled I took that as a sign and never financed another one.
Same here… sort of…
My father taught me that if you can’t afford to pay cash for something, then you really can’t afford it.
I’ve never bought anything except new cars, and I paid cash for most of them. The only exceptions were when I learned that I could borrow some of “my own money” from my pension account, at a rate far below the loan rates that were current at that time. I would pull most of the purchase price out of my savings, and supplement that amount with a few thousand dollars from my pension account, re-paid at very attractive rates over the next couple of years. Meanwhile, my savings accounts stayed at pretty good levels in case of emergency.
One of the Vice-Principals for whom I worked used to take a pension fund loan every year, and put that money into a CD that yielded more than he paid in interest on the loan. I never did it, but it seemed to work for him.
Steve, you know there are no pockets in a shroud, right?
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No garages in a casket either! 
I’ve made payments on the house and 2 new cars, but paid them off early. I don’t like being in debt, so not sure I’ll do it again. Some folks like “stuff” so much that if they had to make a career change and take less money, they’d lose half of their financed “stuff”. I could walk out of work Monday, pick up some job elsewhere and be fine because I own all of my “stuff”. My “stuff” probably isn’t the biggest or newest or nicest, but the bank or finance company owns zero percent. I have nothing against people buying nice things or even financing cars in perpetuity. Just seems like a waste to me, working for more “stuff”. I’d rather try to retire early or something. New cars are really nice, but get old pretty quickly anyway in my experience.
I am probably not the target market for the Grand Wagoneer!
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Just once again when we are talking about economic rules of life, you need to be flexible. Just before the last major downturn, my former boss pulled all his pension money out figuring he could invest it better himself. Last I heard he was working at the casino for pocket money.
Nothing absolutely wrong with having no debt, but there is good debt and bad debt. In 1976, house prices were going up about 20% a year. It would have been impossible to save to buy a house for the ordinary person. So good debt.
If you have money invested that yields 15%, there is no reason to pull it out to save 3% on a car or furniture purchase. Of course now the market is upside down so losing 15% but pulling out still means taking expensive money out since it won’t be there for an upturn again.
At any rate right now it is better to have no debt and plenty of cash to ride the hurricane out. I got a notice from the credit union offering 3.5 car loans. So pull money out from the bank that is earning 1% to avoid 3%, normally would make sense but in these days it might be better to save the cash, or not buy at all.
Just saying in an upside down world you need to be flexible and protect yourself from adversity. Protecting yourself from landlords might be wise even now. If you can do that with credit, OK but if not better to pay cash or avoid it all together.
Just sayin’ is all there is no one single rule that applies except self-protection.
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We paid off our house early and now our FICO score is 26 points lower .
As for those who look down on us that buy new vehicles , we make it possible for people to buy well taken care of used vehicles .
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SY-John, we’re two chips off the same block. Like you, I hate being in debt.
Old_Mopar_Guy makes the good point that we can’t take it with us. We can leave it to our children, grandkids and charity, though. And neither my wife nor I feel we’re depriving ourselves. Yeah, maybe I should surprise her with a new, larger HDTV, but the old one we have now works fine, so who needs it. Our car is a 2011 Toyota, which she tells me is all we need though we could pay cash for any car at any dealer in our town.
When I was working, not being in debt helped me not live in fear of losing my job. My house, car, and so on, weren’t going anywhere. I stayed with the same employer - the US Army - for 36 years but there are layoffs (“reduction in force” we call them) there, too.
Both my wife and I grew up dirt poor, so we share the same values when it comes to money, ie, to not be cheap (she’s generous to a fault), but to be frugal. Can’t think of living any other way.
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I agree with you that it comes down to how you were brought up. My mother used to say “when you’re down to your last $5,000 go out and buy yourself a new Cadillac, it will raise your self esteem and keep other people from knowing that you’ve fallen on hard times”.
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My dad worked as a civil engineer for a construction company and had a company provided truck, so he didn’t have a personal truck of his own. We’d survey land on the weekends when I was a kid. He used a hand me down Pontiac car that my mom had basically already “used up” to haul around the equipment (transit, tripods, etc), because…well, we had it. I HATED that when I was a kid. If we’re going to be doing that kind of work, couldn’t we at least work out of a truck or something instead of the ratty old car? Years later, I found myself hauling pine straw bales and bags of mortar in the trunk of a Buick because…well, I had the car! I did buy a cheap used truck later on, but I thought about my dad being frugal and hauling around the survey equipment as I used my Lesabre as a truck lol. It’s less embarrassing when you do it yourself, or maybe you just don’t give a squat about what people think about you when you get older. Or both. 
I was raised to have more money than it looks like you do versus looking like you have more money than you actually do. I agree, a lot of it is based on your raising.
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