Lady buys a demo car and pays $25,000 over sticker, and no, it’s not a #5 out of 10 kinda vehicle either. It’s a Mazda 6
http://www…el-dealer/
gets resolved, but the damage is done:
http://www…y-refunded
Talk about taking advantage of the customers. The 2nd article mentioned she was “intellectually disabled”, but that can describe a LOT of people, especially the way some salesmen talk.
That’s pretty rotten of the dealer to do this but on the other hand, this woman is a legal adult with a state issued drivers license who made her own decision. No one at the dealer stuck a gun in her back and forced the issue.
It would be no different than if she signed the papers on a 125k dollar loan to buy a 100k dollar home.
Heck, people will go into a boutigue store and pay 50 bucks for a T-shirt; the same shirt (with a different neck tag) which could be gotten at K-Mart for 6.
(Got that actual example from my youngest son’s business law class)
What stuns me a bit about this is that someone in the lending agency actually approved this loan.
I have supposedly educated colleagues that only ask one question when purchasing a car or other major purchase: “What will my monthly payments be?” These people have no concept of how much they are paying to rent money. My dad had a colleague back in the 1950’s who was driving a 5 year old Buick that was still in great shape, but he couldn’t stand driving an older car. He traded for a brand new 1955 Buick and traded the 1955 a year later for a brand new 1956 Buick. The reason he traded was that he could spread the payments for the 1956 Buick over a longer time period and pay less per month.
I think most lending institutions are only slightly less shady than the loan sharks on the street. However, there are people out there who have to have the latest and the best right away, so they fall for the easy payment high interest plans.
Book smarts doesn’t necessarily translate into real world smarts or even common sense. Even my local insurance agent is surprised at how many people come in after buying a new vehicles and practically crapping their pants when they hear how much their insurance will go up.
I’d like to think I’ve done an OCD amount of work for this new car I’m getting(delivery is supposed to be tomorrow). I test drove numerous vehicles to see what fit right, I checked insurance on every vehicle I drove, and some I wasn’t sure about, I told the salesman I was looking to spend X amount of dollars for the car not for a month, I negotiated the price of the car out the door before I even agreed to put the deposit down, I spent my day off this past friday checking interest rates at the various banks/credit unions here in town, and I’ll probably take advantage of the extra .25% off some banks offer if I have a checking account and do auto pay every month with it by opening a new account with them and splitting my pay check up to cover the payments.
However, for every 1 of me, there’s thousands, if not millions, of others who are like Triedaq’s friends and only look at that monthly payment number.
I taught a freshman level computer course for non-majors a couple of years ago. I was demonstrating the financial functions on the Excel spreadsheet. We calculated the interest on $16,000 at various rates over a couple of different time periods. I got the typical rates for an auto loan. I suggested that if a person was allowed $4000 for a trade-in for a $20,000 car, we calculated how much would the loan cost at some typical rates I had looked up before class. We then calculated the cost of gasoline at $3.50 a gallon for 10,000 miles a year at 20 miles per gallon. Everyone at the time was complaining about the high gasoline prices, but the gasoline cost was less than the cost of the loan, and few people were complaining about the the cost of the loan. One student came up after class and shook my hand. Very few people seem to realize that it is expensive to “rent” money.
Maybe you should have bumped the mileage up to 20 or 30k miles per year, depending on what jobs some of your students were going to take, just to see how it panned out. And yes, renting money is expensive, even more so if you let someone else borrow it for you.
Lots of people bought houses for easily triple their value, 3 or 4 years ago, because they got 100% financing with teaser rates of 0% or 1%. They could not read the financial disclosures and no one told them what they were doing - they were just tools of a massive fraud that home builders and mortgage brokers put over on lenders and buyers. No one thinks that new house developers should be investigated and I have not seen mortgage brokers indicted yet. So, if there’s little interest in punishing people who stole billions, broke the hearts of hundreds of thousands of families and nearly destroyed our economy, who’s going to go after one immoral, cheating car dealership?
I read an article in an automotive trade publication a dozen years back in which they did a survey of potential car buyers.
Something like 85% of the ones surveyed were only concerned with one thing; the amount of the monthly payment as Triedaq mentions.
They could care less about interest rate, principle, the real value of their trade, or anything else; just as long as that monthly payment sounds good it’s a go.
About 10 years ago my wife started on me on weekend about going car shopping for a brand new ride. She saw a commercial advertising brand new (not lease returns or demos) Toyota Camrys for 149 dollars a month.
Half an hour of my questioning what planet she was from accomplished nothing.
At the dealership on Sat. evening (after hours) I finally succeeded in making her see that 17 grand plus on the window sticker added up to X dollars over 5 years and that didn’t even include the interest.
The really irritating part is that she’s been pretty much a bookkeeper and auditor all of her life and is an ace when it comes to numbers and money.
There are far too many predatory marketers and too few restrictions on them. We are guilty in our connivance. Luckily, I was born a cynic.