It’s HERE! The new vehicle has taken up residence in the garage.
Having decided the time had come to replace the beloved Dog Chariot., I went over to Bell Road Toyota, a large dealership where a friend of a friend is fleet manager. There I spent the entire afternoon wrestling with Toyota staff and ninnies at the credit union’s lender and on and on. It was amazingly awful. The piles of incomprehensible papers they make you sign rival the stacks of contracts you have to sign to get a mortgage.
So which is worse? Getting a mortgage or buying a car?
My own money is on the car transaction. Mortgage officers don’t try to pressure you to buy things you don’t need or want.
The car is a so-called “Certified Pre-Owned” (CPO) number, which means the dealer has refurbished it from front to back and provides an extended, fairly comprehensive warranty: 100,000 miles or seven years. They’re very proud of this and happily tell you all about it, over and over…until you get to the financial guy to whom you’re supposed to pay up.
He spent the better part of an hour trying to persuade me that I had to buy additional warranty coverage, lest God Only Knows WHAT might happen — liberally emphasizing the cost of replacing a fuel filter installed inside a gas tank. Much of this threat was laid to the federal government’s unreasonable demands for lowered emissions.
Ultimately I passed on the expensive extra warranty: it looked like a scam, sort of like those extended warranties peddled by appliance stores and Best Buy and the like. He finally gave up.
It really is a nice car.
Congrats! I agree, the extra warranty coverage was probably more to their benefit than yours, especially if they were peddling it that hard. I’m guessing that there’s a lot of fine print that pretty much makes it unusable. That’s the story I tend to hear about those things.
Sooo the title of your next blog will be….”What I did on my Summer “Vacation”…I bought a vehicle!” … ??? LOL…. Will share that DD1 bought one of these a couple of years back…she bought hers new….well, because she can and as memory serves there have been several recalls. Might want to check and make sure that the new vehicles is current on it’s “shots”. MAN ….7 years and 100K warranty on a USED vehicle! Why would you need and extended warranty? Can’t wait to hear the particulars…..when you get back from “vacation”. I would think that 7 year warranty gives you some “peace of mind”. IMHO to hell with the fuel filter in the gas tank….I would be more concerned with the cost of a transmission….which can go $5-6-7K. Sorry to hear about the CU …. but with them lending money at 1.9%….might want to just go with the flow…
As for car buying in general. It seems vehicle purchases have reached epidemic proportions in “financial blog” circles….Not so long ago the fella over at Budgets are Sexy bought a new vehicle…a Lexus no less. The guy over at Root of Good recently bought a new van to replace his aging Honda. And the folks over at the Frugalwoods blog bought not one but TWO vehicles. And now you have made your “contribution” to the economic recovery with the new Toyota. Things must be improving…
I hope to keep my vehicle for another 12 years IF nothing REALL bad happens….talking flames….not just smoke… That would make the truck 25 years old and then “collectable” to some “avid auto enthusiast”…..
If we couldn’t get through to the idiots at the CU — who announced they would not fax a letter of approval but would email it, then insisted they HAD emailed it even though it didn’t come through to either of the two people at the dealership to whom they’d addressed it — then the dealership was willing to extend a 2.9% loan. Really, that upped the payment only about eight or ten bucks.
The transmission is covered under the CPO contract: it’s part of the drive train warranty. The alternator is not, and a new alternator for one of these little beasts is $940…according to the high-pressure salesman.
Frankly, I think these vehicles are now built so that if you keep up the maintenance — change the oil a little more often than required, no matter what the maker claims, fix things as soon as they break, and have a fall-back fund of $3,000 to $5,000 for major repairs — some of them will run almost indefinitely. If I weren’t living alone and if that breakdown hadn’t stranded me for five+ hours in a bad part of town, I would not have traded in the Chariot.
On the other hand, at some point it becomes ill-advised to use it for much more than tooling down to the corner store — which is where the Chariot was at. I haven’t taken a day trip around Arizona in years, because I’ve been afraid to drive it out of town. Most places where I go in town, other than the Mayo Clinic, are within (not very reasonable, but do-able) walking distance from my house if the weather is under 90 degrees — which is the case about 8 months of 12.
With this new car, I’ll be able to go sight-seeing again! Jerome, Bisbee, Portal, Sedona, Prescott, Payson, Patagonia, Sonoita, and the endlessly beloved YARNELL! Hooorayyy!
Congrats….You sound “tickled” about your new purchase and in the end…that’s what counts. As for the 1.9% versus the 2.9%, because of the length of the term the difference in payment is pretty crazy….30 year mortgage different story…And as you said you’ll probably pay it off early. That is sad about the CU though. Gotta tell ya we have had nothing but positive experiences at our CU. I re-fied a mortgage a while back at a great rate and it took longer to buy a washer from Lowes then it took to settle on the mortgage ….seriously! And the service provided me on my accounts now is exceptional…. Glad to see it all worked out for you!!
The lending apparently is dispensed through an outside vendor. When you call the CU number you get shunted out to a different punch-a-button network, and when you click on the “car loan” link on the CU’s web page, you get a message telling you you’re leaving t he CU site and going to some other outfit.
So…I surely _will_ be telling the upper management at the credit union about it. But just now I can’t work myself up to very high dudgeon over that. The first dear-sir-you-cur needs to go to Safeco by way of describing the service provided by the hilariously named About Time Towing Company.
I bought a new car 2 years ago (how time flies!) – got myself a fancy Mazda CX-5 – which I absolutely LOVE. So much fun to drive and I love being almost at the same height as most of the other cars on the road as opposed to down load like my old sedan.
I went with new, because the specific vehicle I wanted was not available in used flavours and my sedan was dying and no longer reliable – and I was already sort of starting to curb my driving distances – and I wasn’t willing to do that. I had extended the life of my sedan by a couple of years by purchasing the platinum version of AAA with longest-distance towing option – which had eased my mind considerably for a while, but it eventually was time to replace my car.
The money guy at the dealership did the same thing – he was frightfully friendly about it, and we kept it lighthearted – I said ” you can do your thing because you need to go through your spiel but I’m not buying anything extra”.
The only thing that interested me was what they called “gap” insurance – which guaranteed that if you totaled the car, the insurance would pay off the amount owed on the loan – not just the value of the car. Which was going to cost me another $2500 from the dealership. I went “hmm, that’s interesting, but no thanks” – went home and did some research – and ended up switching car insurance companies to one that offers the same thing for an additional $19 per year. SOLVED.
Congrats on the new car! It looks pretty spiffy!
Congrats on the new car! My current car is a used Toyota I bought from the dealer with the Certified warranty. So far I haven’t used it, but that’s mainly because the one item I did have to replace after only a year — the battery — wasn’t covered. They said the extended warranty didn’t cover standard “wear and tear” items like batteries. Look at the fine print. Hopefully they’ve changed that.
I was super happy to purchase that car in cash. I’ve only ever done that with the beater cars I drove in high school.
Congrats on the new used car! I’m glad you got the make/model you wanted.