Car Buying Tips to help you Stay away from Poverty

Car Buying Tips
You've heard of people who are house-poor or college-poor, haven't you? These are people who put all their money into a house or a college education. They think they're actually investing their money – that their house will appreciate in value and their college education at the fine institution will return millions by way of a great job.

Years later, they find that the housing market has settled itself comfortably at the bottom of a pond, and what you know, a Master’s degree in Shakespearean sonnets and the culture of the Mayan civilization doesn't actually fetch a well-paying job. Well, there's another category of poverty – those who are car-poor. You know who they are, don't you?

They buy good, desirable cars once every three years, and spent so much money over moving themselves from point A to point B over a lifetime that they practically have nothing left. These car buying tips will help you stay away from poverty.

Perhaps it's a bad habit that car reviewing experts actually encourage. Often, they will praise or ridicule the looks of a car in rather extravagant terms. The message is clear – don't be caught dead in a car that looks funny. Well, while vanity does feel very nice indulging, it isn't very kind to your pocketbook.

When people pay even a little attention to how a car looks, they usually feel comfortable accepting bad deals in a number of other areas – finance terms, fuel economy, space, reliability, insurance costs and so on. So right at the top of this list of car buying tips, you get your first one – don't just keep your feelings to do with a new car’s looks in perspective – ignore them altogether. Learn to love what you buy. It'll save you thousands over a lifetime.

How much does it cost to own a car do you think? Well, going by all the eye-popping offers you get to see all over, your average sensible car costs about $350 a month in payments. Well, you need to understand that to make it that low and attractive looking, they have to do a number of things to that pricing. To begin with, your down payment is certainly going to be pretty high, as is your sales tax.

But on top of that, you're going to be paying $350 a month for a long, long time. It's going to really add up. And then, there is the matter of insurance, the fuel bills, the maintenance bills and so on. Owning that $350 a month car actually costs closer to $900 a month when you take everything into account. Most car buying tips won't tell you this.

But you need to figure this out at some point – constraining your family to the use of just one car would save you about $10,000 every year. Save that money, and you won't believe how much it adds up to by the time you retire.

Leasing can be a wonderful feeling. The monthly payments tend to be really low, and you can take the car home really quickly. The problem with leasing is that you to return the car after two years or so. It's like thinking that renting a car from the car-rental agency is going to really work out in your favor because the daily payments are really low.

In the end, you always have to return the car, you have nothing to show for it, and those payments add up. And leasing agreements can be so complex that you’ll never be able to figure out whether you got a good deal.