I guess I don’t mind asking the question, eben if it makes me look as stupid as your examples.
Can you explain why a lease is so asinine? For the same payment as a car I will get tired of, wear out, and have to unload, I can get a new car and have them take care of all the maintenance, give it back at the end and get another new car. What am I missing?
Leases may or may not be desirable for a particular individual.
Here the issue commented on is the the person is talking about say a $350 lease payment being cheaper than $400 tires when it is in fact $350 times 48 months (or 36 months or 60 months or 72 months) being compared to $400.
I was perplexed by this too. I think that the person had a monthly payment on their current car that exceeded $400/month, so they made the decision not to buy snow tires and get a new car at a lower monthly payment, equity be damned!
It is cheap if it is done properly.
If you are doing up the bathroom to sell the house- in other words to make it look extremely nice but not expecting it to last it is about what you could pay (depending on size and what needs to be done to the equipment in the bathroom).
Over a long term, say 10 years +, leasing cars will almost certainly be more expensive than buying a reasonably priced several year old used car. That certainly doesn’t make it asinine - the only thing that would be asinine would be if you thought you were coming out ahead on a dollar basis leasing.
You may come out far ahead on the basis of your own priorities - you don’t spend a whole lot more and you’re always in relatively new cars that are under warranty. That’s a pretty good deal for plenty of people, but very unlikely to be the absolute cheapest option.
The biggest point making leases more costly is that you can most likely drive a car you own for years after paying off its loan, if you even have a loan. It’s not like a car gets 5-6 years old and is a huge maintenance sink.
All this assumes you’re highly motivated by saving money, which isn’t the case for all drivers. I drive a Mercedes. The idea that it really matters whether I lease or own it is pretty absurd - if I were motivated primarily by money I had myriad cheaper options.
First of all, unloading or selling a car because you get tired of it is more expensive than keeping the car until you drive it into the ground, even if that means you’re driving the same car after ten or more years. Also, even if the lease includes all maintenance, that’s only for the first couple of years, when most cars require little maintenance anyhow. So it’s not saving you much money.
^ This. I buy used cars cheap and drive them until they die, then sell them for scrap. My target is to have an initial cost per mile of under $0.05 and an all in cost per mile of less than $0.10 (initial cost plus gas, oil, tires, maintenance, etc) at the end of the vehicle’s useful life. For instance, the car I’m driving now cost me $1900. If it died today my local scrap yard would give me $400. I have had it for over a year and put about 20,000 miles on it. That gives me a current iniitial cost per mile of 0.075. Another 10,000 miles and I'll be at the target of .05 cents per mile. All in, right now I’m at about 14 cents per mile. That’s pretty cheap and, barring major repairs, will only get cheaper over time.
It helps that I do alot of the work on my vehicles myself, which saves tremendously on repair costs.
This may explain some of the behavior you don’t understand, o wealthy solons of the Dope:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
I would assume they left some kind of note, if for no other reason, so she didn’t drive away and get pulled over for not having plates on the car. I don’t believe this city uses a boot, this was basically their version of a boot.
My mother continues to crack me up. She was a SAHM with 5 kids and as a result, she became a master of budgeting, reusing, and generally economizing. She’s now a widow living in a home with no mortgage and a comfortable income, thanks to my dad’s planning and my brother’s management of her affairs since Dad died.
She loves to travel and she spends thousands a year taking cruises - good for her! She likes treating her children and grandchildren to dinner out - every once in a while, she’ll take us all to a really nice restaurant and run up a tab over $1K, including alcohol and tips. Good for all of us!
BUT, she shops at the dollar store thinking she’s saving money, but even if the bottle if dish detergent costs less, if you have to use 3X as much as the good stuff, you’re not saving money. She likes wine, but she’ll only buy wine in boxes or she’ll get a case of the $3.99/bottle stuff. On a cruise, she’ll order a drink that might cost her $8, but heaven forbid she spend that much on a bottle of wine!! And, of course, she rinses out bread bags and margarine tubs to reuse them - don’t you dare spend money on tupperware or even generic storage containers!!
For at least 6 or 7 years, she’s been using a microwave that doesn’t have a working display. A replacement to fit in its place would cost less than $200. We’ve offered to buy her one for her birthday or mother’s day - nope, hers is just fine. When she’s on a cruise, she’ll spend hundreds or thousands on new jewelry, but her shoes are all from Payless.
I’d think about having her committed, but she’s always been like this - she scrimps on the weirdest things.
There are pros and cons to individual leases for cars and we’ve hashed them out in various threads here, but the bottom line is that they are a good deal only for a small fraction of vehicle owners: those who want/must have a new car, don’t drive an excessive number of miles, and want to trade a lower monthly payment for value over the longer term. Add in the detritus of “hassle selling a car” etc. and I suppose it’s a good fit for those few.
But in financial terms, for most buyers, especially those with marginal finances, it sucks big wet rocks. You’re paying a fortune to own the “new” and losing everything else. Mileage terms get shorter and shorter with the deals, and you could end up owing thousands in overage. Plus you’re responsible for all maintenance, upkeep, repair and possibly more expensive insurance than you would carry on an owned vehicle. It’s a bit like living in a mobile home: the worst of both owning and renting, combined, with a very slim range of upside.
In this case, I feel the idiots compounded all their problems by leasing a new vehicle rather than buying it, so that they can get 6-10 years of use out of it instead of all the limitations of a lease.
A truly vast number of people are like this - burn dollars, carefully polish zinc pennies. Most people are as bad at their overall economic sense as they are at accurate risk assessment, including those who pride themselves on a few “good” habits.
Mom sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
When I go on cruises, I take cases and cases of beer. This does not make me smart. This makes me cheap.
I’ve never been on a cruise that let passengers bring booze.
The logic is very simple, actually. It is the facts that are wrong. For about five years at least, conservatives have been predicting that our budgets are so out of balance that hyperinflation is right around the corner. They are still predicting although interest rates and inflation are lower than at any time since the great depression. Still, if you believe this, it makes sense to borrow as much as you can since you will be paying it off in cheap dollars. Of course, they have to get a LOT cheaper (and salaries have to go in step–not a trivial point) before it makes sense to pay 20% interest on your credit card debt.
But yes, financial stupidity is rampant. Just never carrying over a CC debt would save you so much money.
How exactly do they prevent it? Open up all your luggage?
Stupid heavy luggage that makes loud glass clanking noises when jostled frequently gets dropped a few times “by accident”.
Luggage is x-rayed and inspected, just like on airlines.
Princess doesn’t seem to have a problem. I walk on with a case, and pick up another in every port. They never say a word.
Now, back to the discussion at hand!
Eh, the wealthy do it too, I regret to inform you.