What to do about my Honda?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hey there! Single mom looking for honest, educated, opinions…

I have a 1999 Honda Accord LX that I bought a year ago for $2500. I’ve driven it for a year with very little to no issues with it. I still owe $1700 on the car. About a month ago it started leaking oil. I took it to my mechanic (my son’s soon to be father in law - whom I’ve known most of my life) my son put a new timing belt, starter, and spark plugs (& wires) on it. They weren’t however, able to fix the oil leak (it was worse than he originally thought and he didn’t know if I wanted to spend the money to fix it) I went to pick the car up and they explained all of this to me. At this time, he also tells me that the alternator is going bad… lol. He says I should probably decide whether or not I want to fix it or if I should start looking for another car. At this point, I am already putting a quart of oil a day in my Honda, so, I decided I should probably start looking for another car.

I went to my local Honda dealership and applied for a loan for a Honda Certified 2012 Civic with 25k miles on it. They wanted 13,600 for it. The ‘loan guy’ tells me they can give me a loan with 11.9% APR, and my payments will be around $250 a month. This sounds pretty good to me, UNTIL he says “with $2,000 down”…

:roll eyes: Hello? If I had $2000 to put down, I wouldn’t have a loan on my current car".

I talked to my son (who’s in college working on his BA in Automotive Diesel Technology) and asked him if he thought the car was worth fixing. He wasn’t sure, but thought it was worth checking into. Deciding maybe I should just keep the car instead of taking on more payments, I talked to my mechanic and schedule an appointment. He tells me yesterday that it’s probably going to cost between $1800 and $2000 to fix it. Like I said before, I owe $1700 on it still.

I bought the car with the hopes of having it 5+ years (until I can afford something ‘better’) and I figured that anything that went wrong with it my son could fix. (He’s a Honda nut, at 17, the kid replaced the transmission and clutch in his CRX by himself in my ex-husbands gravel driveway!! lol)

SO, now I don’t know what to do.

I don’t have anything for a down payment on another car.

I can’t afford to make a new car payment AND still be paying on the other one.

I could probably borrow the 2000 to fix it from the company I already have my loan with.

Would the 2000 FIX it, or is this just the beginning of more problems to come?

I JUST DON’T KNOW…

Am better off trying to get something else or am I better of putting the 2000 in my Honda and (hopefully) driving it another 5+ years?

THANKS!!

2

Yes.

3

Nice way to be helpful. :rolleyes:

Everyday Essentials, my wife and i were recently faced with a similar situation. Our 1998 Civic started having some real problems, and was going to need about $2500 worth of work to get it back into something like driving condition. I started a thread about it here.

After reading the advice that thread, and talking with my wife, we decided that throwing $2500 into a 16-year-old car with over 200,000 miles on the clock just wasn’t worth it, and we started looking around for a replacement. We wanted a four-cylinder sedan with good gas mileage, and we didn’t want to go over $14,000 in total costs.

Just this week we bought a nice 2008 Civic Coupe (we have no kids or pets, so we can live with two doors) for under $12,000 including all taxes and fees. Our loan is for the full amount (no down payment), and we’ll be paying about $210 a month over five years.

Here’s an important difference, though: our finance. We got an interest rate of just over 2% through our credit union. The dealer offered to finance us, but the best he could do was 3.99%. And 11.9% is pretty high for an auto loan. On a $12,000 loan, every extra 2% interest is about an extra $10 a month, or $120 a year, or $600 over a 60 month loan. So an 11.9% loan for $12,000 will cost you about $450-500 more per year than a 4% loan, or about $2,500 in total.

Interest rates are based on your credit risk, and it could be that the high rate offered by the dealer means that you have low income and/or not-so-good credit history. If that’s the case, there may not be much you can do about it. Your current, outstanding loan on the old Accord probably isn’t helping things, either.

At the very least, it will be worth your while to look elsewhere for credit. You might not get a great rate, but shaving a few percentage points can make a difference. You might also look at some slightly older cars. Here in Southern California, there were some pretty decent, reliable cars going for under $10,000. You won’t get into a Certified 2012 Civic for that price, but you can get something that should be reliable for a number of years—a slightly older Civic (like ours), a Toyota Corolla, or something similar.

One thing to watch out for is insurance costs. We drove a Mazda 3 during our search for a car, and it was certainly fun to drive an, overall, a very nice little car. I came to find out, though, that our comprehensive insurance policy would cost about $600 a year more for the Mazda than for the Honda. Apparently the sportiness of the Mazda 3 means that it’s more of an insurance risk.

4

A quart of oil a day is a major leak! Is it leaking from one of the main seals? If it was just an oil pan or valve cover leak, it would be easy to fix.

11.9% interest and $250 a month with $2K down for a used car? That’s outrageous. I suggest that you look at other dealerships such as Kia or Hyundai. You might be able to buy a new car for less per month - of course it will probably be for a lot more months. However you’ll have a new car with a 100K warranty whereas the Honda is within 11K miles of its 36K mile warranty.

You might find a new car dealership willing to pay off your old car and roll up the payments into the new car. However this is going to bump up your payments either in amount per month and/or number of months.

5

Moderator Action

Welcome to the SDMB, Everyday Essentials.

The General Questions forum is for questions with factual answers. Since this is looking for opinions and advice, it is better suited to our IMHO forum. You don’t have to do anything. I will move this thread there for you.

Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.

6

11.9% interest is credit card level interest. Way too much to pay for a car. Start talking to someone when they mention 5%, or even 8%, which is still really high.

7

I didn’t mean to be completely snarky, but the OP is asking for answers that seem completely self-evident or impossible to answer. The biggest one being that we can’t judge whether her 17yo can or cannot fix the car - that factor completely changes the situation.

It does sound like the deep financial/mechanical mess that too many people get into. There’s often no way out but by spending more and more money.

8

Maybe it isn’t that outrageous. The OP mentions that in over a year of making payments on their current car, they’ve only paid off $800 in principal. On a $2500 loan, that means their current interest rate is astronomical - meaning that their credit is very, very, very bad.

If their credit is indeed that poor, 11.9% would be a very fair, nay, even low rate.

9

None of us here have seen the car in question. Meanwhile, your son is a mechanic-in-training and your son’s fiancee’s father is a mechanic you trust. So aren’t they better able to advise you? And I cringe at the thought that you’re adding a quart of oil every day, since that means, presumably, that a quart is leaking out every day. Can the mechanic not locate a used car that you could purchase, perhaps after he checks it out and maybe fixes up a bit?

10

What did they say when you told them you didn’t have any money to put down? Is the $13,600 the sticker price or after tax? Did you try to get a loan through your bank or credit union for a better rate?

A 5 year loan for the full $13,600 would be $301.84. If you add in tax and title for something around $15,000 would be around 330-335/month. If you were able to get the interest rate down to 8%, your 15k loan would be down to about 300 flat. If you’re to borrow only 13,6000 the payments are 275/month.

Honestly, if I were you, I would be looking for a much lower priced car. You have reserves about finishing a 2,500 loan. A 5 year, 2500 loan (I’m assuming that’s what you got based on how much you’ve paid off in a year) amounts to around $50 a month, depending on your interest rate. I don’t think it’s a good idea to take on a loan that’s 5-6x that amount.

11

Look at older VW Passats or Audi A4s, from 2000-2008 or so. There are lots of them out there and I love my 2001 Passat GLX. It is amazing! V6 190 Hp engine. Don’t get the 4 cylinder turbo, as turbos tend to be delicate. My mechanic calls Hondas and Toyotas “appliances”.

12

There’s a reason he calls them appliances: they are generally reliable, and regular maintenance is inexpensive.

There is no way i’d recommend a VW or Audi older than ten years to the OP, given the higher mileage that would likely come with such an old car, and the more expensive general maintenance costs that tend to come with European imports. And i say that as someone who likes VWs and Audis.

Also, when we were investigating auto loans for our recent purchase, any car older than a 2008 was going to attract a higher interest rate on the loan. You could get a 2008-2010 VW for around 10 grand, but for that money i think i’d still go with the reliability reputation of the Honda or Toyota.

13

Go to a credit union, & ask about a loan.

you do not have to be a member to get a loan there!

14

The OP went to a Honda dealer to look at used cars but a new car dealer isn’t going to have any really cheap used cars. For that, you need to go to a used car lot, where you might find something in the sub-$5000 range. But maybe the Honda you already have will be worth it, once you fix the leak and the dying alternator.

15

It’s certainly true that dealers tend not to have super-cheap used cars, probably because they send a lot of the real junkers they trade in off to the auctions. But in my recent experience looking for our car, there is a segment of the market where you can get a decent used car without spending a huge amount, but also without the extra risks that come with sub-$5000 cars which tend to be more than 10 years old, with six-figure (often high six-figure) mileage.

We actually got our Civic from a new car dealer, although not a Honda dealer. The car was a one-owner that was traded in for a new Fiat 500. Not only is it in great shape outside and inside, but our mechanic had high praise for it was well. The only things he suggested doing were a few routine maintenance items (related to fluids) that were due based on the car’s mileage. About $200 worth of stuff, just for peace of mind. In making our decision, we also figured (maybe wrongly) that the sort of driver who trades in their Civic for a Fiat 500 is probably not the sort of driver who thrashes their car too badly.

If we had wanted a larger car, a local Ford dealer had a certified Fusion with about 25K miles on it (so still under warranty) for less than $13,000. Civics tend to attract higher prices for recent year models, partly due to their reputation for reliability. Our biggest challenge in finding a certified used car in our price range, though, stemmed mainly from the fact that we wanted a manual transmission, and about 95% of used cars on the market come with auto boxes.

One thing i found about used car lots, or at least some of the ones around here, was that some of them had outrageous markups on their inventory if you walked onto the lot. At one place we went to, they had a 2010 Mazda 3 2.0L manual with about 68K miles on it, and a sticker price of $14,700. When i looked online, however, i found that they had advertised the exact same car on cars.com for $11,999 the previous week. A look at some other local Mazda 3 stock suggested that a fair price for the car was easily under $12,000.

Now, the guy at this particular dealership made pretty clear that he was willing to take a big slice off the sticker price. Before i even opened my mouth to begin negotiations, he took a thousand bucks off, and he said he would not be beaten on price. He may have been right, but someone walking into the dealership off the street, without doing online research, might not have a sense of how much wiggle room there was in the sticker price. It certainly pays to do your research, and see what similar cars are going for in your area.

16

I am baffled about the existing car and the repairs done to it.
The car is leaking a quart of oil a day and they put in new spark plugs?
WTF? Over.
From an auto repair perspective this makes about as much sense as giving a manicure to someone that has arterial bleeding.
This is right up there with “We couldn’t fix your brakes, so we made your horn louder,”
Such a major oil leak can only have a few sources basically:
Front main seal
Rear main seal
Oil pan or gasket
Valve cover gasket/ cam seal
With the exception of the rear main seal these are all fairly minor repairs. ( read cheap)
Even a rear main seal isn’t that bad, it does require removal of the transmission, but you said your son has done that on his car.
The PCV system should be checked and cleaned when the repairs are done as excess pressure in the crankcase could very well be the cause of the engine leaking.
At full retail price with the exception of the rear main we are talking a couple of hundred bucks for any of those repairs.
The rear main would be more $ but even at full retail it wouldn’t hit $1700.
What else are they proposing to fix for that amount of money?

17

Everyday Essentials (the OP) is brand new to the SDMB, so it might be worth pointing out that Rick, the author of the previous post, is an experienced mechanic and is well known around these message boards as something of an expert on all things automotive.

18

I would and DID recommend one. Hilarious. I would not take a Honda or Toyota if you gave me one and $10,000 to boot. My 2001 Passat outperforms my boss’s 2010 Toyota Camry hybrid. It’s not even close.

19

The OP needs and can afford only basic transportation, not something that can outperform a “2010 Toyota Camry hybrid.”

20

I’m glad you’re happy with your VW, and so enamored of its performance.

Nevertheless, VW’s and Audis tend to be much more expensive to maintain and repair than Toyotas and Hondas. To some people, and we suspect the OP is in this group, that’s significant. They can’t afford to own a hard-to-get-serviced really-expensive-to-fix European car no matter how exciting it is to drive.