When does buying a used car become cheaper than buying a new one?
My girlfriends car got written off and we are currently looking at replacements, we are mainly looking at Japanese branded cars like Mazda, Toyota and Honda. We priced out new cars at the dealerships and also looked at used cars at the dealer and online that are 1-5 years old. From what we found unless paying cash or you have an Home equity line of credit(HLOC) you can use which we don't, the used car loan will be close to 7% interest over 60 months. And let's say you finance a new Honda civic lx on 60 months, the current rate is 0.5% so the payment is is not that much more than the used car. Unless you can find a smoking deal on the used car which I noticed is hard to come by with the Japanese branded cars, I don't see why you would buy used if you finance through a traditional loan also not knowing the car's history unless you know the owner, am I missing something?