hey..i got a question...im looking to try and get a g35 within a year or two...but..i was wondering..how much did you guys down? and how much are your monthly payments? so i can see wht to expect..thanks

 

I don't have much experience in buying cars (since the G35 was my first), but you should try to focus more on the price you're going to get on the car rather then looking at what the monthly payments might be. However, I have heard on that people average $400-600 on monthly payments but this can vary depending on your down payment, length of loan, interest rate, total cost, etc.

 

i put about half down and financed half. payments are 450-500, but your interest rate makes a huge difference.

check out bankrate, they have rates and loan calculators...

 

My out the door price was $33,800 for a new 2005 G35 Sedan.

I put $17,000 down and took a three year loan for the remainder at 1.99%.

My payments are around $430 per month.

 

just to give you some ideas...for every 1000 borrowed...
for 48mos
@6%---23.48
@5%---23.03
@4%---22.58

for 60mos
@6%---19.33
@5%---18.87
@4%---18.42

so if you borrow 35000 for 48 mos at 5% the payment is 806/mo, for 60 mos is 660.50/mo

 

I put down $0.00 and pay $641.xx per month for 60 months. At 2.9%, it didnt' make sense for me to put down a significant amount of money, especially since I can actually put the money to better use (http://home.ingdirect.com/products/products.asp) . As long as the interest rates on their CDs stays above 2.9% I'm in better fiscal shape than if I put down a huge payment. There's a little sticker shock when you first realize you're making a $650 car payment, but really, when you think about it I'm not paying that much more than if someone were to take their $10,000 down payment, and parcel it up into 60 equal chunks and apply that to the loan. In fact, I'd argue that I'm paying less, when you zoom out a little bit and take a look at the bigger picture.

I'm paying approximately $2,600 in interest over the term of the loan. If I put down $10,000, I would pay $1,900 over the term of the loan.

So, you have $2600 in interest paid, or $1900 in interest paid. Seems easy enough to say "put down a huge payment." (Channelling Ron Popeil) But wait, there's more...

HOWEVER, let's say we get 4% APY growth on our $10,000 in a CD account (this is conservative, actually, since a five-year CD at ING is now 4.85%). At 4% growth, after 5 years, we'd have $1800 in interest earned. Now, let me apply that to the interest I paid. $2600 out - $1800 in = $800 out. In this case, since I took advantage of a higher interest income with my lower interest expense, I only pay $800 of interest. Makes it a little murkier, doesn't it?

Assuming you get a good interest rate on your car loan, I'd argue that you go for a small or $0.00 down payment for as long as you can and stick the money in a CD that's the same term as your car loan.

You can think of this as if I borrowed $10,000 from one bank at 2.9% interest, and loaned that $10,000 to someone else at 4% interest.

~ Mike

 

Now I didnt read your whole thread, one question? do you pay TAX on the interest earned? and did you factor in inflation for 5 years?

 

Good point: You do pay tax on any interest earned. Good catch.

If you want to tinker with numbers, go try out http://www.jlplanner.com/ . You can get a trial that will do most of the "easy" stuff like this for you, including factoring inflation, tax, etc.

I did pay taxes on the income in the analysis. JL Planner did that for me by default. This is a *really* cool program. It defaulted to 15% tax though, when unfortunately my income is in the 28% bracket. With the properly adjusted tax rate, the account will earn $1505 in interest vs $1800(ish), so my numbers were slightly off.

As for inflation, unfortunately I don't have the juice left in me to bother messing with that. JL Planner has a tick box, to show values in "age 0" purchasing power, accounting for inflation. I'm not gonna mess with it though.

G'day,
~ Mike