New and used vehicle prices are up, and so are car payments — including a lot of people OK with paying over a grand a month for a hunk of metal, and high interest rates aren’t helping. Yahoo Finance details how one man is stuck with a high payment for a Dodge Charger even after filing for bankruptcy.
A 28-year-old Seattle man named James was recently on an episode of the YouTube show Financial Audit, hosted by Caleb Hammer. Hammer is known to go in on guests who make stupid financial decisions, and he didn’t skip with James, perhaps rightly so after you read the financial situation he’s in.
Hammer went over James’ financial picture and it’s not pretty. Although James makes $80,000 a year, he admitted that he struggled with that amount given how he is with his personal finances and credit cards; he mentioned his wife makes another $40,000 a year. Somehow, a BMW purchase for $20,000 led to the downfall of his finances.
...BMW he bought for $20,000 that bit the dust after less than a month. Bouncing back from his poor judgment and money miscues — he had no emergency fund when the car died — has been an uphill struggle at best, even though the bankruptcy was a painful three-month process.
After declaring bankruptcy, James says he had no car, and managed to get around using an electric scooter. But after finding out his wife was pregnant, James went and purchased another car, a 2008 Acura TL with 166,000 miles. James says he got a 23.69 percent interest rate on this loan and still owes $7,252 on it. It gets worse.
James says that he went out and dropped over $35,000 for a 2018 Dodge Charger; $35,821.29 to be exact. Payment for it is $850 a month for 72 months. The interest rate is also high — James says it’s somewhere around 14 percent — that $438.65 of that payment goes to interest. When making a pie chart to break down James’ finances, Hammer also discovered that the Charger was eating up another $600 a month in gas.
This is all a little too much, and, suffice to say, not an advisable road to go down, no matter how much you love Dodge Chargers. Buying the car you can afford, in the end, is the best purchase of all.