Lease or Buy

NavyNOLA said:
Good lord.....OP, please have your son just buy something before this thread gets any longer!!? Car, bike, scooter, anything......
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A bit vintage, but....there goes @NavyNOLA !
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You make a lot of valid points concerning buying a used car that would be likely to have lots of repairs and other maintenance. As for transporting the car, I didnt mean overseas, I met going from one American base to another. I didnt know they would pay him to drive to another base, but here is the current situation. We leased him a car and the last lease payment is probably due August of 2018. He graduates May 2018 and supposedly is coming home from Indiana to California. He isnt going to drive it home as he has no desire to drive cross country. I am either go to pay for three months to end his lease and or possibly sell the car if the numbers makes sense. His 3 year old car is going to wind up with maybe 7500 miles, 10,000 max . You know the story of the little old lady from Pasadena, well that is my son's car. Why did I lease my son a car, because he major is Professional Flight and he has to drive from where he lives to the school's airport. His best friend who also goes to his school is graduating this May and want my son to drive home with him in his car. My son doesnt want that either. So my point was that I dont think my son is going to want to drive his $2000 used car from Vance Air Force(or any other UPT Air Force base) and drive 1500 miles away to another base. Plus at that point, he will probably want a new car


Pima said:
I am not sure I agree with this at all. I don't know which base he is going to for UPT, but my DS was at Del Rio aka Hell Rio. He lived on base, so day to day he may have driven the car 2 miles in total. However...like most AF bases they are in the middle of nowhere. Between San Antonio and Del Rio it is a 2 1/2 hr car ride with nothing in between. I would say he probably went to San Antonio once a month, sometime more. If the car broke down on that road trip it would be expensive and a pain in his arse. Leave the repair bill out of it, he would have to have it towed somewhere for the repairs, and rely on a friend to drive however far to pick him up so he could get back to base.
~ My DH and I were stationed at OMG NO Alamagordo. Mt. Home, Idaho and Seymour Johnson. All of these places are in areas that I would call rural. Mt. Home is 50+ miles from Boise. Seymour is @70 miles from Raleigh. This is where young lts. will go and spend their Sat. or Sunday.

DS was wise. He purchased a brand new upgraded Corolla. He got the new college discount and the military discount. Tax, tags, and the whole kit and kaboodle was @17K, plus they gave him a 0% int. loan. He drove that car from our home in VA to TX for UPT. He than drove it to his RTU at Little Rock. Drove it back to Dyess for his Op. base. The car is now 4 yrs old. He was able to pay it off early because he never had to pay repair bills and he was fiscally smart.
~ He did not do what many kids do...take the full 25K, and buy a car. He took a smaller starter loan at 2.99% and bought a modest new car with the 0% new car loan.

I am not someone that does not believe in buying used, but I am someone that agrees with the idea as others have stated car repair bills are insanely high now a day due to the number of computer chips in cars.
~ Due the math. Let's say you purchase a 5 yr old car using the starter loan of 2.99 or whatever rate. The car has 75K and costs 12K. He has to drive 1 K miles to his UPT base, but because there is no social life at the base for a 22 yo they drive every weekend to the closest "big city" that is 50 miles away. That = 5K more miles, without including driving to work everyday and PCSing how many more miles. Add in PCSing to FTU/RTU for another 6 or 9 months, and now being forced to live off base (daily commute) and within the 1st 2 yrs they are probably going to be looking at 100K miles.
~~ How much will it cost for 4 brand new tires? A new car comes with new tires, and they won't need to be replaced. The used car may already have 5-10K miles on those tires. A new car battery will not need to be replaced whereas, the used may need that to be done due to the age of the car. Keep going down the list...windshield wipers are brand new on a new car, not necessarily true for a used, same with air filters. Brake pads, drums, shoes. Serpentine belt. If a stick shift, the clutch. etc. etc. etc.

I am also confused with your statement of transporting the car.

Again, that makes no sense to me. When he PCSs they will pay for him to drive it to a new base. They will NOT transport the car unless he is PCSing overseas. If that is the case than he wants to buy the NEW car.
~ Our 1st base was in the UK. People made money this way, basically the Brits would pay way over the price you would get in the states for an American made car...I mean thousands. The reason why is simple it is a status symbol for them. You are not going to find a Dodge Ram Big Horn pick up truck there, nor a convertible Camaro or Ford Mustang, or even a Jeep Wrangler. Car buffs know that American engines in these cars are much larger than the ones they have offered in their country.
~~ Many of our friends in the UK would take their cars and right before they left they would sell the car on the economy. They would order a Volvo and take the trip to pick it up in Sweden. The trip was paid for and they bought a higher end new car without taking a financial hit because they made money off of selling a newer used car. In turn, later on they made more money again because they bought a higher end car at a lower cost.
~~~ My friends that were assigned to Germany came back with high end Mercedes and BMWs.

I am someone that agrees with the swapalease.com It is a really great program.

Humey,
Your DS is just going to start UPT. He does not know where his Operational base will be in the end. If you look at the AFROTC rated thread you will see, very few go overseas right off the bat. Even if he gets overseas, between the time he will spend on casual, plus the 54 weeks at UPT, than SERE and water survival, plus RTU, he is looking at 2 yrs at least before he will be sent operational. If he gets fighters it could be closer to 2 1/2 yrs due to IFFT. How many miles will he have on that cheap used car?
~ My DD wanted us to buy her a cheap used car. She wanted a used Honda CRV or Ford Escape. We investigated from a $$$ side. We would have to take some of it out on a loan. When we crunched the numbers, and started to look at the repair costs it became apparent we were buying new. Her car does not have all of the bells and whistles (heated leather seats), but it has what she needs (sorry for her cloth) and because she got the new grad discount and new car loan at 0%, the monthly payment for brand new was cheaper than the used. I do not live in fear that her car will break down somewhere.
~ Bullet and I do buy new. However, we own our cars for 7-10 yrs. We do not USAA car buying service anymore. We use truecar.com It is the same, but using them we always seem to get a better loan % rate. Our interest rate for our new cars have topped out at more than 0.9% rate.
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The car we bought for all 3 of our kids to use in high school finally died on my DS last month. It was a 1993 Toyota Corolla with 180k on it. We took it to the local garage and the condition was fatal= $800 fix. DS said no thanks and said he would find something else . The garage owner had a 2003 Subaru Outback that they had totally gone through for sale . $2800 later DS now owns his first car. OBTW Geico has the best rate for a 22 yr old male driver with a great driving record. USAA was not even close. Soapbox Alert!!! College kids close to graduation should be figuring out their own transportation needs. If we entrust these young men and women with millions of dollars in equipment, multimillion dollar airframes , national secrets and most importantly our troops then they should be entrusted to figure out their basic transportation needs moving forward. It's difficult as parents but we need to move from enable to empower more quickly, I fear our kids ( newly minted 2 LTs ) are going to grow up very quickly unless we get some semblance is sanity in our country's leadership soon. Back to the thread. [emoji6]
 
You make valid points. However, there is a difference between saying I have no problem with him driving a Ferrari and being okay about him buying one. Yes we do trust them to fly these multi million dollar jets but they also dont pay for them. I have no problem him figuring out his own transportation, the issue is the financing that goes with it. He doesnt have the financial maturity to figure out that using your LT Loan on a brand new car that wont be used much, doesnt make much sense. We dont have a bankruptcy and massive credit card and student debt in this country because people know how to deal with debt. I am not planning on managing my son's money for the rest of his life, but i think that pointing in him the right direction is an important step . Being 22, commissioned and a college graduate doesnt mean I shouldnt help educate him.


sheriff3 said:
The car we bought for all 3 of our kids to use in high school finally died on my DS last month. It was a 1993 Toyota Corolla with 180k on it. We took it to the local garage and the condition was fatal= $800 fix. DS said no thanks and said he would find something else . The garage owner had a 2003 Subaru Outback that they had totally gone through for sale . $2800 later DS now owns his first car. OBTW Geico has the best rate for a 22 yr old male driver with a great driving record. USAA was not even close. Soapbox Alert!!! College kids close to graduation should be figuring out their own transportation needs. If we entrust these young men and women with millions of dollars in equipment, multimillion dollar airframes , national secrets and most importantly our troops then they should be entrusted to figure out their basic transportation needs moving forward. It's difficult as parents but we need to move from enable to empower more quickly, I fear our kids ( newly minted 2 LTs ) are going to grow up very quickly unless we get some semblance is sanity in our country's leadership soon. Back to the thread. [emoji6]
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It is true that we let LTs use and oversee multi million dollars worth of equipment, but in many cases they are trained first. I see this assistance with young college graduates in the same way - we're helping train them, especially in areas like credit, avoiding debt, and with buying cars where they might think that all auto salesmen are honest and have their best interest at heart ("we lowered the monthly payment just for you son - you now have an 8 year loan instead of a 6 year!").
 
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