Posts like these always miss the point. NO ONE is saying you absolutely cannot afford any kind of car at all. But......CampSkunk said:
Overblown and misleading. My kids have an old Sequoia that they bought for $3,000, 4-year-old Forrester that they bought for $27K, a four-year-old Honda Odyssey for about $25K. The only one of them who bought new picked up a Ford Maverick for less than $30K. I on the other hand do buy the expensive SUV's and pickups, because I can afford it. Guess what? When I was younger and couldn't afford it, I bought old and used. If you don't want to high car payment you can avoid it and still have reliable transportation.
Wages simply have not kept up. To get the same thing today takes a higher percent of income. Even if you take the cheapest thing you can get. It's simple math, and some of you continue to scoff over that in everyone of these threads from vehicles to housing to groceries. Some always say you can find cheaper options. Yes. True. But again, those cheaper options on average still take up more of a percent of income today than they did 5 and 10 years ago.
So basically, you make the same sacrifice, but you still tie up more of your money than you would have 10 years ago. For the average wage. Maybe for you, your wages have outpaced it. If so, consider yourself lucky. But that certainly isn't he case for, well, the AVERAGE person.
For example upon a QUICK search: A used honda civic that is 10 years old (2014) and has 75k miles on lists typically around $14-17k. The CHEAPEST options for anything under 100k miles is about $12k. Doing a search for a 2004 Honda civic with that many miles back in 2014 (the equivalent timeline of the first search 10 years later) would have cost around $4-5k on average. That means a 275-300% price increase. Have wages gone up 300% in the last 10 years?
So again, you can buy that cheaper civic. To the average person, it still hurts their monthly balance much more now than it did in 2014.
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