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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today, we tackle the subject of new cars.

A question came in on the Twitter a few weeks ago about leasing a car, and I sat down a couple of times and recorded a show on car leasing, but there always ended up being two distinct parts of it. See, the major problem with leasing a car is not the lease itself.

The major problem is that you have to lease a new car. So I realized that first we need to talk about new cars as compared to older, used cars, and then separately, we can talk about leasing versus some other form of new car financing. So today, we talk about buying a new car.

Now, new cars are one of those things that get a bad rap in the personal finance space for good reason, because frankly, they can be very expensive and very deleterious to your personal wealth. However, I want to explain to you why. See, I don't approach most topics in finance with a dogmatic approach.

It's not that I mind dogma. I just want dogma to be applied in the place where dogma is important, and not to be mixed up in places where dogma is not. And I want to explain to you why new cars, for most of us, are usually not the best idea.

But you can listen to these reasons, and then judge for yourself. So if you were going to buy a car, what would be some of the benefits that you could get from choosing to buy a brand spankin' new car? Well, of course it would smell great. It would be very clean and very beautiful.

You could peel a lot of little plastic off of the things yourself. You could make sure that nobody else's muddy boots had soiled your carpet. Those things are simple and obvious. But what are some of those other benefits that don't wear off in a few weeks after the new car smell has effectively disappeared?

In my mind, one of the biggest benefits of your choosing to buy a new car is you can get exactly what you want. As someone who's purchased a variety of used vehicles, I have learned that you can usually get most of what you want, but it's very rare for you to get exactly what you want.

When you home in on the particular type of vehicle that you want, the particular make and model, you then start thinking about what attributes, what combination of features would be most helpful or most appropriate to your intended use case, and then you have to order those. I recently bought a pickup truck, and my ideal pickup truck, it had to have a crew cab, but I wanted to have a long bed, a crew cab and a long bed.

But I was also committed, more than having the long bed, I was committed to having a diesel engine in it, a particular diesel engine in that particular vehicle. And so that was essential, was the diesel engine and the crew cab. The long bed I put on the list of, "Well, it'd be nice to have if I can, but I'm not going to make that the only thing I get." Similar thing with four-wheel drive versus two-wheel drive.

I didn't mind either way, but I probably would have been happier to have a four-wheel drive, but I was happy to have a two-wheel drive. I didn't have to make a solid decision. Well, I wound up with the diesel engine, which was a must-have, and the crew cab, which was a must-have, but I wound up with a short bed, two-wheel drive pickup truck.

Now that fit my needs, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted. But I couldn't hold out for exactly what I wanted because I needed to buy the car, and I was shopping in the used car marketplace. And you can't force somebody else to sell their vehicle just when you want, and you can't force them to sell it at the price that you want.

If I were going to go into a new car dealership and buy a new pickup truck, then it would be very easy for me to sit down and have a chat and say, "Listen, I want a four-wheel drive crew cab pickup truck with a long bed, and I want this engine configuration, and oh, by the way, let's go ahead and put the towing package on it.

Let me choose the paint. Let me choose the interior color." And you can spec out everything to be exactly what you want. So here's the question. How important to you is the ability to spec out exactly what you want? Here you'll need to think about your use case. Do you intend to use this vehicle just for transporting your body from place A to place B, or your body and one or two or a handful of other people from place A to place B?

In that context, just about anything will do the job. You need to have exactly the right thing in order for you to have your body moved. But if you were doing something like I was doing, buying a pickup truck, and let's say that you would spec out a very heavy camper, in your case, it might be very important to you to have the sufficient gross vehicle weight rating on your vehicle, and you need to spec it out exactly how you want it to be.

Or perhaps you're going to load on some kind of aftermarket equipment. In this case, it's very important that your vehicle be manufactured according to your specifications so it can do the job. And you have to decide, how important is it to me to get exactly what I want? If it's very important to get exactly what you want, you will probably move in the direction of a new car versus a used car.

What are the benefits, are there, of a new car versus a used car? Well, another obvious and very important benefit is a new car will have the maximum possible lifespan. When a vehicle is manufactured and put on the road, in that very first drive, the clock starts running. Its lifespan starts ticking down.

There is, for any vehicle, a maximum potential lifespan. And the earlier the vehicle is in that lifespan, the more time you can drive it, the more time you'll have with that vehicle. It's a fact of life that cars or vehicles are mechanical devices, and mechanical devices, over time, wear down and wear out.

If I offered you an unrestored car from 1950, you'd say no. You don't want it, because it doesn't do what you need to do. We're not driving vehicles from 1950 that are not restored, or from 1970. The vehicle has a lifespan, and the earlier you buy it, the better in terms of the maximum possible lifespan.

This is important primarily for its ability to do the job that you're buying it to do. You want it to do the job that you're buying it to do. If you need a car to pull your camper, well, it needs to be able to do that. If you need a car to get you down the road, it needs to be able to do that.

So it needs to be able to do the job, and you want it to do the job for the most amount of time. And you want it to do the job for the most amount of time with the lowest repair costs. So imagine for a moment a chart, and on the horizontal axis, the x-axis, you have time going from left to right, and your mind goes from zero units of time up to the maximum units of time.

And on the up and down vertical axis, the y-axis, you have cost. A new car at the beginning will have very low repair costs. In fact, for a brand new car, that may just be factored into the deal that you worked out with the dealership. You may not have to pay for any repairs while the car is under warranty.

So that line of costs starts at the bottom left, and it goes up to the top right in an increasing line. Now, it's not an exact 45-degree line. It's probably more of a geometric curve where it's very slow and low in the beginning, and then it starts to increase significantly at some point.

But there's another cost, which is depreciation. And that line starts off on the left at very high, and it comes down to very low. That one is also not a direct 45-degree declining line. Rather, it actually comes down massively in the beginning, and then it starts to smooth out over time.

These two lines are your costs. And early in the car lifespan, there should be very low maintenance costs. Late in the car lifespan, high maintenance costs. Early in the car lifespan, there's high depreciation costs. Later, there's low depreciation costs. So you're paying either way. You're either paying with repair costs, or you're paying in depreciation costs.

The point is, the new car gets you the maximum possible lifespan, which if you're choosing a car that you can or intend to drive for a long period of time, that can be very important to you because it can be a real hassle for you to go and to get a new car all the time.

In addition, one of the benefits of buying a new car is the useful lifespan may possibly be expanded or extended because of your good care and good maintenance practices practiced on the car from the very beginning. For example, you may be able to make sure that that vehicle has always had high-quality synthetic fluids.

Well, in the short term, high-quality synthetic fluids versus conventional fluids may not make a big difference to your vehicle lifespan. But when you can stretch that out over decades, those fluids might make a very big difference or your simple ability to ensure that the maintenance on the vehicle is performed on the appropriate schedule.

Cars don't just break. If they're maintained, there's really very little reason why a car should ever break down if it's maintained and if it's proactively maintained. So if you bought one from the very beginning and you made sure that the maintenance schedule was done and you knew what the lifespan is of the various bits of equipment, you know that we changed the oil on this schedule, we changed the tires on this schedule, we changed the belts on this schedule, there's no reason why you couldn't have a vehicle with proactive maintenance that never left you stranded over the course of 20 or 30 years.

And it's a whole lot easier to do that if you've owned the car from the beginning. So by buying new, you could get the maximum potential lifespan and the maximum potential reliability by knowing the maintenance history. Now there could be some other benefits of a car. For example, a new car might give you access to the latest technology.

Consumer Reports recently has gone to the position where they find that the new crash avoidance systems are mandatory. They love all of the new crash avoidance systems, the emergency braking systems that are available on new cars. You might look at something like that and say, "That's really important, and I can't get that on an old car.

That's hard to retrofit. So I'll just go ahead and get a new car so I can do that because of the safety upgrade." Or perhaps you appreciate getting a newer car that has an excellent crash rating and is very, very safe for the occupants in case of a crash.

Well, you may not be able to get that on an older car, and so you may need to buy a new car. So if there's a technological issue that really helps you, I alluded to pickup trucks earlier. A pickup truck that is new today has about three times the tow rating of a pickup truck that you could buy 15, 20 years ago.

And so it might be worth it for you to go ahead and buy that newer, stronger vehicle because it'll do the job that you need it to do. And there may be other ancillary benefits. Example, you might need to buy a new car because it's clean. Perhaps you're going to buy one for your company, and you're going to wrap it with your company logos.

A lot easier to do that with a new car with straight sheet metal and clean paint than an older one with a bunch of dents in it, perhaps. Or if you're going to be adding specialty aftermarket equipment to the vehicle. Well, now it doesn't make a lot of sense for you to shop around to save $5,000 by buying a used vehicle instead of a new vehicle when your aftermarket equipment is going to be about $75,000.

You're not getting that much of a savings for it. So you might have some of those other benefits from the new car. Well, what are the disadvantages of buying a new car? First obvious one is, do you have the money? Can you afford it? Because the new car is going to cost more up front.

And here I would encourage you to think about the available cash that you have. Now, poor people often wind up in a difficult situation. They frequently will be driving an older car that's requiring more repair costs, and this older car that's requiring more repair costs is taking money out of their pocket.

But then, in order to solve that, they often go and sign up for a new car payment, which does have the benefit of taking those older repairs out of the way, mostly. But now those older occasional repairs are replaced with a consistent, regular car payment. So I would just say, do you have the money?

I've never borrowed money on a car. I don't intend to ever borrow money on the car. I don't see any value of borrowing money for a car. Just simply pay for your stuff. And if you do that, it keeps your life in a simple and peaceful place that is really healthy.

It's good for your mind. It's good for your wallet. And it's good just for the peace of your life. And you don't wind up wondering if you're going to wander out of work one day and see the repo man driving off with your vehicle. So do you have the money?

If you don't have the money, don't buy it. It's as simple as that. But the big cost, of course, is depreciation. Now, what is depreciation? Depreciation is the decrease in value that an asset has simply by virtue of it being older. Think about this. If you were going to buy a new car for $40,000 and you had the choice between buying a brand new car for $40,000 or a three-year-old car that somebody has put tons of miles on for $40,000, which would you choose?

The obviousness of that answer is what drives the car marketplace. You would be a fool to pay $40,000 for the three-year-old car when you could go buy the new one for $40,000 and enjoy all those other benefits of the new car. Now, as we start walking down those numbers, we're going to at some point come to a change.

Let's pretend new car is $40,000 and now that three-year-old car is available for $39,000. Now, which would you choose? Most people are still going to go to the 40. Well, let's compare new car for 40, three-year-old car for 38, 37, 36, 35. For $35,000, would you buy a three-year-old car with 40,000 miles on it instead of a brand new one at 40?

I don't think I would. I would buy the $40,000 car. And the reason is I can run that math in my head. If I buy a $40,000 car that doesn't have those three years, and that means that I can enjoy over the next three years basically free use of the car.

I'm not going to have repair costs. I'm not going to have a longer lifespan. If the difference were only 40 versus 35, I'm still probably going to go with 40, assuming I have the money, of course. Let's keep walking it down. 34, 33, 32, 31. How about 30? Which would you go for at 30?

Now, we could continue this game, and your answer would, of course, be it depends. It depends on the actual factors. It depends on the market. It depends on the vehicle, etc. Of course it depends. But there is a number somewhere at which you would be willing to take the three-year-old car versus the new car.

That number would be different for each person. But on the aggregate, that number is about 20% per year for the first year, and 15% per year for the year after that. The general industry numbers would reflect that that $40,000 car, if that car is one year old, it loses 20% of its value almost immediately.

And so after one year, it would be worth about $32,000. 40% minus 20% equals $32,000. And then each year ongoing, it loses about 15% of its value. Or at least that's what most people on the aggregate across the whole marketplace feel that vehicles are worth. So at the end of 12 months, the $40,000 car is worth $32,000.

At the end of 24 months, the $32,000 car is worth $27,200. At the end of 36 months, that car is worth $23,000. At the end of 48 months, it's $19,000. At the end of 60 months, it's $16,700, and on and on. If we continue that number each year, notice that the value continues to go down, but because it's based upon percentages, it goes down a little bit less in dollar amounts each year.

60 months, it's $16,700. End of 72 months, it's $14,199. End of 84 months, it's $12,069. End of 96 months, $10,258. End of 108, 108 months, $8,720. And at the end of 120 months, $7,412. So if you bought a brand new $40,000 car, you could expect at the end of 10 years or 120 months, it's value to be about $7,400.

Now think for yourself about the current car marketplace and see if that matches up with your own experience. I'm recording and publishing this show in April of 2018. So think of a 2008 vehicle that new cost about $40,000. Think what you'll find if you were to do research on it or to think about it, you'll find that most vehicles of that vintage, if it cost about $40,000 new, would probably be worth about $7,000 to $8,000 in today's dollars, today's market.

So this is depreciation. Over the course of that 10 years, the original owner of the vehicle has lost $33,000. $32,000, $33,000. Now what have they gained for that $32,000 or $33,000? The use of the car. They've been able to use the car and get the benefit of the transportation for them and their goods for those 10 years.

That's the trade-off they're making. So the value of the vehicle is being used up. Now at some point in time, the age of the vehicle starts to become less and less relevant. And it has more to do, the value of the car has more to do with the usefulness of the vehicle.

There is a terminal value of a vehicle. That ultimate terminal value is the scrap metal price. Depending on scrap metal prices, it's probably around $500 to $1,000. I've taken cars and scrapped them. At the time, metal prices were higher, but one time I scrapped a car and it was about $600 that they gave me for it.

That was what the recycler could take, crush the car, and sell the car, the value for in the recycled metal marketplace. That number will vary, but you should always have a guess of that number. I'm going to tell you right now, if you have $500 in your head, that's pretty much a good value.

The next bit of terminal value is just simply does it work? Does it move you from point A to point B? And so here would be, that terminal value is probably about $1,000. In my market here in South Florida, any vehicle that works is going to be worth $1,000.

Now, if it works and it has air conditioning, it might be worth double, but if it works, it's worth $1,000. And I've bought a couple of cars here and there for terminal value, for in that number. Years ago, I bought a 1998 Toyota Corolla. I bought it for $500, and it was one of these situations.

The car was old, but it worked. It was in not great condition, but it worked. And so it was at its terminal value. I drove the car for a number of years, have kept it around, it's been used by other people, and then I sold it for $1,000. So it did its job.

It worked. And that car will really, as long as it's running, really need never be worth less than that $500 to $1,000 range. That's important to know. Now, different vehicles with different attributes will have other terminal values. If you were having a big flatbed truck or a dump truck, the terminal value of a 30-year-old dump truck would be a whole lot more than $1,000.

Why? Because somebody could buy it, and as long as it works, they could buy it and they could run a business with it. And they could move loads of dirt from place A to place B, charge people for that. So it's going to be worth more than $1,000. My little old Toyota Corolla that I owned for years didn't do anything except move people.

I couldn't load dirt. But that's that terminal value. So the depreciation goes down, down, down towards that terminal value. But as you own the car, what's happening with the repair costs? Remember, those are going up. And those repair costs could range from minimal to significant. So if that $40,000 car owner paid $33,000 to own it for 10 years and use it, the question is, how much money does the next owner, who buys it when it's 10 years old for $7,500, how much money are they going to pay over the next 10 years in repair costs?

This is the great unknown. With some vehicles, that cost can be very high. With some vehicles, it could be not so much. And this would have to do with the make and the model, the usage by the owner, and how well the maintenance was done on that vehicle. And here's where in used car pricing, you should be very, very sensitive to the mechanical state of the car and not so sensitive to the price.

It may be well worth your interest to buy that 10-year-old vehicle for $10,000 if it was owned by a single owner who was meticulous in their maintenance and was using the car every single day over those 10 years and can show you all of the maintenance records for the last 10 years and you can see that proactive maintenance was done, fluids were changed regularly, et cetera.

I'd quickly be willing to pay $10,000 for that $7,500 car if that owner had all of that proof and data for me where if I were to stumble across that $7,500 car and see that it had been beat up, I could discern that the maintenance hadn't been done, I might not even pay $5,000 for it because it would be no deal at $5,000.

So let's get out of the weeds on depreciation, but you need to understand that. You can't escape the cost. You're just going to either pay the cost in terms of depreciation or repairs. So which cost will be less for your context? That's the question. If you analyze all these factors, I think what you'll find is an ability to discern what would be appropriate for you in your situation.

For personal automobiles, frequently you don't need those new car attributes. For personal automobiles, you simply usually need something that's going to work most of the time. Most personal automobiles aren't really driven all that much. They might do 8,000 to 12,000 miles a year, but in terms of the capacity of the vehicle, that's not really that much.

The car could do 10,000 miles a month and it would work fine. So we don't use them all that much. Most of the driving of a personal automobile is not extreme duty. It's just light driving. And we usually don't keep our cars for very long. Most people don't seem to think that far down the road as far as their vehicle purchase, they either have a change in their circumstances, which leads to them wanting a different type of vehicle, or they get bored with the vehicle and want to move up to something different.

So personal automobiles aren't usually used to maximum capacity. And in personal automobiles, things like downtime become much less important. If your car breaks down and it's in the shop for a week, that of course could be an inconvenience. But it's not really costing you all that much money or time.

If you were to compare this to a business that's actively making money on their vehicles, that difference would be significant. In the Southeast, there is a large grocery chain called Publix, and Publix uses these nice green trucks. My understanding, just from reading the door stickers, is that Publix leases all of their trucks.

Why do they lease their trucks? They have worked out some kind of deal, I'm sure. But if you think about a grocery store like a Publix, or in your area maybe it's a Kroger or a Walmart or anything like that, what you'll see is their trucks have to be reliable because the grocery store is running on a just-in-time inventory management system.

And there's a central warehouse or a regional warehouse. That warehouse has most of the supplies. And then each day, perhaps multiple times per day, a semi-truck is getting loaded up from that warehouse and is moving things to the store to be sold. And there's a computer system that's maintaining very little inventory in the back of the store and is consistently and quickly moving things from the distribution center into the store.

Well, in that context, if a truck breaks down on the side of the road, there may be a bunch of products that run out on the store. And that could result in customer dissatisfaction. Customers annoyed and say, "That's it. They don't even have this. I'm going to go shop somewhere else." And it could result in lost sales.

Customer comes in, wants to buy something. It's not there. They have to go to another store. That's money that's not into Publix's pocket. That's money that goes into Walmart's pocket, etc. And so for a company like Publix, they need their trucks to be very reliable. And I don't think I've ever seen a Publix truck broken down on the side of the road.

I'm sure it happens, but I don't think I've ever seen it. And so for them, the cost of depreciation of a vehicle will be not so bad-- sorry, not such a cost as the cost of downtime on a truck. This could be applied in your business as well. Perhaps you are a roofer, and you're running a crew of roofing guys.

And those roofing guys are using your dump truck, loading up the roofing materials. And if you think about the labor costs of, say, a crew of eight guys that are going to go and rip a roof off a house, and the cost of making sure that your jobs are lined up, and the revenue that can come in if you can run a tight schedule and move your eight guys from house to house right on time, that cost, your consistent cost to your business, is very significant.

And if your dump truck is down with mechanical problems, that can result in an entire week of lost productivity. You've got eight guys not able to work, and you're going to be paying them for some of their time. You're missing jobs. You're bouncing customers around. That could be a serious problem for your business.

If you compare the cost of depreciation, you might find that the cost of depreciation is relatively low compared to the scale of your daily wages that you're paying for all your guys. So you'll see a business need that uptime with their vehicles far more than they need to save every last dollar.

But that's not the case with most of our personal automobiles. If your car's in the shop, and you've got to get a ride to work a couple days, it's not going to make you lose $30,000 because you didn't get this re-roofing job done on time. So with personal automobiles, we simply don't usually use them to maximum capacity.

And so there's probably a sweet spot there where you can buy a vehicle that has depreciated a little bit, but that still has lots of maximum useful life left. Usually, depending on the person, depending on the car, this is why most personal finance advisors will recommend buying a car that's a few years old.

Anywhere, two, three, four years old. You can get a good deal on a car that still has a huge amount of useful life left. And those cost savings can be substantial. Now, numbers, remember a $40,000 baseline car, at the end of 36 months, that $40,000 baseline car could be worth $23,000.

You can buy that car for $23,000, and that 36-month-old car could very well last you for a decade with very low repair costs because you're using it pretty lightly as compared to the maximum useful lifespan of the vehicle. If you buy new cars, if you choose to do that, the best thing for you to do is to keep those for a long period of time.

If you'll keep a car for a long period of time, your total out-of-pocket outlay will be substantially less. Let me use an example case here. Pretend that you buy, every three years, you buy a new car, and each year you buy a $40,000 car. So you're always buying a new $40,000 car.

Now, how you're buying it doesn't matter, whether you're leasing it or buying it, just you're always getting a new $40,000 car. And then you're selling that $40,000 car after three years. Well, a $40,000 car, 36 months later, you can expect it to be worth $23,120 of value when you sell it.

So that equals a depreciation of $16,880 in those first three years. What that means is if you were to buy and sell a car every three years for 30 years, your total loss of value for depreciation would be $168,800. Let's say that you stretch that out from three years to five years.

Well, now, if you keep your car for five years instead of three years, your $40,000 car would be traded in at the end of five years for $16,704. So your depreciation loss every five years is $23,296. Take that out over the course of 30 years, and you wind up with $139,775 of depreciation cost.

And final example, let's say that you only buy a new car every 10 years. $40,000, but you buy the new car every 10 years. That means that you buy it for $40,000 and you sell it for $7,412. Well, now your depreciation cost is $32,588. And here your total loss of value over 30 years is a total of $97,000.

And so what you see is keeping your car for three years costs you $168,800 over 30 years. Keeping it for five years costs you about $140,000. And keeping it for 10 years costs you only about $98,000. That's a big savings, about $74,000 of savings by keeping your cars for 10 years versus three years.

Now you, of course, will have to take that and figure out your maintenance costs because you would have more maintenance and repair costs keeping your cars for 10 years versus three years. But would you have $74,000 more total over that 30 years? It's hard for me to imagine it.

Which brings me to my final point. The reason that this works in the United States is not because it's always better to buy used cars versus new cars. The reason that the used car marketplace is so strong in the United States is because so many people constantly buy new cars and trade them in.

The good market for used cars that you can get for a deal exists because so many people buy new cars. Think about it. If everybody bought a new car and kept it for 10, 15, or 20 years, would you always want to buy a 10 or 15 or 20-year-old car?

I think more and more people would be pointed towards the new ones. And this exists in some other countries. I've traveled in places, and you start looking at used car prices, and you say, "Man, this doesn't make any sense." It only makes sense just to go ahead and buy the new car and get all of those other benefits, getting exactly what you want, maximum possible lifespan, maximum potential reliability, latest technology, make it exactly how you want for the total amount of time.

That makes more sense than buying the used car because there's not an abundant supply. Same thing happens with the size of the middle class. If the middle class--or if there's a big middle class and there are lots of people that are going out and buying new cars, keeping them for a few years, trading them in, that creates a large number of good quality used cars that you can buy.

But if you go to a country where there is no middle class, where you have a very small, wealthy elite, and you have a massive, poor lower class, then that strong marketplace of used cars doesn't exist, and so you don't have that to draw on. So in thinking about this, you'll have to analyze your situation.

And my advice, just like just about everyone else, is unless you have some major need for that new car, or you have the money and you want it, and you've decided this is something that's important to me, for your simple personal transportation, it usually makes more sense just to go ahead and buy a used car.

You save a lot of money up front, and you get plenty of lifespan. There's a big market supply that you can probably get just about exactly what you want. The vehicle has loads of reliability left in its lifespan. You can get great technology, et cetera. So there's no reason to pay that brand new price.

But don't get too mad at the people that you see driving new cars. Always remember that it's their actions that's creating the market that you're taking advantage of. By all means, help them to save their money. But if they don't want to listen to you, I wouldn't yell too loudly.

I would just offer to buy their car from them when they're done. Thank you for listening. You've honored me with your time and attention, and I'm grateful for that. And I hope that I've effectively served you today with some ideas and strategies and tactics and techniques and tools that will help move you towards your goals.

Before you go, three simple requests. One, if there's an idea that's been helpful to you in today's show, make a plan to take action on it. Listening does lead to learning, but learning in and of itself doesn't automatically lead to a life change. It's action that leads to a life change.

So take action. Two, take something that was helpful to you in today's show and share it with somebody that you care about. I'm depending on you to be a co-laborer with me in helping me to propagate the message that I'm seeking to share. That helps the person that you are engaging with, and it also helps you because teaching others is one of the most effective ways for you to learn and for you to cement your learning.

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