Honest question: are US movies for real with kids having cars?

I just sold my 05 Prius to a guy buying it for his 16 year old daughter. He paid $3600 for the car, and the plates were good for another 18 months. Insurance would be expensive, I suspect he will pay about $150 to $200 a month. All in all that is within reach for many families.

1 month after I sold him the car he came back to get an item I found after the sale. His daughter had already crashed the car. She side-swipped another car and damaged every panel an the passenger side and took off the mirror. No doubt her insurance went up but he just laughed it off as something to be expected.

Nexus 5X ?

 

Missed this thread, but yes USA has lots of cars. If you have 2 adults 2 kids in high school, you have 4 maybe 5 cars (need a spare car, right?). That's why a BEV might make sense for one or two cars.

Our street has so many cars parked in street that the mailman cannot get to the mailboxes. 1980 vintage houses were designed assuming 1 or 2 cars.

 

I'm starting to feel like a dinosaur, and liking it. We've always bought our cars for cash. I don't give a rat's nice person if interest rates are near zero, you're still digging yourself into a hole of debt.

Still pay cash for groceries too, physical cash, not debit card. it's just easier to budget when you see the bills disappearing from your wallet.

 

Well in USA it helps your credit rating to take the loan pay it off, so that is one element.

 

Meh, we had a mortgage. And credit cards of course, but avoid using them for groceries, and small purchases. Paying off the credit card balance every month, I believe we're referred to in the industry as "dead beats". It's a tongue-in-cheek term the card companies use, for folks who don't accrue interest charges.

 

I doubt that Canada is meaningfully different than the U.S. on this.

Not having initiated a car loan since 1996 (and that was just for two years, after a 50% down payment), or any sort of mortgage since the 1980s (and paid off before that last car loan), I went for an extremely long time blissfully unaware of my so-called 'credit score'. I learned a FICO score only incidentally on my most recent car purchase (pulled automatically by the dealership, despite me paying cash), and now see it on a regularly on a credit card statement (always paid off promptly, never any interest). But for me, it remains merely a curiosity, I don't need it for anything.

Of course, it helped to be financially relatively independent before much of the public ever heard of FICO.

 

Ah, so THAT'S what the credit people call folks such as us.
Huzzah for cash & carry!
Or as my Grandpappy used to say, "in God we trust, all others pay cash!"
But "dead beats" sure "beats dead" six ways to Sunday!

 

We're strictly a cash and carry family too. I was laid off from corporate operations as jobs in my industry were drying up. Thankfully my wife had a good job with good benefits. I was unable to land a decent paying job in another industry so we went through a bankruptcy. Coming out of it we decided on a family budget of, "If we can't pay cash, we don't buy it." We started setting aside the cash ahead of time for the things we really want to buy or do; if the money's not there we don't buy or do it. Tracking every penny for a few months, we were able to identify some areas that absolutely shocked us with the amount of money that was wasted. We now have an emergency fund (one of those thing we wanted to do) and plenty of insurance to cover unexpected things.

Life is a lot less stressful now.