Posted on 03/23/2024 6:49:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
With a $650 payment for 72 months, this is going to be one expensive Toyota Camry
Your twenties are the perfect time to screw up and try to get your xxxx figured out. Sometimes it takes getting to the rock bottom before you can dig yourself out of it. For the sake of everyone involved here, I hope this young woman on Caleb Hammer’s Financial Audit show has reached her bottom and will find a way to get her life turned around. Right now, it seems like the best first step would be to sell her car and find her way into something less expensive. At 23-years-old, there’s no reason to owe $31,000 on a Toyota Camry. Especially when you can’t afford it.
This young woman’s financial situation is a real mess, and she’s going through some rough stuff with a pending divorce from an abusive military man. Her short-lived marriage stuck her living with her parents, driving a car she can’t afford, and working part time. Unfortunately, this downward spiral came with a bunch of self-destructive coping mechanisms, including hundreds of dollars of in-app purchases, lots of fast food, vaping, and over-drafting her bank account.
It seems like she’ll be headed back to college, so she will definitely need some good solid reliable wheels. Living in Texas means public transit isn’t really an option, but spending 30 percent of your income on a car payment isn’t really an option either. This 2021 Camry came with a 72-month note at nearly 12 percent interest.
At the end of the day (er, month?) the payment runs her $646.33, despite only working 33 hours a week at $15 an hour. She has to work more than 43 hours at her retail job just to afford the car payment. No wonder she’s drawing too much on her accounts and racking up credit card debt!
To make matters worse, it doesn’t seem like she and her former paramour spent much money on the car’s down payment, as she still owes $30,656 (the equivalent of 2,044 hours at her current job) on the note.
Saving up for a couple of months, or borrowing from her parents, and buying a cheap-but-reliable beater would give her a lot of opportunities that this Camry just isn’t delivering. I hope she gets it turned around. This was a rough one to watch.
“Sure, you paid off your car or paid cash for it and have no car payment so that saves a lot of money. But at some point, even with routine maintenance, things, very expensive things sometimes start to need repaired or replaced. If in a year you are spending more $ to keep the car running that what it is worth, it’s not worth it.”
That is known as: Sunk-Cost relationship.
She could sell the car and not lose much money. There are used cars that are good that do not cost much. Under $10,000 total.
Getting a 72 month loan was just dumb.
These are the idiots that want their student loans forgiven.
It's pricey because they are stolen so often.
This could be true but there are other sides to the story sometimes.
One of my nieces got married just after turning 17 when she got pregnant. She married the father, but it didn’t work out. He couldn’t hold a job, drank and smoked pot heavily and was cheating on her to boot and she got a quicky divorce.
I guess you could call it a re-bound, but she reconnected with a young soldier who she’d know in HS and “fell in love” almost immediately and eloped with him. She left her daughter with her parents while she got settled with her new husband who had just been stationed at a base in South Carolina.
She found that base housing was terrible, and she felt isolated, he disconnected and took their phone when he wasn’t home so she couldn’t call anyone, she had no transportation, no money except the few dollars he gave her for groceries at the commissary, and it didn’t take long before he was beating her; beating her for not keeping the apartment clean to his satisfaction, for not cooking to his liking and sometimes according to her, beating her for no reason at all.
She met another military wife who after seeing her black eye and bruises, got her in touch with a counselor on base. It turns out her new husband was on the verge of being booted from the military with a dishonorable discharge for his numerous disciplinary problems.
The military paid for her airfare to go back home to PA to her family. She got an annulment.
She made many bad decisions by the age of 20 but she didn’t deserve to be beaten.
“She found that base housing was terrible, and she felt isolated, he disconnected and took their phone when he wasn’t home so she couldn’t call anyone, she had no transportation, no money except the few dollars he gave her for groceries at the commissary, and it didn’t take long before he was beating her; beating her for not keeping the apartment clean to his satisfaction, for not cooking to his liking and sometimes according to her, beating her for no reason at all.”
And there are many male FReepers who believe that she should have stayed with him. They disparage women because they account for (allegedly) 70% of people who file for divorce.
At her age, I drove an ancient VW bug. It was great in the snow, but I had to stop every few miles to brush snow off the headlights.
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