Posted on 10/12/2008 8:59:55 PM PDT by bornred
An inflatable gorilla beckoned from the roof of Don Brown Chevrolet in St. Louis, servers doled out free bowls of pasta and a salesman urged potential customers to "come on up under the canopy and put your hands on" a new set of wheels.
But sitting across from a salesman in a quiet back room, Adrian Clark could see it would not be nearly that easy. This was the ninth or tenth dealership for Clark, a steamfitter looking for a car to commute to a new job. Every one offered a variation on the discouragement he was getting here: Without $1,000 for a downpayment, no loan.
...
"I think we're undergoing a fundamental shift from living on borrowed money to one where living within your means, saving and investing for the future, comes back into vogue," said Greg McBride, senior analyst at Bankrate.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
“An inflatable gorilla beckoned from the roof of Don Brown Chevrolet in St. Louis”
Racist!
What a novel concept!
I pray so. The long term viability of our country depends on it.
$1k downpayment on a car? That’s peanuts. We put about $4k down on my 2001 CRV which we bought new.
I know things are starting to get bad. I look at the local bulletin boards at the stores here and a heck of a lot of people are selling their “TOYS” boats, four wheelers, R.V.s etc.
Yo Adrian, if you can't scare up $1000, how you gonna make the payments, jack@ss?? I had no idea we'd reached a point where this was considered normal. Same with houses. Silly me, living by Poor Richard's rules.
If you can’t afford to put $1k down on a car, you should be shopping for $200 junkers on Craigslist, not going to a dealer and expecting credit.
Did someone post a picture of Mich. O.?
In the consumer market, I think the appetite for risk at banks will be considerably less than in the past 10 to 15 years.
One thing that will come out of this period of American lending is just how little economists and “financial engineers” (what an oxymoron of a term) know about risk. Another thing that will be studied is the behavior of bankers around false risk prediction metrics. The financial risk models have utterly failed, and the whole premise of “Value at Risk” is now discredited. It will take a couple of years for it to finally be buried, but there’s no doubting the losses here. Entire international banking empires, built over more than a century, ceased to exist in a week’s time because of the mathematical mental masturbation of “financial engineers” and their absurd ideas of how to quantify and model risk.
In DC... well, that’s a whole ‘nuther story.
Just bought a 2005 Chrysler 300C with $1,000 down, and a 6.5% interest rate for 60 months. There are loans being made out there folks.
“”I think we’re undergoing a fundamental shift from living on borrowed money to one where living within your means, saving and investing for the future, comes back into vogue,” said Greg McBride, senior analyst at Bankrate.com.”
Three generations too late.
Past time to stop easy credit forever.
“Just bought a 2005 Chrysler 300C with $1,000 down, and a 6.5% interest rate for 60 months. “
There shouldn’t even be financing on cars.
Save your money and pay cash.
Of the more than a dozen cars that I’ve owned I paid cash for every one of them.
I borrowed for my first car, but I have paid cash for the next three (and plan to pay cash when I replace my wife’s car after it gives up the ghost).
To get a good downpayment (and we are talking about $3,000) I walked to work for five months (from Feb. to Aug.) in the Quad Cities, IL/IA. I felt I was taken advantage some by GMAC in the loan process (they included the extended maintenance in the contract along with life insurance and did not tell me). I caught it during the review process on the paperwork and threatened to walk out (now days I would have walked out without blinking). They pulled it out, and I took the loan. I still got burned by the prepayment penalty (Rule of 78) when I paid ahead on my car to finish the loan.
I did not have a car during college, and I survived by using my feet and buses. I had absolutely nothing when I came out of college.
And if you can’t get to a job because you don’t have a car, where are you going to come up with $200?
Very few people could afford to go to college, to buy a house, to buy a decent car, etc. if they had to wait until they had all the money to purchase it outright.
Similarly, businesses would not expand and create new jobs if they depended entirely on receipts.
Obtaining credit is an act of faith and hope in the future: you believe that you will have the financial wherewithal to afford your current purchases even if it means paying for them over time with interest.
Some of the things you purchase will be entirely practical such as purchasing a decent truck for your business. Other things will be a mixed bag such as a vacation to a location which might provide some future business opportunities. And some will be purely for the sheer enjoyment of life such as a jet ski.
We need to be prudent, but we also need to realize that this is the one material life we will have and we weren't put here merely to struggle through and barely get by until we drop dead of worry and regret.
A cursory reading would provide the answer:
1) Get car with dealer financing.
2) Use car to commute to new job.
3) Receive wages for work from employer.
4) Use wages to make loan payments.
I don’t have a car and I am totally dependent on transit to find and maintain employment, and it totally sucks. I’m tired of finding listings for great jobs and not being able to get to them.
For those of us at the bottom of the economy, $1K is a lot of money and represents a lot of toil.
Take the damn bus! Are you actually trying to tell me that people are somehow ENTITLED to a car? And I’m supposed to cry because they ‘can’t get a job’ because they don’t have a car?
Listen, I’ve actually been in these situations. I’ve actually had nothing, been poor, been totally screwed. I’ve lived with no car, no job, even no place to live at one point.
You pull yourself up out of it. You don’t expect others to just give you anything and you damn sure don’t think you’re entitled to anything that you can’t afford!
And then when his $200 junker breaks down and he can’t get to work and he loses his job, he got what he paid for and it’s all his fault. Got it.
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