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> There is only one way buying a used car ever makes sense. When you have enough sense not to buy a new car! I regret purchasing my new Mazda for $25k when I

• peterwwillis 12y ago
  You'd just end up fixing it again for another $5k, and another $5k, and another. It adds up, in small amounts of time, labor and parts. There is no used car fairy. You don't get to pay $5k for the equivalent of a $25k car. Physics pretty much puts that to a stop by constantly degrading every part in the car. The whole point of "mileage" in buying used cars is not that a car is better or worse at a given mileage, but that it's more and more and more likely to fail. Each part has a guesstimated point at which it will fail, because all the parts have defects. As your car gets older, practically every single part fails. You end up replacing everything. Your old SUV will eventually cost you as much as that new Mazda. The hedged bet with a new car is that by the time you pay it off, you won't have paid anything other than regular maintenance costs, and you can now buy yet another new car. If you drive like a grandma or barely drive at all and garage the car you can stretch this out for a long time. Most people are not grandmas. Leasing is a very sensible solution for most people because it combines hassle-free maintenance-free car ownership with a promise for an always-working car at a fixed [read: no surprises] price.