TC - Did I pay too much?

Post it a third time! Post it again!

Do you think I should? The other one looked kind of like a spam topic so I thought this one might get some responses. Looks like it did :-)

Haha don't sweat it. Always a wise guy out there. Anyway you probably paid more than you had to at the time but remember there is always a better deal out there somewhere. Just enjoy what you have and rack it up for experience.

Cheers

Hey, for years it has been well known that the Caravan and the TC are the same vehicle, with the exception of some window dressing, and the TC has cost more. A long time ago there was more of a difference, but that difference has eroded.

But as one consolation I have for you, no matter how much your buddy may crow about saving $5K the fact remains that the Caravan name has a strong association with cheap, the TC has a strong association with luxury. The next time he opens his yap you can tell him that at least you don't have the same van as 3/4 of the Kmart shoppers in the parking lot. Your buddy knows this well or why would he keep telling you how much he saved - he's continuting to reassure himself that his cheaper van is just as good as your more expensive one.

You ought to go ask your wife or girlfriend one of these days why they go buy their mascara/lipstick/perfume from the hoity-toity department store instead of just going to Kmart and getting the exact same stuff for 1/4 of the cost. I guarentee you they will tell you the more expensive stuff has a better color - and you can take a stick of their expensive lipstick and a stick of the cheap stuff from Kmart of the same color, and bring it to a paint store and get a printout from the color match computer saying they are exactly the same shade.

The honest-to-God truth of the matter, which you probably don' t want to hear, is that both you and your buddy are spending a whole lot more on vehicles than if both of you just bought some

3 or 4 year old used van. Your both essentially funding the rest of us who don't go buy new cars. While that is fine for me, you should at least be aware that if you really cared that much about saving money on a vehicle, you would never buy a new one again.

To you and your buddy, who have enough money to burn on fripperies like new vehicles, all this price/cost is some giant game to you. Maybe one day you ought to try to understand that to a lot of people, money is a far more precious resource than it is to you, and that careful husbanding of the peanuts we make during our working lives is the only thing that will keep us off the street once we are too old to work anymore. You can afford to lose $5K in this game with your buddy, to a lot of families, $5K is all they can spend a year on food to feed themselves.

Ted

Gee, nothing like telling somebody how stupid they are for spending "their" money....... I wish I had a mom like you..

Denny

With high gas prices, SUV's and minivans are sitting unsold on dealers lots. Discounts are bigger now than they were when you were in the market. I wish I had bought a few Toyota Prius's when they first came out. I could make a bundle on them now.

I'm not telling him how stupid he is for spending his money.

I'm telling him how stupid he is for getting his tit in a wringer over an amount of money which he quite obviously can easily afford.

Ted

Not now:

Ted

How do YOU know he can easily afford it?

I agree to a point. But then again there is now some serious competition with the Ody and the Sienna where before it was just the Ody. So that is driving down prices.

And to Ted out there - I appreciate your comments and I don't take them personally. Just take them with a grain of salt. But come on! Losing 5 large to the dealer would make anyone sick - even Bill Gates. Plus I don't think you are all wise with your used car philosophy. I'm driving a 15 year old Acura that I work on myself. But having had and hated a used Jeep GC I vowed to get a new DCX with a warranty and make them fix everything that went wrong with it. That was a good investment - was it worth say, $5K more? Not really and sadly my wife still griped about the problems so I guess no. But used car prices fluctuate sometimes more than new cars. Its a commodity market and used or new it is volitile I am learning.

I already explained that if he was interested in best value for the money he would have bought a

2-3 year old vehicle where the initial depreciation hit had already been taken. Since he bought a new vehicle he obviously has enough money to afford to pay the extra $5K (or more) surcharge for the "new car smell"

And frankly if that makes him happy - to spend money on this kind of thing - as long as he understands the value of the money he is spending, then fine. However his initial post shows that he doesen't understand what those dollars really represent. There is a phrase for this I'm sure you have heard it's called "taking things for granted"

While the procedure is laborious, anyone can sit there nowadays with the Kelly Blue Book webstite and compare new vehicle prices with how they depreciate, adjusting everything for inflation, and build a depreciation curve, and see that the cost-per-mile-per-year is an inverted bell curve - the most expensive vehicle miles are the first 10,000 (when the depreciation is highest) and then drop down, then later on start coming back up sometime after the 150K range when everything falls apart.

Someone without a lot of money therefore really can't afford a new car, but they can afford a used car with 10-30K miles on the odometer, and drive it until sometime after the

130-150K miles, then sell it. Of course, what many people think that they can afford and what they actually can afford are different things, that is why we have personal bankruptcies.

Ted