How To Get a Car For (Relatively) Free

Did a little car shopping over the break and the whole financing thing comes up. Sometimes you'll hear someone argue for the benefits of a car lease. The only benefit I see is buying more car than you can afford. Here is a simple example of the math on a lease based upon my own experience owning my car for 15 years.

Car lease cost - $300 a month. This is neither cheap or expensive. I think you can get a cheap car lease for $200, but it's common to see people paying $400 a month.

Car lease cost = $3600 a year.

Assuming you took that money and put into the stock market instead at a modest 5% return per year, it'd accumulate to $85,166. About $27K of that in interest alone.

I think you can buy a new car for $27K, or, that is the amount of interest accumulated from not leasing.

*Granted this is comparing apples and oranges, assumes one has enough money in the first place to buy a car outright vs leasing and perhaps there is additional pleasure to be gained from driving a new car every 3 years vs being stuck in an old one. But it also demonstrates how one type of behavior leads one into spinning ones wheels like a mouse in a cage whereas the other one can enrich you, if that were a personal goal.