Monthly Car Payment Calculator
20 August 2006Here’s a good calculator from Fox News Business: it’s for people considering buying a car who want to know what the payment will end up being. In general, you probably don’t want to be buying cars new anyway - it’s not the ideal way to spend your money there. The smart approach is usually to buy a car that’s a couple of years old - so that it’s still relatively new, but you don’t pay the “new car premium.” But we all know not everyone’s going to do that, so for those who want to buy new, this calculator considers a number of different variables, including the interest rate, the downpayment, the trade in, sales tax, and the length of the repayment period.
How do you use this calculator? Mainly to combat the car dealer’s greatest weapon: keeping you focused on the monthly payment. They’ve got all kinds of tricks to make sure you pay through the roof, even if you think you’re getting a deal you want based on how much you’re willing to pay per month. I used a similar calculator when I bought a car a few years ago from a dealer to figure out roughly what I’d pay each month depending on what the interest rate was. It came in very handy, because the salesman initially tried to pin me down to a monthly payment that I knew would be about 10% interest - a horrible deal. But if they’re just quoting numbers at you, you won’t realize that if you haven’t run them beforehand. So figure out the price of the car and run several different rates through so you know what monthly payment is OK and what is way out of line.
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