Borrowers Are Going Underwater on Car Loans

Reading some of these stories makes you want to smack your forehead on your desk. A lack of basic financial literacy + materialism sometimes have some pretty brutal results.<p>One example:<p>&gt; Nicole-Malia Tennent and Shyanne Fernandez, both in their early 20s, wanted to trade in the car they shared for something less expensive last year. The friends, who live in Hawaii, ended up splurging on a new vehicle and moving the unpaid loan balance of $12,500 from an older GMC into a new loan for a 2018 GMC Sierra truck.<p>&gt; The rollover debt helped drive up the new loan balance to more than $66,000. The friends now split the payment of more than $900 a month, which they owe to Pearl Hawaii Federal Credit Union for 84 months. Their old loan was about $500 a month.<p>How do you go looking for a vehicle that&#x27;s less expensive and end up with a vehicle that&#x27;s nearly 2x the cost?

Americans make terrible decisions with cars.<p>The article includes two anecdotal examples. I suspect that my income exceeds both. I would never pay as much as they did for a car. Cars are terrible investments. Most should be purchased as the bare minimum cost to get back and forth to work.<p>I particularly dislike the common refrain, &quot;the cost to repair it is more than the car is worth.&quot; It&#x27;s the wrong mindset. The repair cost is always far less than the replacement cost. My old 150k beater that needs $1k of repairs every year is still much less expensive than the $25k+ it would cost to replace. I have no car payment (thus no interest), and property taxes are cheaper.<p>And people keep buying brand new cars. Why? Our culture doesn&#x27;t properly identify brand new cars as luxury items. We should publish a new rule of thumb. Nobody should be buying new cars who can&#x27;t already afford to fund an IRA.

This is a weird summary because everyone who buys a car on credit is always “underwater”. The cars are never worth the balance of the loan. People buy cars on credit not because the car has intrinsic value or is an investment, but because it gives them access to other things of value, like their job.<p>I’m concerned, of course, that Americans have built a society with so few buses that everyone has to buy a car on credit. But being “underwater” is not the main problem here.

Car loans are a relatively small component of overall consumer debt in the U.S.[1]<p>By far, the largest amount of money tied up in debt is in mortgages. The highest number of borrowers are credit card users.<p>Underwater car loans are a problem for some borrowers, maybe, and could portend a slowdown in car buying, but people have many options when it comes to cars. They&#x27;ll buy used, if they hit a debt wall and simply can&#x27;t afford new, then later trade up for a new vehicle.<p>It&#x27;s unlikely that this is a sign of recession, in my opinion.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lendingtree.com&#x2F;debt-consolidation&#x2F;consumer-debt-statistics-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lendingtree.com&#x2F;debt-consolidation&#x2F;consumer-debt...</a>

Two friends wanted to by a cheaper car, so their loan is now 66K?<p>Looks like WSJ is skirting around the issue of subprime loans made to rideshare (Uber&#x2F;Lyft) drivers. lost track of the number of unhappy uber&#x2F;lyft drivers I have chatted, because of the predatory nature of the incentives and car loans.<p>The drivers think they bought a new Camry, and while making a nice profit in the first few months. Then the incentives dry up, while principle due has barely moved. Now the predatory lender has a captive slave to make the monthly payment by giving ride, because there&#x27;s a loss aversion mindset that prevents the driver from walking away.<p>At some point though, the drivers will realize it&#x27;s not worth slaving it out for a car they don&#x27;t own. With Uber losses continuing to pile up, at some point incentives will go to zero, their retention costs will go up, drivers will get fewer $$$ per mile.<p>If this happens on a large scale, there has to be some kind of a crisis with these subprime loans. There&#x27;ll be glut of used cars, killing new car sales, thus affecting those car manufacturers&#x2F;sales.

If you read the traffic on &#x2F;r&#x2F;askcarsales, the salesman all point to Chrysler&#x2F;Jeep&#x2F;Dodge&#x2F;Ram as the last refuge of the credit-unworthy.<p>FCA will take much riskier clients (and much more negative equity) than other makers, even though their product depreciates way faster than almost every other brand on the market.

I&#x27;m underwater on my car loan. But my credit rating was low and I got to get a new car without anything down, extended payments. The interest rate is a bit high, but now my credit score is good. It works out. At least I got a car that will last as long as the loan.

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How does this have anything to do with anything that could be on topic for HN?