Brendo,
You gunna buy something like an S3 and still live at home with Mum and Dad ? Hehehehe.. You bum!
Getting married soon? That is exciting though! What the?! cool!!!!
Don't even consider a personal loan to buy a car. Its a pit of debt, its the worst thing to do with your money. There are no benefits. You are belted with interest (usually a lot higher than the typical interest rate that you would get with a home or home/equity loan).. There are no tax benefits or anything with a personal loan. You go into debt, you pay a lot of interest, and your car depreciates like hell, so you sell it for a lot less later, and are still are responsible for all the debt you originally borrowed.
For your situation of employment, e.g. steady income, permanent etc.. If you are set on buying a flash car, a novated lease is definitely the way to go. There are a ga-zillion tax benefits and things that you can benefit from, depending on who you go with. There are different types of leases, it HAS TO be a "novated" lease. Not a normal standard lease..
Yes you can buy the car outright from the leasing company at any time, but this price changes throughout the life cycle of the lease. So its dearer near the start, and gets cheaper for you to buy it as the car depreciates and you get closer to the end of the original lease term. E.g. normally 3 years, 4 years can be common too.
A lot of the government places have pre-configured things with "Leaseplan". Leaseplan look attractive at the start, because they bundle a high level of "features" and services into the whole package for you. E.g. they register the car, they do everything. You just go pick up the car and drive it. Its always serviced and got tyres for you.In terms of administrative hassles and paperwork and ringing up for quotes etc, that's all done for you. Makes life easy.. BUT.. The catch with leaseplan is that they lock you into a higher residual value at the end. So say you get a WRX and wanna buy it outright after 3 years.. If you went with leaseplan, they might make you pay $19,000 to buy the car outright.. But if you went with a more core-financial type of lease company, it might be as little as $16,000. Just examples, not based on real numbers.. So Leaseplan could cost you an extra few grand at the end, where as the other company can give you the car for cheaper and you make those few grand back on profit if you sell the car straight away.
CBFC is one of the other major companies. That is who my car runs through. Their numbers, particularly their residual value, are more competitive than lease plan.. But with CBFC, basically all they do is hook up the finance and pay for the car. You still have to go negotiate with the dealer, get the cheapest tyres you want, pay for everything yourself. But then run it all through your employer as tax benefits compared to with leaseplan its already bundled into the main package in a single place, i.e. single expense. But Leaseplan will cost you more in the long run, and its pretty much hassle free for me. I just keep all my receipts and they just go to my employer once a fortnight and get processed and you get reimbursed.
You can go berzerk on what you can benefit from. The only thing you can't claim are parking tickets and fines/speeding tickets etc. You can buy a brand new GPS for the car, and its a vehicle expense, e.g. so costs you half price. All petrol, all cleaning products (go buy the best Maguiars microfibre wash mit, super x generation mega bucks car wash, the best chamois, and a red bucket), they are all expenses. Take your car to a car detailer, that's an expense. Buy a personalised number plate that says "BRENDO" - that's an expense. Of course, also is all servicing and tyres.. So basically it costs you next to nothing to run a latest model pretty flash car and you always get all the best stuff for it.
Money that you would have normally donated to the government to pay for all the lovely people on the dole, now pays for your car and all the associated gadgets and cleaning products that you get for it.
I did heaps of sums, and it worked out next to exactly the same to "own" the fairmont (worth only about 10 grand), as it cost to "lease" the $30k colt ralliart. Consider that the $10 grand in cash just sitting there to "own" the fairmont, is real cash that could be paid off my mortgage to reduce interest. Every single expense to do with the fairmont you pay for in full out of your own cash and you can't claim a single cent of it - that's why you don't get a personal loan, there are just no benefits. Plus the fairmont depreciates in real cash, where as with a lease, you just keep paying the monthly amount as you go, you are guaranteed getting the car for the originally agreed residual amount that the lease company promised you. So when the lease ends, most people get a small loan to buy their car back from the lease company, sell it for a few grand profit, then go and lease another brand new car.. Like a continuous cycle etc.
Get a few quotes, most of them have calculators online, including leaseplan.. But compare the difference in after-tax cash in the hand that say owning a $60,000 STI would be compared to owning a $30,000 colt ralliart. Even though the car is double the value, the lease will not work out at double the cost. Because you pay for it with pretend tax money. So you can actually benefit more by getting a more expensive car. Yeah it will cost you more, but not double like if the car's value was double. Just depends on where you wanted to draw the line. I am trying to focus on getting ahead, and I love that the colt doesn't use hardly any petrol. So I opted for a pretty small/cheap lease and a car with low running costs. But there's not much difference, so you could easily get some complete flash machine and it doesn't cost you that much more.. Remember, even something like an EVO that guzzles a bit more fuel, will still only cost you half of that fuel, because its all claimed. So it encourages you to drive the out of the car, and put a lot of Kms on it. Extremely backwards and bad for emissions and the kyoto agreement I know. Stupid way the system works, but you might as well just benefit from it when the tax rates are so high.
), consider housing before a nice car.
