Somehow I thought the RLX was a tarted-up Honda Accord.

That one was the most conflicted. It could be reliable, but repairs are likely still BMW levels of complex and expensive.

I don’t get it, either. These thing have had sticky high prices for a very long time.

Most of these are for good reason. #1 is bad because it’s unreliable. In fact, most of this list is just a list of the least reliable cars. Only #3, #6, #7, and #10 could be worth exploiting if you’re in the market for these types of car (if I had a spare garage bay, I’d own a Leaf just for cheap commuting, for example…

This isn’t always true. Depreciation eventually bumps into inflation. The market is also extremely distorted on used cars, especially those in the 8-11 year old range (deep in the Great Recession), which are quite scarce. In 3-4 years they might bottom out again at base transportation value, but anything newer than…

I had this exact problem with a 2001 Ford ZX2, except it wasn’t in such rough shape. I wanted to get something else, but I could never justify it with such a freaking cheap and reliable car. Eventually ended up choosing to get something else not because it was bad, but because it was so lacking in features. From a…

I don’t know where he came up with it at, but my bet would be that it’s about the point when the second major value decline happens. Usually 7-8 years is when the car still has “used, but not old” resale value, where after about 9-10 they go for maybe a hair over transportation value.

I have made a lot in the market, but I’m realistic: The market is a house of cards. It has gone basically nowhere in over a year when you include the fees to play. Down $80 per $1000 invested from the peak value. I still pour money in because there’s nowhere else practical to put it when all other assets are so…

Modern cars, especially early-2000s through about the early-2010s are by far the easiest cars I’ve diagnosed and repaired. Dead simple. Swap a sensor, swap a component. The worst stuff is usually not too bad and they’re so amazingly simple. Hybrids and turbo cars are starting to make it harder, but the engines…

That seems to be everywhere. My area has the most extreme premium for used cars that I’ve ever seen. In many cases, you’ll pay more for a lightly-used car than a brand new one when you account for the actual sale prices (instead of the MSRP), and especially when you consider the mileage, warranty, etc. Unless the…

Prior to this decade, all Korean cars were built with the expectations of the Korean market and extreme cost cutting on interiors to keep them cheap. Their mechanical problems are because they were never designed to last over around 5 years, when pretty much all cars go to the crusher there.

Except it set a new base for used cars. Anything under that simply ships to developing countries now, making the sub-5k part of the market (where cars used to spend most of their working lives) very thin. Prior to it, you could buy a decent DD-worthy shitbox for a couple grand. After it, they were all five grand and…

This is crucially important. The people I knew that traded their cars in this program were actively driving them at the time, they weren’t junk. The “clunker” stuff was marketing, these were all functional and generally reliable cars. Some true junk cars were probably destroyed by the program, but the vast majority…

I have also noticed this effect: Trucks and SUVs have extremely low depreciation to this day.

Used cars haven’t been worth their original price minus depreciation since around 2012, either. I was expecting the bump from C4C cars getting replaced to fill the low end back in, then the big lease swap in 2016-2017 after the spike in them earlier in the decade, but nothing has had much effect on used car prices.…

Do you have a huge disparity in credit scores? I found that was a huge red flag when dating. If they didn’t have good credit, it was pretty much doomed.

Retirement accounts are always tied to an individual. Even with merging finances, funding these accounts gets complicated with a couple. We simply put the same amount in each, though when money was tight my wife advocated for only funding mine.

My wife and I were extremely similar financially when we met (aside from a huge income and total savings disparity, mostly due to our fields and ages) and that has eased a lot of things. We maintained separate everything until we were married and didn’t live together prior to that, which avoided the sharing of…

Your information about credit cards Is incorrect and the rest is extremely dubious.

You can play this the other way for a better score, too. If you track that reporting date and pay the card in full prior to that date (long enough for it to be received and processed), they’ll report a zero balance. If you’re paying off cards monthly and want to goose your score, this really works - I bumped from the…