A $45,000 Loan for a $27,000 Ride: More Borrowers Are Going Underwater on Car Loans

But why would you buy a nice used Subaru in the first place when it's only $1-2k below new MSRP, for which you get a warranty and a percent or two off the interest rate? Even if you would usually buy cash, an interest rate of 2% or lower is effectively 0% interest. Even if you're not taking the free money in order to do something else with your money, and just tying up $20-30k of your own cash in a (albeit slowly) depreciating asset for emotional reasons, you're still paying just $2k less, sometimes as little as $500 less in exchange for no AA/CarPlay, less recent safety tech, an almost-out bumper-to-bumper warranty, and a less-recent therefore less-reliable run of the CVT. Even if just for the warranty, the difference between a used and new Subaru is hundreds cheaper than the cost of just about any aftermarket extended warranty that actually covers anything.

/r/cars Thread Parent Link - sj.com