Over the weekend I visited a well-known German car manufacturer’s brand new showroom and as usual I was impressed by the design and build quality and the engineering. I saw the car I was interested in and asked to take it for a test drive which I did. Yes it was great car and yes if circumstances were right and I could get a good trade in for mine then we might just have a deal. But the salesman was thousands of pounds adrift on a trade in value for my car, so I would not be buying today. All the salesman kept saying was that the second-hand car market had crashed and they could not offer me a better deal.
Nice motor mate! Don't you worry about the Interest rates if you can afford the monthly payments. This motor has your name written all over it. Said the car salesman.
I decided to make some enquiries into the cost of buying a new car in the current economic climate. The garage had it’s usual offers on selected new cars that they wanted to move this month. They were offering a respectable APR of 5.9% on their special offer deals. This was great if you wanted the special offer deal on their selected cars.
If you did not want to take advantage of their special car deal on selected cars in the showroom and wanted a car that was not on a special offer or a quality used car then they were offering an APR of 14.5%. Well I was speechless and then I told the the salesman that I was not surprised that the second-hand car market had crashed and burn’t with such high borrowing charges. Then the salesman went on the defensive and told me that their brand new showroom had hit their forecasted sales last month; so sales were good. Well of course sales were good last month, the new 58 registration number plate was released. Clients will always put off buying a new car for a few months just to have the latest number plate.
I was then told by the salesman that the company was down £5 million on sales so far this year and that at this branch they had just made 5 members of staff redundant. Wow! Who says we are not in a recession now? What happened did the Germans not hear that the Bank of England had dropped interest rates to 4.5% and that there were rumours of a further interest rate drop possibly to 4%. Even the European Central Bank had dropped their interest rates last week. It did beg the question, where were the Germans getting their finance from?
The British government had asked the Bank of England to drop interest rates to 4.5% and pump £500 billion into the UK banking system to get the banks working again. This was done to get the banks to lend money to help the retail sector which in turn might encourage buyers to go shopping and to start spending money again. This is one way of getting the economy moving again otherwise we will just sink deeper into a recession and unemployment will start to rise and retail sales will start to fall.
My money saving tip for today is you should keep your car for another year and save money by not buying a new car this year. If your old car is paid for just think of how much money you are saving by not paying for a new car. What a saving! In this current economic climate nobody will care what car you drive or how old it is. If you are bothered about driving a car that’s a few years old then go and buy a cheap private number plate on eBay and make sure you bag a bargain!For external reviews and comparisons, please take a look at Car Reviews
Your thoughts, experiences and comments are always welcome. You can join the discussion below by leaving your comments.
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Buying anything on credit is going to be expensive for quite some time to come I think.
I wonder if we’ll see a return to old-fashioned values of saving up for things?
One tip to save you money on a car is to go into the showroom at the end of the month; if the dealer is one or two sales away from hitting his monthly sales target he will do everything he can to get the sale.
Phil
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Hey Mark how sure are you that they would lower their price, I think they would give you promos/giveaways but not to lower prices, If so how many percent they would give. I just read an article a week ago regarding on Auto Industry in UK, the UK government encourage car makers to build a car again, the issue is if you have a 10 year old car, they give you $2,000 discount to buy a new car in exchange to your car, and I think that is a law already. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Great articles & Nice a site?.
Great post!Thanks for the info,i also have one website about vehicles,but yours is better!
Before buying anything on loans, I thinked, it’s going to be expensive. But after reading your blog I have changed my mind.I really liked your blog. Thanks…………