If you’re thinking about buying a new car, some things to financially plan for are:
- Financing: Loan amount, down payment, APR, term
- Asset: Value at purchase, depreciation over time
- Routine expenses: Fuel, oil changes, maintenance, inspections/registration, insurance
- Bigger expenses: Tires, engine / transmission repairs
- Inflation: Inflation makes these expenses even more expensive over time
FarPlanner makes it easy to estimate the impact of all these expenses on your overall financial plan. Just add an automobile ‘template tracker‘ to your plan, which bundles together the loan and all the expenses above as their own ‘trackers‘. You can then view and set values for each of these trackers to match the car you want to purchase. You can also click ‘Visualize’ to view and tweak your trackers on a graphical timeline.
Cars are expensive purchases, but their impact to your overall financial plan is even higher. By simulating with a newly added automobile using FarPlanner, you’ll likely find your overall net worth drops by 2 times the purchase value of the car over it’s lifetime. FarPlanner takes into account that you are taking funds away from investments to pay auto loan and expenses.
Another consideration is that each person in your family might have or eventually have a car, and these cars might have to replaced every 10 to 12 years or so. With FarPlanner, you can add auto templates for each one of these situations, to see the full impact on your overall financial plan.