Originally Posted by kALMIGHTY
(Post 1416921)
I'm by no means experienced in the field. Damn, I'm not even 20 years old yet (1 more day!), but from what I figured out when I went in to get my car 5 and a half months ago is that you don't want to tell them you want to put any money down.
Generally, go in with an idea of what to expect. Use the Scion website to get a quote from their Build and Price feature, and know the numbers you got, or print it so you remember. Armed with that knowledge, go in and ask them what they can give you, and compare that to what the website told you. If they're not giving you a better deal than what the website gave you, they're trying to take an advantage of you to see if you'll fall for a crap deal, and if they won't budge from their crap deal, look elsewhere.
Price it out all with $0 down by the way, and make sure their interest rate is as low as possible.
Also, try to put down the least amount of money is possible. Now, people may not agree with this, but the idea is that if you put $10,000 down, they will basically take the money, and divide it by the number of months in your term (let's say 48 months in this case) and that's how much your monthly payment will go down by, or biweekly, in which case they would divide the $10,000 by 96 payments and lower it by that amount for each payment you make.
Depending on your interest rate, ask yourself this: is putting down $10000 upfront at the beginning of 4 years worth it to lower your payments, when you could basically pay the same amount slowly over 4 years? Let's say something happens and you need cash in a different situation, you may have higher biweekly or monthly payments, but you also have $10000 in cash available as a rainy day fund in case you ever need it for something. Is it worth it to tie up that large sum of money right up front by handing it over to the dealer?
When I got my car, they explicitly said there were no penalties for paying my car off earlier than the intended 60 months, or paying more than my monthly every month. So I could pay twice my monthly payment one month when my budget allows and slowly decrease the remaining amount that way if I so choose, but I still have that $10000 I initially put aside in the beginning instead of handing it over to the dealer for a lower monthly payment.
If there's a difference in the amounts you have to pay because of the interest rate, see if you can throw that $10000 in a savings account with a decent interest rate to earn some money from your cash to offset that difference.
Good luck!
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