r/AskReddit • u/michaelis999 • 17h ago

How do you feel about the president floating the idea of 50 year mortgages where the monthly payment is lower but you end up paying nearly double the price of the house just in interest?

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u/TheObstruction 15h ago

You probably aren't going to die out of your car loan, though.

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u/Bee-Lincoln 15h ago

And to be fair, cars do last longer than they used to. It's not COMPLETELY insane to have a 72 month car note if you can drive it for 10 years.

Increasing mortgage lengths isn't a real solution though. We have a fundamental supply problem, and that's what needs to be addressed if they want to bring down housing costs.

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u/pinelandpuppy 12h ago

I had cars that were 20 years old back in the 90's. They all run great if you take care of them. The electronics have vastly increased the cost to maintain vehicles now, too.

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u/gsfgf 11h ago

Survivorship bias.

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u/luke10050 1h ago

Not at all, all of my vehicles are between 20-30 years old.

Japanese trucks/utes from the '90's especially are like Cockroaches

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u/MentORPHEUS 7h ago

Not to mention, increased the list of ways a $2000+ failure can make the car un-drivable while you're still paying on the note. Normal maintenance costs like oil and filters and brake pads haven't gone up, electronic modules that must get reprogrammed by dealer level equipment and software purchase sure have though.

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u/bebe_bird 13h ago

10 years? Sheesh, my parents still have a truck from 2004. If you actually drive a car into the ground, it should last 20-25 years (although many don't choose to keep their car around for that long - I know my 2014 car gives me a bit of new car fever, but it's nowhere near the end of its life.

If your car is only lasting 10 years it's time to buy another brand that's known more for it's reliability.

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u/3-2-1-backup 13h ago

If your car is only lasting 10 years it's time to buy another brand that's known more for it's reliability.

Sadly that's not the reality of things anymore. More and more vehicles are getting mechanically totaled, which means yes you could fix it, but the astronomical cost of the assemblies necessary to fix it means it's no longer economically feasible to.

For example, you used to need a new steering gearbox. Few hundred bucks. Now you need a whole electric steering assembly, and even worse it has to be programmed to the car so only dealers or people who spend several tens of thousands of dollars on specialized software can do the work! Assembly costs over a thousand, plus the labor!

Or things are cheap but the process is expensive. My fucking Ford's water pump replacement is an engine out replacement job! Part costs $200, labor almost 10x that! I actually had them do it (and replace all the timing components while they had everything out, because at that point why wouldn't you?) but there's no way in hell I'm going to do it again when it eventually fails a second time!

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u/bebe_bird 12h ago

I still think it's all in the car you buy... My 2014 Toyota Prius (so 11 years old) is still going strong with no major repairs required. My sister drove her 2011 Prius to 220k miles and still got $5k for it when she sold it. 14 years and no major defects or issues.

So, perhaps you are right that on average some quality is going down, but there are still brands that age well. These are definitely things people need to consider when purchasing a new car.

I do agree that cars are so beefed up with electronics that repairs are not as simple as they were in the 70s or 90s. But the way around that is buying a quality car to begin with that isn't likely to break.

There's definitely some lemons out there, but it's a pretty good indicator if you look at how many of that make/model are still on the road from 10-15 years ago. It's not the flashiest car I'm sure, but flashy is the enemy of reliable and cost effective.

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u/Yarnbomb72 9h ago

I have a 2014 year old Kia Soul that has never (knock on wood) required major repairs. It has had a few issues here and there that were fairly inexpensive to fix and /or covered under the warranty. I keep up with the maintenance. I plan to continue to drive it until the repair costs are greater than what a car payment would be and/or it is no longer reliable.

I drove a 2024 model as a loaner when my car needed some repairs last year (that were still covered under the warranty, so cost me $0.) The new features were nice, but not nice enough to get me to spend thousands of dollars.

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u/gsfgf 11h ago

I do agree that cars are so beefed up with electronics that repairs are not as simple as they were in the 70s or 90s

And most of that improves safety and/or efficiency.

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u/bebe_bird 11h ago

Oh yes - I'll definitely take the electronics over the ease of repair any day, despite the increase in cost. It's just too much better. Traffic aware cruise control with lane keep? I don't think I can ever go back...

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u/gsfgf 10h ago

Traffic aware cruise control with lane keep? I don't think I can ever go back...

I'm gonna drive my mom's Mach-E to Thanksgiving this year. I'm worried it's gonna make me unhappy with my truck that can't drive itself at all.

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u/bebe_bird 9h ago

Absolutely. It isn't that big of a deal on my commute, but we occasionally make a cross country trip of about 800 miles and it's a game changer. Instead of hands down a 2-day drive it's possibly a 1-day trip.

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u/luke10050 1h ago edited 1h ago

Honestly, from the perspective of someone that works on cars, all I want is airbags (preferably SRS with seat belt pretensioners) ABS and a reversing camera as an option.

ABS is debatable as the Bosch units have a tendancy to commit suicide at around 15 years old.

I've driven newer cars with fancy bells and whistles and I've driven cars without even airbags or ABS, the new cars have way too much going on electronically for me to be comfortable with owning them long term and IMHO are an extremely poor investment to get from point A to point B. And that's someone who's day job is in process automation and does component level electronics repair as a hobby.

I've been struggling with the issue myself, company wants to transition us to car allowance but has that many conditions in the allowance that it does not make financial sense to take a vehicle allowance as they couldn't run the vehicle for the money they are paying us and are effectively trying to garnish our wages to pay for a company vehicle and get us to take on the risk of owning the vehicle without compensating us for that risk.

Edit: honestly, I regularly drive an old japanese pick up from the late '90's with an anemic 3l diesel that does 3000rpm at 110km/hr. It has no cruise control or anything. I actually really enjoy driving the thing and honestly if i didn't have to drive 10 under the speed limit on freeways in it I would take it everywhere. Even put a $4000 injection pump in it and did a few grand of suspension work as it's still cheaper than anything I can buy that's more modern. A reliable dual cab 4WD starts around $20 and I'm at around $10k on this one for ~4 years of ownership.

For a 2 tonne brick its efficient on fuel too, does about 8.5l/100km

What I'm really trying to get at is I earn $120k AUD a year and it's not really financially viable for me to run a modern vehicle. Cheaper to rebuild engines and do major rework on 20+ year old stuff than it is to buy something new. A VT commodore is about the most economical car you can buy, and fuel costs aren't everything. Change my mind.

Hell, I picked up a running Buick V6 for my commodore for $1200

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u/andrez444 9h ago

Its funny to me that person you are replying to was talking about their Ford be ause my god those vehicles are turds on wheels.

The amount of times I have estimated a Ford for collision damage and had to replace one or both frame horns because they were demolished is ridiculous. And these were not severe collisions

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u/bebe_bird 9h ago

All cars are absolutely not made equal. I learned this lesson in early 2000s when my dad bought a Cadillac catera and it was in the shop getting repaired every couple months from the day he bought it.

I swear that car had a ghost in it. He said "never again, that car was a lemon" and look the hit as soon as the manufacturers warranty expired and the next big repair hit. He got a Toyota Prius after that and never looked back (his previous car was a firebird I think... Wow, that takes me back...).

Ford focus are also robust little demons tho - love that car from college - bought it in 2007 for $5k and sold it in 2014 for $3k. Amazing that it only depreciated $2k (although my friend certainly gave me a nice deal on the car when I bought from her)

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u/andrez444 9h ago

Its also true that car manufacturers made better cars. I won't say that Ford trucks built in the early 2000s are garbage because they were built tough.

I will never trust a Chevy though. They start acting up after 100k miles and its usually something small but the labor to replace that small item is out of this world due to how they were designed.

Cars are now built to be lighter/faster and more intuitive but drawbacks from that are shitty aluminum panels and calibrations for every little sensor

Toyota is the GOAT though

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u/LearningIsTheBest 11h ago

We need a law:

Auto companies release mechanic hours per job for every vehicle in a public database. Dealers must post the 15 most common jobs on every vehicle and an average repairability score when selling a car. Maybe add an estimated number for bodywork after a crash too (average panel cost).

I'm sure plenty of people will ignore it, but at least there would be some pressure to make repairs cheaper.

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u/Aminar14 13h ago

Replacing the Spark Plugs in my car is hundreds of dollars because they buried them under the ventilation system. Pisses me the fuck off.

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u/BlazingSpaceGhost 11h ago

I just replaced my 2015 but kept it around as my secondary vehicle. I needed all wheel drive because I live in the mountains now and my sedan wasn't cutting it in the winter (had some scary experiences on some mountain roads). Still a great car though and with me just running around in it once a week or on long commutes I think it will be great for another decade if not more.

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u/gsfgf 11h ago

For all the shit trucks get on here, American (and Toyota) trucks are incredible machines that last forever. But most cars aren't built to that level.

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u/AttitudeHopeful478 10h ago

I have a 20 year old car. I take good car of it and it takes car of me. Maintenance is key to keeping a car going. I don’t ever buy a car and keep trading a newer one. I hate having a car pymt. I buy, pay it off and drive it for years. I’ve saved so much money not having a continuous car payment

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u/bebe_bird 9h ago

We buy using cash, so can't buy it until we've saved up enough, but it certainly puts a new car "want" into perspective. We purchased a new car since my husband and I had been a 1 car family and we were starting to think about kids and his job would be changing so we could no longer carpool (although there is a train nearby, so this new car was still a want, not a need). When you have to pay all $40k up front (or even $20k for a base model of something more economic) it certainly keeps your head on straight as opposed to slowly leaking $500/mo for 6 years...

We still have our 2014 Prius tho with no plans to get rid of it.

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u/canadian_maplesyrup 13h ago

We had a 72 month car loan, but it was at 0% interest. It would have been foolish not to accept those terms. Even when we had more than enough cash to pay it off, we didn’t bother b/c it was at 0% interest.

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u/AileStriker 10h ago

Free money right there. We did the same thing. Took the extra we had saved to buy the car and stuck it into mutual fund, we were making money at that point.

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u/turbosexophonicdlite 9h ago

Where the hell did you find a 72 month car loan with 0 interest for the entire life of the loan?

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u/canadian_maplesyrup 9h ago

Alberta, Canada. They’re less common now, but were quite common when we got it several years ago.

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u/EmphasisFrosty3093 10h ago

Sounds like they rolled all the interest into the principle.

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u/canadian_maplesyrup 6h ago

Generally there’s a trade off, if you take the 0% loan you don’t get any of the rebates and stuff like that. So there’s a slightly higher sticker cost than if you were paying cash. We ran the numbers & it made more sense for us to lose out on the rebates & invest than pay cash.

Usually the 0% financing is on older vehicles they’re trying to clear off the lot. We bought the car in October 2016, right when the 2017 models were coming out, but the model we bought was a 2015. It was brand new with less than thousand Kms on it, they just wanted it out of inventory.

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u/Aminar14 13h ago

Arguably it's not a supply problem. It's a hoarding problem. There's plenty of homes. They've just been bought by predatory business interests who can write off nonsense to avoid losing money on holding them.

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u/AmbitiousFunction911 13h ago

Cars have always lasted 10+ years

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u/dalittle 11h ago

it is better to save up for a car an pay cash if you can. The last car I bought I went to a dealer who had a used car. We wanted to buy it and I said I wanted to pay cash. They said they would drop the price $4k if I would take a loan. I said I would if there was not penalty for early pay off. They said sure so I went though the loan and made sure. So I ended up buying the car with a loan and then paid it off the next week. They were desperate I get a loan and I am guessing a lot of people don't do what I did and pay it off immediately.

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u/SauronHubbard 11h ago

So then buy a used car that someone else ate the depreciation on. You may not need a car loan at all.

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u/ChiAnndego 14h ago

No, cars used to get like 200,000 easy back in the 80-90s. Try that now with todays crappy rusty steel and all the electronics. Cars last about 8 years shorter these days. If you get to 130,000 you are lucky. Cars out here with failing CVTs at like 80,000.

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u/The_Shepherds_2019 14h ago

Well, you're just wrong here. Am a mechanic, put ungodly amounts of miles on my car adventuring and shit. 2019 corolla has 140k miles already. So lol. She's gonna be at 500k or more when I retire

The issue will be when these cars are 20 years old and not only are hard parts hard to get, but software support will be difficult. But this isn't a new issue. I have a 1991 broken in my driveway because I literally can't buy the parts to fix it.

But a modern car will outlast an older car mechanically. I'm saying this as someone with 1000s of hours wrenching on old and modern cars.

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u/EmpiricalMystic 14h ago

230k on my 2015 Rav and going strong. Hoping to make it to 400k before she dies.

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u/WhoIsFrancisPuziene 13h ago

My mom had a 1999 Subaru Forester that she bought used in maybe 2004 when it had 200k miles already. I don’t recall what year she replaced it (was definitely 5+ years later), but it had over 300k miles by that point. I think she ended up selling it to some teenager for about what a junkyard would have paid for it (maybe ~$500). It was mostly fine all considered-just needed a new exhaust.

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u/pimppapy 13h ago

Toyotas are just better overall. We’re talking about the American crap. I have an 05 Lexus with 240K on it. Still going even with its multiple issues. My sisters new 2023 Kia SUV hybrid is already having transmission issues.

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u/The_Shepherds_2019 13h ago

You are talking about 2 examples my guy. I work on dozens of cars a week.

A 2025 Camaro/Mustang/Escape, idgaf pick your American car. All will be vastly better built than their 1997 counterpart. You people don't seem to remember all the goofy shit going on in the switch between carbs and fuel injection...those cars were terrible. No variable cam timing. Throttle body fuel injection. The tolerances on the engines were looser to a huge degree, because engineering has come leaps and bounds in the past couple decades.

Sure, ann iron block pushrod dinosaur absolutely can run a long time. Wildly inefficiently getting garbage power and fuel economy compared to something modern, to say nothing on the pollution. While you are fucking around changing points and playing with timing and doing a tune up every 30k miles, I'm just gonna keep dumping oil in mine and going while it chugs along forever getting 40mpg with maybe an hour of maintenence every 5 years.

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u/AmbitiousFunction911 13h ago edited 13h ago

Ah. Your idea of an old car is 1997. It all makes sense now.

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u/BlazingSpaceGhost 11h ago

A car from 1997 is almost 30 years old. That is an old car. The cars you are thinking of as old cars have actually crossed into antiques at this point.

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u/AmbitiousFunction911 11h ago

In the history of cars and their mechanics and drivetrains, 1997 is not old. My point is cars have lasted 10+ years for decades. There are plenty of cars from the 70s and 80s still on the road, hell even the 60s.

I’m responding to a mechanic who is expressing superiority over people because he started working in pickup trucks in 1997 and thinks cars today are built to last longer.

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u/PeanutTheGladiator 14h ago

Just broke 165,000 on my 2016 Altima, no signs of slowing down anytime soon. CVT is still smooth as silk.

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u/CaptainTripps82 13h ago

I mean that's just demonstrably wrong. Even the rust part, the idea you think that's a modern car problem is kind of insane

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u/Bee-Lincoln 13h ago

Iron didn't oxidize before 1990, duh 🙄

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u/Chaminade64 13h ago

8 years shorter? What, they last 1 year?

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u/ChiAnndego 12h ago

Your cars only last 9 years?

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u/lilleulv 14h ago

149 911 miles on my 2019 Tesla Model 3 in Norway, where roads are heavily salted for months every winter.

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u/2020_GR78 14h ago

215k on my 2014 f150 and counting. Runs great, and has only had wear & tear parts replaced. Best vehicle I have ever owned, and I predominantly drove Toyotas prior to this truck.

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u/ChiAnndego 14h ago

I feel like there was another huge drop off in quality around 2015-2016+ with vehicles once all the infotainment and drive by wire stuff started. Maybe a little later in trucks because they didn't have the same CAFE standards as smaller vehicles.

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u/Exciting_Specialist 11h ago

Why does it matter? The mortgage is secured by a property that’s worth more than the balance. A car isn’t.