🔺 r/personalfinanceuwarssamu·24 days ago
To lease or to buy… Getting conflicted tips
Hi everyone, I recently had the transmission start acting up on my 2011 Subaru Outback with 160k miles. Long story short it’s worth about $700 and repairs cost around $3000 (at minimum) so figured it’s a good (not really) time to get into the car market. I am looking for a compact SUV, and really only care about dependable and not running up the mechanics bill. I’ve always been told to buy, but I would only want to do CPO, 2022 or newer, and under 50,000 miles. You would think that you could find many options around $20k, but I have looked far and wide and nothing. I want my car payment to stick around $200-300 a month, as I’ve never had a car payment and don’t want anything high. To get to this rate, I would need to put down around $10k, which, as a 25 year old, would mean surrendering about half of my savings, which I don’t want to do. I make decent money, nothing real crazy by any means whatsoever, and my other living bills are around $1k. So, looking deeper into it, I came across leases. I know that Reddit is pretty anti lease, but for my situation, it seemed like it kinda made sense? I could get something new, not have to worry about maintenance, and then if I like it after 3…