@jesussaves7763 Bought a brand new car this past December with a car note around $825/month after down payment.
I’ve wanted an SUV for as long as I can remember. My original plan was to turn in my previous car at the end of its lease (another wrong that was right for me for many years) and then buy said SUV and drive it into the ground. I ended up buying out the lease (and then paying it off a year later, so I had no car payment for 2 years). My husband’s car had been paid off for about 4 years, but it was getting expensive to maintain (gotta love that German engineering) and close to negating his lack of car payment. Earlier last year it started having a major mechanical issue that would have cost more to fix than the car was worth - he squeezed about six more months out of it before he started to feel nervous about running out his luck and agreed to the SUV purchase. We traded his car, and he took over my Honda Accord (2017 with 70K miles, so it has plenty of life left and no car payment).
If I had stuck to my original plan and bought at the end of my lease, I’d have gotten a different SUV and likely ended up with a more reasonable sub-$600 payment, however since then I’d gotten a big promotion + we’d increased our HHI by $100K between the two of us. I had also gone from not contributing to my retirement accounts to maxing them out, and we’d built up 6ish months of expenses into a HYSA and started to fund a brokerage account. We refinanced to a 15-year mortgage at 2.25% at some point in there as well - this did increase our payment, but it was at the same time that we’d reached enough equity for our PMI to drop off and essentially cancel out the increase. I mention this because even tho our housing expenses didn’t really change, we now have 10 fewer years of mortgage payments.
Not to mention I would’ve given up the Honda in that original scenario, so my husband would have needed to buy a new car himself when his went to shit last year. Even if I had a $500-$600 payment, car prices these days would have definitely put us beyond what my actual current payment is.
We are DINKs whose only debt was our mortgage and who have a solid emergency safety net, so I splurged on a sweet ride with all the bells and whistles, and I don’t bat an eye when the payment gets pulled from my account