Cancelling

[p3asa]

The cost of ownership numbers add up to that, but as I said earlier, after three years you will own the GTI which will be worth whatever it's worth. You say £3000 on the conservative side. What will you have in the GTD? You reckon a £2000 deposit towards a new car. Maybe, but it's not guaranteed, but you will have to make a decision whether to find a considerable amount of money to keep the car, or start the whole process all over again.......

Not always a bad thing Dubber.

Before I went down the PCP route, I would usually get a bank loan over 3 years.
Pay it off then trade the car in and start over again.
I've did this for around 25 years so have always paid car finance*
This has always been on 2nd hand cars usually 2 or 3 years old so just outside the manufacturers warranty plus in MOT land! 
Then a few years back I stumbled upon the PCP method.
For me it works out just slightly more for a brand new car, compared to what I was paying for 2nd hand. So a "no brainer" 
Granted the cars never fully paid off but since I've paid car finance for 25 years I'm not any more out of pocket.

*One car I paid off and then didn't trade it in immediately. So I had a few extra £££ to play with each month. But its amazing how quickly that gets accounted for in other ways so when I did trade my car in to buy something else, it was a real struggle to find the monthly payment again.

[monkeyhanger]

I think the extra £3500 for the GTD is worth it.

At the moment I am sticking with it.

By the way warranties on second hand cars are a pain, they don't cover what you expect and take weeks to sort out.  Given the choice I have always gone for no warranty, its easier to fix it myself. (haven't found anything I cant sort out myself in 24 years of driving yet)

The difference in figs is primarily down to interest for the GTD that you won't be paying on the GTI, doing your own servicing and disregarding fuel savings on the fuel that your company pays for. If you have £10k available, have you considered using the whole £10k and getting a £15k bank loan at 5% or thereabouts (assuming your credit rating is good to very good) over 5 years, and then if you change cars at 3 years (and take out a new loan at that point) you will have more equity in the car and will have paid less interest as a result.

I used to do this prior to the last Scirocco going through VW finance, as I find it difficult to find a bank loan at a good rate with more than £15k borrowed.

On your proposed terms, you will be borrowing £18k for a £25k car (£7k down), and you will owe £13500 at the end of it. So for your £236 a month, you are only clearing £4500 of capital, which is £125 a month over 36 months - the other £111 a month is interest. This is how the high residual value pays dividends for VW finance - you will always be paying interest on the majority of the car's value, from month 1 to 36.

If you can get a £15k loan at 5%, you could end up taking it out over 60 months at approx £283 a month, and settling at 36 months. You will have overpaid by £47 a month vs VWs terms, but at that point, you will owe just over £6500 on it (including 2 months penalty interest for early settlement), vs £13500 GFV on the VW finance. £47 a month paid x 36 months = £1692. So in effect you are overpaying by £4692 (inc your other £3k: £10k down vs £7k down with VW) against £7k difference between owings at 36 months. There's a £2300 saving to be had with the personal loan route.

If you were to go for the GTI, the one thing I would insist on getting done would be the timing belt (or was it a chain back then? Thought the chain was brought in for MK6) and water pump unless it was done quite recently and fully documented as having been done. Apart from that and the cost of the turbo or gearbox, anything else that could go wrong is relatively cheap to repair/replace.

[Ricepop]

Monkeyhanger, you have just about convinced me to cancel.

£230pm is easy to cope with. Your talk of £18,000 loans and debt is making me realise that maybe its something I don't want to get into.

[monkeyhanger]

Monkeyhanger, you have just about convinced me to cancel.

£230pm is easy to cope with. Your talk of £18,000 loans and debt is making me realise that maybe its something I don't want to get into.

IIf you want to think of it as £230 a month rather than a single huge wedge of money then that's fine. If it helps you sleep at night, having £7k or £10k down means that car will always be worth more than you owe on it if you worry about finances.

It sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into this (I was just bored at work when I got into some heavy number crunching!), maybe you don’t want it enough to be dropping that kind of money on a car (hence all the thought), and that’s fine. I’m at about my limit on what I’m prepared to spend on a car with a £20k loan so as not to have to start cutting back on hols, going out etc. For some it will be less, for some it will be more. At the end of the day, going new is about getting the latest tech and having worry free motoring (no nasty surprises). Occasionally I’m tempted to go old school and get a very tidy MK2 (the best of the “old” Golfs IMO).

I do think that the way VW finance is engineered with high residuals etc, if you think of the car as only ever being on loan for 3 years etc (how many people buy new cars to keep them beyond 3 or 5 years?) you can get behind the wheel of a new one for not much more than a fairly recent used one when you’re only covering the depreciation and some interest – albeit with nothing to show for it at the end of the agreement.

[dubber36]

Monkeyhanger, you have just about convinced me to cancel.

£230pm is easy to cope with. Your talk of £18,000 loans and debt is making me realise that maybe its something I don't want to get into.

That's just how I see things. No amount of number manipulation can get you away from the fact that you will still owe a considerable amount of money.

Occasionally I’m tempted to go old school and get a very tidy MK2 (the best of the “old” Golfs IMO).

However appealing that might sound and the nostalgic grin that it will give you driving one, as a daily, never. Even the very best ones feel like really old cars and have done for the last 10 years.

I perhaps should have made the effort to do more than 300 miles in mine this year, but it's more of a nice thing to own, rather than a car that I would be comfortable using.

[Ricepop]

Occasionally I’m tempted to go old school and get a very tidy MK2 (the best of the “old” Golfs IMO).

However appealing that might sound and the nostalgic grin that it will give you driving one, as a daily, never. Even the very best ones feel like really old cars and have done for the last 10 years.

I have a 1967 Beetle in the garage and driving it is really fun however as a daily driver, no thanks its incredible how things have come on, I do think we are now getting diminishing returns in regards to comfort and usability, technology seems to be where the gains are.

The Mk 5 I drove felt easily as refined as the Mk7 GT I drove the day after.

[harryhackenbacker]

Had well over 250 Golf performance cars ,and apart from a few mk2-3-4-GTI's they have always got better ,a lot
better , the only two I would go back to as sunday cars is an 1800 early GTI and My late but with original wheels
R32 ,more for the Presence and sound of it 
Otherwise it's Mk 7 all the way 

[double0]

250

[harryhackenbacker]

250

Yup ,That will be 240 whilst in the trade and 10 after that I bought ,so did I brain wash myself or
after experiencing Ford,  Vauxhall, BMW, Renault ,Audi , Audi Quattro and more why did I settle
on VW and the Golf   Simple seen it all ,like a medium sized performance Hatch ,and VW do
it best in an All round sort of way