What percentage of your income goes to car payments

[elistan]

Originally Posted by elistan

Depends on your situation, IMO.
I once bought a car myself at 50% of my salary. I had very few other expenses at the time. I didn't think about it too much.
My wife and I recently bought a car at 25% of our combined salaries. Plenty of other expenses, including house and retirement accounts. Took nearly a year to convince ourselves to go for it.

Hmm, I just noticed everybody is talking about monthly payments, not total purchase price. So in my scenarios above, the car that cost 50% of my salary was financed over four years - oh wait, I just remembered I also had a trade-in that served as a 40% down payment. Hmm, so about 7% of my monthly gross income went to paying for that car IIRC.

And the 25% car - about 5.5% of our combined gross monthly income goes to the car payment.

Sorry for the confusion.

[amanda hor$t]

"it's just a car"