Financial Considerations and Optimizations while Buying and Maintaining a car
Buying a car is a dream for most of us, and these days it is a reality. Hence the dream has become a desire, and slowly now the desire is becoming a necessity. Behind buying a home, a car would be the second biggest big-ticket purchase in our lives. Hence we need to give it enough thought and consideration and its impact on our personal finance.
At the outset, I would like to emphasis that a car is a consumption item, it is not an investment (unless you are going to use the car for commercial purposes). So it is not an asset per se, and one’s expectations need to be aligned to reflect the same. At the same time, since this is a big ticket item for which most of us would even apply for loans, we cannot buy it like buying a washing machine. We need to apply all the seriousness that we apply while taking other financial decisions. Let us look at some of the financial considerations linked with buying and maintaining a car.