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Comment by J5892 | Hacker News Reader

Buying a $60k car seems like a completely insane concept to me, even with a Silicon Valley tech industry salary. Even $16k (used) was higher than I wanted to pay for my current car.

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You have a good mindset. A lot of people view a car as a status symbol and derive its utility from a social point of view, which I think is financially unhealthy. To me all I care about is 1: How safe is it?. 2: How much will it cost me over its lifetime? And 3: Does it get me and my stuff where I want to? Everything else comes far behind these three things.

People really shouldn't be borrowing money to buy a car. It's pretty crazy how many people do this.

Depends, borrowing money to buy a car and needing to borrow money to buy a car are 2 distinct things. I recently got financing for a new car because they gave me thousands of dollars discount for doing so. Over the course of the loan, if I pay it according to the full 5 year schedule they'll obviously get more in interest back but I plan to pay it off very quickly (and yes, I did make sure the financing contract allows to do that without having to pay off the entire schedule interest, only the interest accumulated until the time of the payoff).

As for the general idea what people should do with their money, I try to avoid those discussions because it's just a matter of priorities. To you it's more important to use your money to do other things, to others it's important that they drive a nice car. Life is too short and we should spend it pursuing that which makes us happy.

Respectfully disagree. Recently leased a $60k car and I enjoy every single minute I'm driving it. I'm not paying for a transportation vehicle, I'm paying for joy and pleasure. What else should I spend money on? Burgers and coke?

I won’t tell you what to do with your money, but there are a lot of cheap fun cars to drive out there. If you want fun to drive combined with new features like automatic lane keeping, dynamic cruise control, etc. you may need to shell out a little more for it.

I encourage high-earning tech workers to save more money in general - these are boom times. $60k pays rent on a room in the bay for a long time if you’re unemployed. I’m gonna buy the house before I lease the Tesla. But don’t know about your personal financial situation.

/s Well - u could save up for cancer treatment /s

Seriously though. Enjoy it. I had a cool sport car as a young-ish engineer and it gave joy after every long dreary day at the office.

It's super awesome to drive your expensive sports car at 5mph in stop and go traffic on the 101 or 405. s/ Just the best. /s

I was totally going to buy and enjoy a sports car when moving back to the states after 11 years abroad with no car at all. Then we got pregnant and...the dream has to wait ~5-10 years as I'm now into fancy strollers. :).

> What else should I spend money on?

Vacation. Early retirement. House. Airplane. Charity. Cleaning services. Boat.

Or a really nice car.

I can empathize. I've never paid even as much as $3k for a car. The idea seems absolutely ridiculous to me, yet I still hear about people not much better off than myself who spend as much on a new car as I would on a modest house.

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