What New Car is Best For Me?

How do you figure out what the best new car for you really is? This is is essentially the first step in buying a new car and it is exactly what we are here to talk about. By the time you are done reading this, you will have a pretty good idea as to what vehicle is best for you. Figuring out this initial moment in the car buying process helps later as well. Once your know what car best suits you, it makes it much easier to decide if you are going to buy a new car, purchase a used car for sale or lease a new car.

Step One to Finding the Best New Car: Set a Budget

When you are trying to figure out what will be best new car for you, first things are first. How are you going to pay for this new car? Chances are that unless you are paying cash, you’re going to need to obtain some sort of financing to buy or lease your new car.  Sit down for a few minutes and go over all your monthly expenditures and figure out how much you can really put towards a new car payment. To be safe, you generally don’t want to be allocating more than twenty percent of your take home pay towards your car payment.

Step 2: Household Needs Assessment

Determine what type or class of vehicle you are going to need. What will you use it for? Are you the only one driving this vehicle? While we all have that dream car that we want you should keep function at the fore front of your mind. A few things to ask yourself are:

• Who will be driving this car?
• What will this vehicle be used for?
• How many passengers will you be carrying?
• How far do you drive to work?
• Do you drive more on the highway, back roads or city streets?
• Do you travel a lot in your car?
• Will you need all wheel or four drive?
• How big is your garage?
• Is fuel economy important?
• Do you ever use car seats?
• How much cargo do you carry?
• Do you ever tow anything?
• How long do you plan on keeping this vehicle?
• What safety features are a must?

Step 3: Determine Cost to Own

Depending on how long you plan on keeping your vehicle will determine how heavily this step in weighted for you as an individual. One new vehicle could be less expensive up front but end up costing you more in the long run. When going over this step be sure to keep in mind factors such as deprectiation, repair costs, insurance, registration fees, and fuel costs.

According to AAA,, the average cost of ownership for a vehicle driven 15,000 miles a year came out to be $8,469 a year in 2017. That’s $706 a month!

Step 4: Should I Lease or Buy?

As with most all situations, when deciding to buyor lease your next car there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

Consider this – most times leasing a new car requires very little or no money down. You also have lower monthly payments, sometimes as much as half what you would when buying a new car. So what’s the drawback there? When the lease is over you have no car and have to start all over again. Comparitively, when buying a new car, it is going to be more expensive up front and the monthly payments will be higher. Once you have paid off the loan though, you will own the car outright and be able to drive it as long as it lasts you. Other points to consider – warranty, driving distance, maintenance.

Here are several different points to go over that can help with the decision of buying or leasing a new car

New Car Purchase

• You can do whatever you want to your car.
• You can sell the car whenever you would like.
• No mileage penalties.
• Lower vehicle expenses in the long run
• You own the car when all the payments are made

Leasing a New Car

• You can drive a more expensive vehicle for much less money.
• You get to drive a new car every few years with the latest technology and updates.
• No hassle of trading in a car or negative equity to deal with.
• Factory warranty is still in place.

Step 5: Compare Similar Vehicles

By this point in your research you might be narrowing in on a certain vehicle. Chances are you at least have pretty good ideaa as to the type of automobile you want. You may even think that you have your heart set on a specific one already. When it comes down to it in fact, after all the research and the time spent online comparing vehicles, roughly 30% of consumers purchase a different car than they intended to once they visited a dealership.

Step 6: Find Cars for Sale Near You

In years past, shopping for a new car could be a very time consuming process. To see a new car for sale and find out if it had the options you were looking for, you had to visit dealerships in person. Those days are luckily way in the rear view mirror now. You can quickly cover more a lot more ground and save time and money. By using the super easy car buying tools on Liacars.com. Once you have an idea of what are looking for car you want, you can easily see its availability.

Just select a vehicle’s year, make, and model at the top of our Find My Car page on Liacars.com. You can narrow it down even more by entering your preferred mileage, transmission, and price.

See something you like? Simply contact one of our local dealerships near you to confirm the car’s availability and ask any questions you may have. It is that simple.

Step 7: Schedule a Test Drive

The only thing left to do now is take it for a test drive. Always take a test drive. Taking a test drive is one of the most important steps to shopping for a new car. Of course if it is a new car, everything Chances are that yuo will be driving this new car for at least the next three years so why wouldn’t you want to make sure it was actually comfortable.

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