mmarshall

Appreciate the love of your vehicles, but even Jay Leno can drive only one at a time LOL.

Besides, when your kids are grown, computers will be doing most (if not all) of the driving for you.

SW17LS

You're confusing lease residuals and actual resale value. BMWs have high lease residuals, but their resale values aren't particularly high, nowhere near as high as Toyotas for instance. BMW artificially inflates their residuals to move product.

And again, a manufacturer is not "neglecting" a segment because they don't compete in it. Manufacturers don't have to serve every segment, they make strategic choices. Anyways there is no "luxury Minivan" segment. You make it sound like there is. BMWs business model doesn't fit a Minivan.

Bit added the 1 to my 4 lol, I'm 4 years away from an SUV lol

mmarshall

Yes, I know that the term "neglect" does not always mean literal or deliberate. But, on the other hand, one reason why SUV sales are so brick is the lack of minivan alternatives.



Yeah...I saw that. I was J / K.

BMW does offers a healthy choice in SUVs, though, including some high-performance M-grade versions. And, if you can afford a Lexus LS, I'm sure you can afford one of those.

SW17LS

I don't think buyers are choosing SUVs because there aren't good minivans lol. In reality there are better minivans now than there have ever been, the segment still contracts YoY. Minivans began to decline in the 90s, and that's just continued through today. They simply have a stigma and a lack of style that image conscious Americans are continuing to move away from towards ever more family functional crossovers that are more stylish and don't have that stigma. I'm a Minivan owner, and for us for these few years it's a vehicle that brings needed utility to our lives, but I would never choose a Minivan unless I needed one, an SUV is an entirely different matter.

Bear in mind the American Minivan is just that, an American phenomenon. You don't see our style minivans overseas. That's one reason why manufacturers have abandoned them, limited market. Crossovers are more accepted in other markets.

Johnhav430

I don't mean to criticize your math, I have a 3 y.o. Assuming they're going to college, and assuming they don't get into an elite college (all of them, up to 250k income, 10%, i.e. cheaper than a state university), you would have to add 4 yrs. to realizing your dream. My ex friend did not save for her son's college, one day, he turned 18 and got accepted at NYU (not elite). After all aid and loans, it came out to $28k per year.

Here's the sad part--she bought a new CR-V for 31k and financed it over 60 mos. On that college? That number must be met every year, for four years--it's like paying cash for a CR-V, 4 years in a row. I've seen the numbers, on what a good parent is supposed to save, from the hospital ride home, through age 22, it's not pretty. It is what it is, I believe in the saying parents can only do so much. Or, you can be like a colleague who has 2 daughters at Notre Dame, one who graduated Vanderbilt, and another one who wants to go to Notre Dame. 3/4 are girls, so you can imagine the look on his face when I asked if he's gonna pick up the tab for the weddings....

If BMW made a minivan, it would be a very sad day...

SW17LS

My choice of vehicle in no way impacts my ability to plan for my kids college education, the two things are totally separate from each other

Anyways how does buying a $50,000 Minivan not impact that but buying a $50,000 SUV does? The point is the choice of a Minivan is one we make for utility at this point in our lives with our kids, it's not a choice we make to save money. It doesn't save us any money. Lease payment on the Sedona is more than the payment was for our Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland.

$28,000 a year, we might be paying $28,000 a year each to send them to the first grade if we wind up sending them to private school (I don't want to do that, but it's a possibility).

Johnhav430

I'm just throwing out the notion of 18 yrs. rather than 14, since you said your child is 4.....just be careful. My ex friend sent her son to a school that was around 50k per year since the 7th grade (along the way he got a benefactor which brought it down to the high teens), he was supposed to get into Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc. as a result, and did not. Part of this is why we're no longer friends, our opinions on it, that's how seriously she took this college thing....just the way I was raised, I believe you can go to a good public school and have the same results, so their ice hockey program is better and they've sent several to the NHL, we just do a little Hanson brothers on them to equalize it....lol those prep schools use our rink anyway....it's all good in the hood

SW17LS

My kids are 2. What I said was I am 4 years away from having a second vehicle that I enjoy vs having a Minivan. That's not a function of cost, that's a function of needing a Minivan to haul our kids and their junk around. When they get to be 6 or so, no more strollers, no extra gear besides their clothes and stuff when we travel...the minivan will be replaced with some sort of SUV or crossover with 3 rows. You brought cost into it but cost has nothing to do with it at all, we don't have a Minivan to save cost...as it doesn't save cost the things are $50k loaded up. Could buy many nice SUVs and crossovers for the same money.

I agree about public school. We live in a place with great public schools, and I went to private school when I was little and then public school, and I preferred public school. What I have come to realize though is the value of these private schools isn't really the education it's the community and the contacts. Many of these schools if you contact an alumni sometime in life later on who is in a position to help you, they help you. Help you get jobs, get loans, so on and so forth. That's the value I've seen from friends of mine who went to them.

Allen K

iTrader: (4)

I like how bit's stealth edit disrupted the whole thread

I feel bad that every thread that you post in seems to devolve into you having to defend your financial choices too. Not everyone is spending all their disposable income on lease and car payments people

Johnhav430

hahahahaha sorry you added a 1 to the 4 LOL.....I was thinking 14 and 4 y.o.....

Yep all true....unfortunately through my ex friend I saw she was vicariously living through her son, as she didn't get into an Ivy League school herself. This is how fragile friendship is--she was with me as a 3rd wheel when I got engaged! She stated by text that Boston College only accepted 9% for the class of 2019. I said impossible, it was always around 30%, and they have a much lower yield rate than other top tier schools...I could have seen 25% on a bad year, but she insisted upon 9% and that's why her son didn't get in. End of friendship. lol Text messages. I stick with my story, despite the time spent, the number of years, not a true friend if it ends like that.

SW17LS

Me too lol

Yep, like clockwork.

It's just two different ways of looking at the world. Some people see any spending above which they feel is a minimum as a huge assault on their future savings, and those of us who don't just don't, and there's no middle ground there. To people with that savings mindset this spending looks reckless and out of control, to somebody like me who knows my spending on cars doesn't hurt my family financially and I have a different set of goals, that frugality seems cheap and silly.

What frustrates me is when we're all car folks and trying to have a discussion about cars and our choices for buying cars and somebody comes in and starts trying to be our father and tells us to "think of your future" blah blah blah. It's a car enthusiast forum, not a financial strategy forum. Do people post on classic guitar enthusiast forums where some guy is getting ready to buy a $20,000 guitar he loves "well, have you thought about how buying this guitar now will keep your kids from going to college?" How about boat forums? How about travel enthusiast forums like my wife posts on. Somebody plans a $10,000 trip, where is the person posting "are you sure financially you should spend that money vs finding your IRA?"

It's more than a little bit absurd IMO. We're all adults and we're here to talk about cars, if somebody asks "do you think it's smart for me to do this for these reasons" then that's a different story. But the "frugal" folks here interject themselves everywhere it seems, and it does curtail some of the enjoyment about discussing the forums subject IMHO. It's almost like this "frugality" of buying used cars and driving them forever and doing without to save everything you can has become a sort of religion with Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey as the gods. "Has anybody discussed with you or Lord Dave Ramsey and why leases are fleeces?" LOL

situman

Yea I tried to get out of my 2015 GS lease early and I was upside down by $9k. Its ridiculous how much this car depreciates.

SW17LS

Yeah, the GS is rough. I was upside down $8k when I traded for the LS, but the deal on the LS was so good that it made sense. Saved $2,000 in taxes by trading, bringing the gap to $6k. I've watched the deals since then and had I waited until the end of the GS lease and turned it in best lease I could have done at the time on an LS was about $100 a month more than I'm paying dispute the negative equity. Really low MF on the LS plus a good rebate when I got it that I knew was atypical on the LS. They have good rebates but the MFs on the LS usually aren't very good. MF on the LS was like .0004.

Right now they are also very good BTW, .0005 and $1k lease cash on the LS, but at the time my GS lease ended the MF was like .0014 which has a huge impact on the payment.

Johnhav430

Is that in fun, like an inside joke on this thread, or it's totally allowed on Club Lexus? my opinion is you don't do that. I had mentioned the President's name on one sub forum and a mod totally changed the sentence that I wrote--didn't think that was cool, but hey, I'm a newbie....that's like checking someone else's voicemail and then renewing it (there is security typically built in to let the subscriber know), not done, not cool, but what do I know?

SC300Es

This reminds me of my brother in law when we told him they should get a minivan since they have three toddlers. They flat out refused to talk about it when my wife brought up the subject.