Well explained..as you say, the trick is to play them at their own game. The last car we paid for in full, as was the Plus 8.
But we bought the AMG 43 on a PCP in order to delay paying most of the cost for 3 years, and to get a good discount.
The car should have cost £53,583, we paid £50,683, so a discount of £3000 of 5.6%.
We part exchanged the diesel, and put a cash deposit in, so the amount borrowed was £28,280 at 5.5% over 36 months. The monthly payment is less than £200, so over 3 years we pay £7000.
The PCP can be paid off at any time with no penalty. The plan is to wait about 18 months, when we will have a tax free lump sum from one of our pension plans and use some of that.
Why not pay in full now? We would have to have paid a much higher monthly amount out of taxed, rather than untaxed income and the pension pots are growing at more than the interest rate on the borrowed money.
So it made sense to have the car now, on the lower rate vehicle excise duty and put off paying.
