When I bought my truck in sig I signed up for a little over 60G of payments.
My monthly payment was $1140.76 for 60 months.
I hated the payment but it was a case of simple math for me.
I was making good money in those days. It varied, but call it an average of about 100K a year. Lots of expenses, the truck, fuel, insurance, supplies, tools and equipment etc as I traveled all over BC and Alberta building sunrooms, but still netting decent money.
Do some math and I was grossing about $1923 a week, averaged out.
But here is the kicker:
Prior to that, in 2003, i was driving a 97 GM dually with that piece of garbage 5.7 diesel. I was losing on average about 3 days of work a month due to mechanical failures and shop time of the truck.
I calculated the loss of wages vs a new truck payment and the choice was clear. I bought a new 2003 truck at $1172. a month for 60 months.
Sadly that LB7 Duramax turned out to be a lemon and it too let me down a lot. About 93,000 K on it I got fed up and drove onto a car lot in Calgary and drove away with my current truck.
Now i was in business. No breakdowns, it never left me stranded on the side of the road until 373,000K later in August of 2018 when I overheated it and blew a head gasket.
12 years of trouble free driving, with the exception of an injector pump at 300,000K. That didn't leave me stranded, and I had time to plan the repair. I did put one glow plug in it during that time, that was all.
So in my case I was able to justify my heavy payments because it saved me a lot more money than the cost of a new truck. And I lost zero work time for 12 years running, saving me a pile of money over 12 years.
