I’ve been thinking about buying a new jeep lately. I decided to put 60k in the 401k and throw a few hundred into my 2000 Sahara. Bought her new and she still runs strong and drives great.
finding this website helped me make the decision.
This is almost exactly what we did last year. While we were in Hawaii for spring break, they started closing everything for COVID (NBA, flights, etc) and when we finally got back I was really tempted to get a Power Wagon (I was already looking at them prior to leaving on break). Ram was discounting them heavily (>$15,000 off MSRP and >$5000 below retail!) and was even offering 0% interest for 72 months.
I don't buy new vehicles (usually get them ~1 year old) and I tend to keep them for a long time (10+ years), but the used-prices for Power Wagons are very similar to Jeeps, so there wasn't a significant savings to be had in buying used. I was also planning on paying cash, but financing at 0% was tempting since I could dump the $52k into our savings/investment accounts and pull some off monthly as needed.
Thankfully, I resisted temptation - we ended up skipping the Power Wagon purchase and maxed out our 401k, retirement and other investment and savings contributions. I was curious so I just logged into my account to check and see how well we did at the 1 year mark...
44% Rate of Return!
On $52k of investments, that's enough earnings to pay for my TJ, all the mods done so far (including the Hemi swap), all the mods I want to do, and then some - plus zero asset depreciation!