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I’m 100% with you on buying old used cars and paying cash. And that’s how my wife and I bought cars for years . Our budget puts X amount of dollars each month into a car saving account to repair or replace our cars, kind of like making a car payment to ourselves. It built up enough recently that I quit putting that “car payment” into cash and instead invested it into my Roth IRA. (Tracking how much of my Roth IRA should be counted as for the cars).

That is, until my wife retired and I quasi-retired and we started driving a lot more. Now that we put 25K to 27K miles per year on just one of our 2 cars, the gas savings is worth getting a new, or at least a new-ish, car to get a high mpg. And with the interest rate at a fixed 2.85% (a few years ago), I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to leave the cash growing in my Roth IRA tax free and making payments from it.

In our case, the new car is an EV to really save on gas. But I wouldn’t get one unless you really do your homework on settling up charging at home (which is where the gas savings is), how much power rates are and the miles per kWh you get from your EV, the number of miles you drive, the availability of fast chargers along the road trips you usually take (assuming you’d rather take the new EV on most trips instead of the older gas car/truck since the new car is more comfortable), if you take a lot of trips up north in the winter (don’t call it “fast charging” if it’s bitter cold), etc. So far our road trips have been fine for the EV and we didn’t opt to take our old gas pickup instead. But I’m sure the day is coming when at least one trip will demand we take the gas pickup (aside from the ones we already took the pickup because the trip involved pickup chores).

But again I’m with you on nothing but old used cars and paying cash except for the few niche situations that a high driving frequency demands looking into reducing gas expenses.