As kindly as I can put this - if you can't do your own research sufficient to answer those questions (especially the second, which is extraordinarily subjective and for which you have provided no baseline for your skillset with regard to repair), then you're going to have a bad time.

The catch is that they're either heavily damaged, massively in arrears on taxes, or that this is a marketing ploy, or some combination thereof.

> would be less than financing

Well, at the end of 3 years, you would own a financed car.

At the end of 3 years, you turn your lease back in.

Leases are a great way to be spending money perpetually. And lest anyone say something about "unreliability" - the average age of cars on American roads is 12 years. You're fine keeping what you've got.

> should I do to be financially stable?

Find out something that is some combination of (A) Difficult / requires skill, (B) Unpleasant / undesirable, and (C) Necessary

"Diving for treasure" would fulfill A and B, and scooping dog shit would be B and C, but you really gotta tag all 3 to make the big bucks.

That usually means things like plumbing, tile setting, and other skilled vocational work.

> which is roughly equal to the payments I am currently making.

Gahhh... I die a little inside when I read this. Yeah, it's equal to the payments you're currently making, but how many months of current payments remain vs. the sixty months on the newly issued loan?

Whether you carry collision or comprehensive is a measure of your own risk tolerance, risky behavior, and capacity to replace. There's no formula for it. You can pencil it out. As an example, if you have a car worth 5k and a 1000 deductible, you'll get 4000 in value out of your insurance should you total your own car. Over 4 years, that comes out to $80/month. So if you feel you are unlikely to total your car in the next 4 years and your insurance is $80/month for collision, you're better off dropping it. This is a moving target, though - how many cars have you totaled? How many more and how soon do you think you'll total them? Nobody really knows except you, and even then you don't really know that well.

As far as liability limits, that really depends on what you're likely to hit. I carry high limits on mine because I live in a neighborhood where G-Wagens and Teslas are rampant.

I've never filed an auto or home insurance claim in my life, though. Insurance should cover catastrophes, IMO, and anything short of that I expect to come out of my own pocket.

> Car payment including insurance would come out to be $900 a month.

No. Like, I don't want you to feel bad, but this is an incredibly bad idea and you should feel slightly bad for even having considered it.

At that income, you're in barebones Yaris territory.

> 'm almost certain beyond a doubt that they legally can't force you to use any financing from them

And what would lead you to believe this?

Dealers can definitely mandate that they use their own financing, as long as the financing does not fall afoul of any kind of discrimination (IE, credit has to be extended in a way that is not discriminatory) or usury laws in the state and municipality in which they're operating.

Nah. You can run the math, but I doubt it's going to make more than a $10 a month difference.

You'd run the math two ways:

1. Finance the car. Keep 15k in a brokerage account. Every month, reduce the amount in the account by the amount due for the car note. At the end of the loan maturity, whatever's left in the brokerage is your "arbitrage."

2. Pay cash for the car with money removed from your brokerage. Then, take the money that would have gone to the car payment (the same dollar amount) and put it in a brokerage account. Increase the account value by whatever the expected rate of return is.

The difference between 2 and 1 is the option cost for maintaining your liquidity (in the first example) / opportunity cost (second example).

I'm not sure how to put this politely, but there are hundreds of millions of people working in the US, all of whom bring their own skill and experience to the job.

If you want us to help you, help us by telling us what you mean by "pay well" and "pays decent enough to buy a house" and what exactly you're good at.

> entitled to

Well, gotta tell us where you're at.

In most places you're not entitled to anything. Most companies will do something like one week of severance per year of service.

> I drive less than 2k a year and 90% of those miles are going 70mph or over.

Then... drive what ya got. You're going to have time-based depreciation like nobody's business.

> Would you suggest just taking on the $400-600 monthly payment of a new vehicle or stick with what I have?

At that, you'd be paying on the order of $3-4 a mile, just because the fixed costs (insurance, registration, time-based depreciation) are gigantic in comparison to the miles driven.

Were I in your shoes, I'd buy a used Leaf or something similar if you don't like the Hyundai. I can't think of any good reason to buy a new car and sink hundreds a month into something that only will get driven a couple hundred miles.

They're well known among upper crust Northeasterners who want to send their kids to ivy league schools.

That is not "well known" in ant meaningful sense. Exeter enrolls 1000 kids. So over 20 years there have been roughly 5k graduates, or about - out or a population of 400 million in the US - about .00125% of thr population. Or if you prefer it this way, assuming Exeter graduates are evenly distributed throughout the USA, there are 5 in the entire state of Wyoming. To the best of my knowledge - and I'm around OPs income - I have never dated, worked with, or worked for a graduate of Exeter.

A few quick hits.

1, you can't just say HCOL and name drop specific schools and assume we know what you mean. I'm guessing this is the US, but boarding schools are simply not a thing in the part of rhe US I live in.

2. You also did not indicate your expectations with respect to these schools here either. 210k is (checks math) what 4 years of private school would cost and is about 4x what I spent getting my BS and MBA.

There's no right answer here. You'll get responses like "India" or "Costa Rica" which have expat populations - but also have to be okay with spending 4k on plane tickets whenever you want to visit the US for a grandkids' event. And never do things like see a Broadway show if that's your jam.

"Best" is going to be a value assessment based on a host of factors like access to your children, access to specific recreation, and so on.

So what do you value?

This is not a percentage based query, and no good answers are available devoid of context (like your earnings, your choices of schools, their prices, and your expectations).

Prenup, sheltering assets with her family, using pre nuptial assets to make the higher risk investments that grow in value, etc.

When there are 7 figures at stake, usually the attorneys get a chunk.

> googled

Don't google. Call (and I mean that, call). States and banks have different requirements for branding the title and authorizing the purchase, including presentation of a purchase order or submission of a VIN.

Jointly liable means jointly liable.

Landlord is not legally obligated to care where the money comes from.

Either (A) You pay the whole amount of rent, (B) Your roomie doesn't kick in his share, or (C) You get a notice to pay-or-quit followed by your state's evictions process in the absence of a sublet/relet.

Numbers and location are necessary here.

Line out what you earn, where it's going, and so on. Be detailed.

Poor credit? Long commute?

Sounds like a candidate for our perennial favorite, the beige Corolla.

Money is fungible. So it doesn't start/stop anywhere. What your aggregate income between the two sources is is the sole determining factor.

> At a 5.5% interest rate - why is 15% of my monthly payment going to interest? Why shouldn't it be... 5.5%?

Because that's not how that works. 5.5% means that you pay 5.5% of your current balance in interest. A basic example:

You have a $12,000 car payment. Every month, you owe interest. 5.5% of $12,000 is $660. This is an annualized number, so dividing it by 12 gets us the monthly number. Which is $55.

Now, your monthly payment might be $100, of which $55 is interest. It might be $200, of which $55 is interest. That doesn't matter. The 5.5% is 5.5% of the balance; it's not a proportion of the payment.

> What makes the most sense given the state of prices and the economy?

Fix your current car.

Keep a week's worth of supplies at home at all times.

418kwh is less than a kilowatt of load around the clock. Pretty common. A kilowatt is equivalent to a small space heater.