Way back in 2010 I bought my very first brand new car, the fantastically well priced, comfortable and surprisingly reliable Hyundai Getz.
Of course, buying a car with zero kilometers off of the showroom floor is far more expensive than buying it out of the classifieds, which means that needless to say, I had the thing financed through MFC, Nedbank’s car financing vehicle.
It was a six year bond and up until late this year a tidy little sum of just over R2,000 was neatly lifted out of my account each and every month. However with the arrival of Emily into our family this year, it quickly became apparent that the sooner the car got paid off the better, because that R2,000 a month is of far more use to me being accessible for all those unforeseen monthly expenses!
So I started accelerating my repayments, and all the extra little bits of money I could find lying around was plowed into extra MFC payments, resulting in a nice letter arriving at the end of September announcing that the car was now paid off and properly mine – at long last! (More or less. There was a bit of a mix up on where to courier the documents to – guys, Somerset Mall and Somerset West branches are completely different places!)
In the end I’ve learned some valuable lessons though. First, don’t buy a new car off the showroom floor unless you really can’t find a good second hand deal elsewhere – it’s really, really expensive. Two, try and avoid long term bond deals like the plague. Compound interest (as I already knew – hey, I do have a Bachelors of Business Science degree you know) really is a horrible bastard (and don’t think I’m not looking at you my massive home loan!). Three, if you do have a loan, try and pay it off as quickly as possible – saves you a hell of a lot of money in the long run!
So now my Getz is paid for and mine, four years down the line. That said, in exactly 2,000 kilometers, my service plan runs out.
Sigh.
