What car can I get for $300 a month?
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What does $300 have to cover?
A payment quote and an ownership budget sound identical. They are two different questions.
Type any amount; there are no $100 slider steps.
The honest answer
No financed car yet
Running costs alone are about $676 a month, $376 more than this entire budget before a loan begins.
If $300 a month is the loan payment alone, the most car it backs is about $12,600, which comes to $300 a month in loan payments at 9.64% APR over 60 months (7.29% to 11.99% for your credit). But the loan payment is not the cost of having the car: insurance, fuel, maintenance and licensing come on top.
Treat $300 a month as everything the car costs and the honest answer in Toronto is no car at all. Running costs alone, insurance, fuel, maintenance and licensing, come to about $676 a month before a dollar is financed, which is more than the whole budget. A cheaper city, an older driver or a car bought outright changes that arithmetic, and the calculator will show you by how much.
Change a figure and this answers for your own car rather than the example above. Nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere.
If it is the whole budget
No car at all
running costs alone are about $676 a month
If it is the loan payment alone
$12,600
before tax; insurance, fuel and the rest come on top
The gap between those answers
$12,600
the part of the cost the payment quote leaves out
| Budget | All-in price | Loan payment | Loan-only price |
|---|---|---|---|
| $200 a month | no car at all | $200 | $8,400 |
| $300 a month | no car at all | $300 | $12,600 |
| $400 a month | no car at all | $400 | $16,800 |
Is $300 a month too much for a car payment?
That depends on one number this page does not know: your income. So here is the same $300, treated as the all-in monthly cost, against four salaries. The share is measured on before-tax income because that is what the verdict bands are set on; the money itself leaves your take-home, and each income is one person's, not a household's.
$40,000 a year: Easy
On $40,000 a year, $300 a month all-in is 9.0% of before-tax income. See what $40,000 actually supports.
$60,000 a year: Easy
On $60,000 a year, $300 a month all-in is 6.0% of before-tax income. See what $60,000 actually supports.
$80,000 a year: Easy
On $80,000 a year, $300 a month all-in is 4.5% of before-tax income. See what $80,000 actually supports.
$100,000 a year: Easy
On $100,000 a year, $300 a month all-in is 3.6% of before-tax income. See what $100,000 actually supports.
If $300 is your loan payment alone, your true all-in share is higher than any line above, because insurance, fuel and maintenance are not in it yet.
The same question, asked backwards
This page turns a payment into a price. The other half of the insight turns a price into an income: the salary at which a car of about $20,000 still rates as manageable. Income needed for a $20,000 car.
People also ask
What car can I get for $300 a month?
If $300 is the loan payment alone: about $12,600 of car, before tax, on a used vehicle over 60 months at the rate a good credit score carries. If $300 has to cover everything, running a car in Toronto costs about $8,112 a year before financing, so the honest all-in answer at this budget is no car at all. A cheaper city or a car bought outright changes that.
Is that the loan payment or the whole cost?
This page shows both, because people mean both. A dealer quotes the loan payment; your bank account pays the whole cost. Insurance, fuel, maintenance and licensing do not stop existing because the ad left them out, which is why the same $300 buys a very different car depending on which question you are really asking.
My payment is quoted bi-weekly. Does this page still apply?
Convert it first: multiply the bi-weekly amount by 26 and divide by 12, because bi-weekly is 26 payments a year, not 24 and not twice a month. A bi-weekly quote always sounds like about half a monthly one and is actually more. The calculator takes bi-weekly directly, so you can skip the arithmetic and enter the payment as quoted.
Run it as your own scenario
This page holds everything still except the budget: a used vehicle over 60 months, Toronto insurance, nothing down, good credit. Your scenario is not that scenario. The calculator opens with the car this budget backs already in it.
Open this in the calculatorUnder 25? The insurance line is doing most of the pushing at this budget. What G2 and new drivers actually pay explains why, and what helps.