PSA for all those people out there like me that don't trade trucks for a brand new one every couple years.
Keep up with maintenance on your vehicles! Besides the obvious reasons of keeping a vehicle road worthy and saving future costs due to poor maintenance habits. For poor folk like me, a well maintained, clean older vehicle that you know is usually worth more, intangibly, than paying sales tax and car payments out the nose every few years by trading up. I've noticed if I start letting small items slip, like a cracked windshield, brake problems,etc. I subconsciously start to treat the whole vehicle like it's a piece of shit. Those small items start piling up and I start lusting over new trucks because mine doesn't seem "nice" anymore. Well, I had to tell my dumb self, "keep the truck you have nice, don't give the state another 3 grand in sales tax just so you feel better driving around". I'm too lazy to look it up, but I believe research has been done on people driving the same vehicle with dirty vs clean windshields, and a person tends to drive more carefully with a clean vehicle.
Obviously there is different situations for everyone, but for myself, if I funnel the money I would spend on the interest and higher registration, sales tax, insurance, etc of an expensive truck into maintenance rather than an ego trip, I've usually came out farther ahead. Not to go all Dave Ramsey, but unless you're a collector, a vehicle will always be only a depreciating expense, so why not keep that cost as low as possible?
Throw all this out the window if you're using your truck to make money, like Tman says. For my business, I consider a nice looking recent model vehicle to make money, so the metrics are different. This diatribe was mainly about personally owned vehicles you use to get groceries in lol. Also, if you're at a place to pay cash money for new trucks, than knock yourself out and buy what you want. But please don't pay more interest and sales tax to "The Man" than necessary if you are on a budget.
