Last October I bought a Corolla from a local Mazda dealership. The price tag was a little more than $17k, and I figured I could handle that.
I have a distinct memory of sitting with the salesman and him saying I needed to put a down payment on the car, so I put down $4.5k. Later on with the manager guy I paid another thousand (can’t remember what the reason was tho).
I left pretty happy, and I’m actually really happy with the car, but my first payment I noticed I owed $24k for the car. I get that there’s a lot of extra fees, registration costs, etc, but the fuck how did it go from 17 to 24 thousand AFTER I PAID 5.5 THOUSAND?
I feel like either I don’t understand dealerships, or I was robbed (maybe that’s actually what a dealership does). Gonna go and ask some questions tomorrow, see if someone “forgot” to process my down payment
TLDR: $17k car - $5.5k down = $24k total cost?