Have your heart set on a car to buy… but your wallet’s telling a different story?
It’s true, most collector car owners pay cash for their vehicles. After all, if this is truly our hobby (as most of us claim), one could argue that we should use disposable income to satisfy our dreams of classic car ownership. In fact, of the million or so cars insured by Hagerty, fewer than 3% have been purchased through loans.
If cash isn’t an option, however, there are opportunities available to finance classic cars–or even take loans against existing collections.
Why would you ever want to finance your car purchase? Here are a few good reasons:
Unless you’re a dealer, few people buy classic cars as investments because the returns can be rather unpredictable. Hagerty always recommends buying a car for enjoyment, and if it happens to gain in value while you own it, all the better. But it’s fair to say that collector cars, by definition, are past the bottom of the depreciation curve. Many of us buy them because we can have fun, try something new, live out a dream and so on, but we’re still likely able to sell the car without much of a loss, if any. Meanwhile, nearly everyone finances their new cars and that’s a depreciating asset, so they pay interest on top of depreciation. So really, which car makes more sense to finance?
What about a car or a collection you already own? Not many of us are fortunate enough to own multi-million dollar collections. In some cases, these cars have been owned for many years and were bought for relatively modest sums. (Oh, to have bought that Mercedes-Benz 300SL out of the back of Road and Track back in 1972… but we digress.)
It’s possible you have a tremendous amount of wealth tied up in vehicles you don’t want to sell, yet you have a need for cash. You may want to expand your collection, restore the car, or just need money for other purposes entirely. Of course, there are some obvious downsides to selling the car:
While still a young market, there are banks offering collateralized loans on large collections. These are typically available for collections over $1 million in value, but options do exist for less valuable vehicles as well.
Here are a few of the loan providers that can help you buy a car.
If you’re interested in taking out a collateralized loan on an existing collection of $500,000 or more, please contact us at financialservices@hagerty.com.
Originally seen on Hagerty.
