A Question and More Points

Edited on 1/3/2013 to correct numbers.

Question posted by mike12verano on BuickForums.com, "could you give a few details? state of your car when you traded? miles etc. how much did you get on your trade. How much was the turbo? if you do not mind."

Without going into too much detail about my financial situation...

MSRP on the '13 Premium was $33,200. Due to the rarity of fully-equipped Premium's in this area right now, the dealer also had $2,125 ADM tacked on for a total of $35,325. This claimed to include paint sealer and all-weather mats, a bit of a joke.

I got my fully-equipped '12 Leather for $28,800.  I had it for 7 months (the first month which didn't include a payment) and only got $21,000 on trade.  My monthly payments were NOT $1,000 - you do the math, I carried some negative equity.

After all was said and done I got the '13 Premium for $31,000 -- this included a $500 Credit Union discount.  They also provided me an over-allowance on my base trade-in value to bring me within LTV lending guidelines for my financier (due to negative equity).

In the end, my monthly payments only went up $29 and of course renewed my finance term. No big deal.  All the additional features are more than worth $29/month to me.

This particular time I went with a Purchase deal and not a Lease. I am a huge fan of Leases and in a lot of cases they are more cost-effective than a Purchase, but when I ran the numbers this time the Lease was actually about $850 more costly over the same term and also would have required money down, whereas the Purchase order this time required $0 out of pocket.

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Few more things I've noticed:

• SRC button now longer takes you direct to Now Playing from wherever you are, this kind of annoys me. You now have to hit HOME then click Now Playing to get back to that. SRC actually *immediately* switches to the next source (AM/FM/XM, etc.) versus before I could swear it would first pop-up the menu, then switch.
• Maybe this is an Intellilink feature and not "new", but to me it is "new" because Intellilink wasn't available with Navigation last year. You can dial contacts from your phonebook *without* having to enter them into the car first. It will do intelligent matching based on your voice commands.
• This may also not be "new" (see above), but it is new to me. You can say, "Verbose Off" as a command and it will turn off the robot-lady's long-winded explanation of things when you're doing voice commands and will drop you straight into the *beep* to indicate it is time to talk.
• I reset my Average MPG counter and did some city driving yesterday, ended up at 18.3MPG. Not terrible for City (my Infiniti got 14ish), but a tad less than the advertised 20. Then again, this was me flooring it all the time.  Highway MPG's remains 25+ and since that constitutes roughly 70-80 percent of my driving, this is fine by me!