So is it in a taxable brokerage, Roth IRA brokerage, traditional IRA brokerage? What is the tax status of the account. You have not answered that, and that is the most critical piece of information.

Being an index fund isn't a consideration for tax and penalty. What type of account do you have it in? That's what matters.

Do the next percent over. If staying at one job and it's the only plan you contribute to, your payroll should stop you at the max automatically

You are behind traditional guidelines. By age 30, Fidelity's rule of thumb is 1x annual salary. You should be targeting 15% gross income to retirement with the ideal goal to max out. With no debt, 15% should be easy.

No. It's not worth considering. The point of my rhetorical question is that if it was so easy, everyone would do it. Of course it's easy to look back and see the low and high points but in the moment is the hard part.

Professionals can't do this with success. What makes you think you can?

Fidelity has a teen account. Check that out. Use this opportunity to teach fund investing. I personally would not let them make any single stock picks at all. It's a good practice to learn and a fairly small amount of money invested early can turn to millions if done early enough.

Any option you have results in paying off the loan. Whether that is by trade, private party sale, or payoff. Given the market trend, you probably won't get what was paid for it.

Your interest calculation. It's just wrong. The 6.94 rate is per year. On a monthly basis you have around .55% of the load balance added to the remaining principal to find the interest accrued.

You end up paying that much in dealer markup (pure profit over MSRP), add on packages, service contracts, plus fees as you mention. You get to this point by not knowing what was being signed and being sold a bunch of things they probably didn't need.

You don't really have a special situation, so I don't see what you want besides the info in the wiki/sidebar. What kind of things are you wanting to know? Your information request is very generic and vague.

Know your numbers before going.

Only negotiate on the actual price of the car. Never, ever base your negotiation budget on a monthly payment.

Get a pre approval for financing before going.

There is probably other things people can add too.

The rates update every May 1 and Nov 1 based on inflation. It's only better than anything in the short run. Won't be long before treasuries pay better and don't come with the penalties.

They don't offer near 10% anymore. It's now mid 6% and expected to decline.

No. It's just an asset.

Is the car worth 100s of thousands in retirement? Where is your retirment allocation? You don't need us to tell you this is an incredibly stupid idea. What car could be so special that made you wait a really long time for at only 27?

If you want to early retire, you need to be targeting 20-25% gross income savings rate, or more, for retirement purposes. The 1x salary at 30 is a traditional retirement plan marker.

If you want to increase savings for a primary home or other large expense, that's fine to do.

What's not fine to do is justify it because the market is down or for alternate investments. The market being down is the best time to actually increase contributions if you can.

No/low fuel expense for commuting.

Always eating at home, so way less eating out, for me at least.

You need to just take the hit once, take out what you can and pay bills that way.

Take out 500$ cash even if it's an overdraft, pay the 30 on that, then pay 5 100$ bills and cost is 530$. If you pay essentially 130 per bill, now that's 650 you are paying. You must stop paying each bill on its own fee. Get a side job doing door dash just to get you to safely above.

Are you taking cash out and taking 1 fee or having each payment have it's own fee?

Step 1 is making a budget with eliminating all possible extra expenses and minimizing everything else you can.

Car loans and mortgages are very different. One has basically the rules the bank wants to use and the other has strict government guidelines to follow.

Only do pre-approval when you are serious about actually buying. They are only good for about 90 days anyway.

Yes, a pre-approval cares about money you have today. That's the literal point of a pre-approval. If you don't have funds today, you won't be approved, so starting it now is pointless.

The used car market is flipping drastically in the last few months. KBB gives retail prices, you never trade a car for retail prices. Negative equity only has one way out, pay it off. Doesn't matter if you pay extra now or wait until you get a refund. It's all pretty much the same anyway in the end.

Well, if it sounds too good to be true.....it most likely is.

Again, it's not on them to spell out every single bullet point. You signed it. You agreed to it. Period. There was no intererest. There was no interest provided you paid by a certain date. They didn't lie. You didn't understand the difference. Again, that's ultimately on you, not them.

It's not their job to list every single detail and fine print option. That's on you to read and fully understand before you sign. Go get your docs out and actually read them this time. I bet it worked exactly like it said it would.

People have never made more than 50k per year retire multi millionaires. Do you think they have big deposits or money to make investing worth it? Time has this magical power to multiply returns, doubling the amount every 7-10 years on average.

Good investing is boring investing. All of your "investing" things you have been are trading or gambling. Investing and trading are not the same thing.

Also nothing wrong with pursuing a side hustle after everything is taken care of. The biggest mistake you could make would be not putting money into a broad market fund and literally not looking at it for 30 years other than when you make your annual contributions.