Blessed by the Potato

I was out helping a friend car shop today when I ran into a fairly sleazy dealer tactic. The guy was actually a pretty good salesman: enthusiastic, knew the car, personable… but then he started hammering out numbers (using the “adjust to a certain monthly budget” method) too fast to follow. He was trying to beat a quote she got from Mazda, which has 0% financing right now, and he said that Kia didn’t (though when we checked the website afterwards, they did). He was going to discount the car to make up for the financing, and was hammering away on the calculator. He turned the calculator around, and said he could do $162. We were like wow, that’s less than half of Mazda’s quote. “Oh, no, that’s bi-weekly, so multiply by 2 to get $324 per month. Pretty good, right?”

Pretty sleazy, actually. There are 26 bi-weekly periods in a year, but only 24 twice-a-month periods. So to get a monthly payment from a bi-weekly one, you have to multiply by 26 and divide by 12, which is 2.167, not just 2X. So he was actually presenting a $351/mo payment, which was more than the Mazda.