A lot of good points on both sides about financing, leasing, paying-in-full, etc.

The biggest thing people forget is financing relative to income--if you're going to spend $20-25k financing a 5-10 year old car at ~2% interest, and you only make $30/40/50k a year, that's not the wisest financial decision. Especially factoring in depreciation, cost of maintenance, tires, insurance, etc.

Combine that with age factor--if you're in your early 20s, have relatively low income, and are not factoring in all those costs, you're setting yourself for failure long-term. How will you ever have enough to buy a house, fund your retirement accounts, or other long-term fiscal goals?

Reasons like those are why a few of us advocate having a healthy savings account (rainy day emergency fund), funding your tax-advantaged retirements accounts, then saving enough for the car + insurance + incidentals, and buying in cash.

On the flipside, I see a lot of guys in the military (or oil fields) on here who are up to their eyeballs in debt on cars/trucks they don't even get to drive while on deployment/work.

Just my $0.02. No interest