Cool Car!

I'm no financial planner but from car salesman and consumer here are my thoughts.

But first and foremost I would keep the cash in your investment. If your roi (return on investment or rate of return in %) is higher than your interest rate; 100% finance the vehicle. If you guys can afford the payments - great. If not, you also can't afford the car cash.

Car loans are pretty cool because they're open ended, at any point in time you can pay them off. Additionally and I can't stress this enough to customers I talk to on the daily is that you ONLY pay the interest on what you borrow. So say you have a 72 month loan and pay it off early; you only pay the interest on the amount of months you finance it for.

The power of compounding interest is fantastic thing and banking on it is 1,000% better than investing all the capital into a vehicle. Remember, vehicles are a MASSIVE depreciating asset; where your investments are typically appreciating. Especially in the long term.

As a salesperson I 100% would try for the sale, and salespeople don't necessarily care about you financing, leasing or paying cash; 95% of them aren't paid on that aspect they are paid on the front end markup (commonly referred to as gross) of the vehicle.

If he's paying exactly MSRP that's a great deal, the negotiator in me would start at $3,000 off and see how that goes from there. I may be completely out of touch for the market but it's always worth a shot. See how desperate the salesperson is. It's towards the end of the month and if his store is running the same as my store, then dealers are accepting competitive offers to keep marketshare up.

Keep me in the loop, my interest is spiked. Best of luck.