Thousands of people look for for an online auto loan calculator daily, according to search engines like Google. It is not surprising, of course, given how important cars are in most people’s daily lives. However the most important aspect of buying a car is not something that any calculator can help with.

An auto loan calculator is part of a whole suite of widgets available on the internet that will compute just about anything that can be quantified, from caloric intake to currency exchange rates, but there’s no programming genius possible that will have the ability to determine the most important consideration of all involving car ownership. Not that calculators are difficult to program; creating such software have been a standard textbook exercise for many computer programming course for years and years.

No, the most important factor of all just isn’t quantifiable.

It is you.

While an auto loan calculator can crunch the numbers, it cannot figure out why you’re purchasing a car – or a particular kind of car, at a particular time, from a particular place, under a particular set of conditions (and so forth and so on). But this is the most important aspect of car purchasing: you.

Beyond your income, personal credit rating, and current level of debt – all put together – looms the much larger, more important matter of your own motivations. Do you really need a car?

Is public transportation truly non-existent? Would it truly be much too much inconvenience to handle?

Will it be worth it for you to still be paying years and even, in all likelihood, decades from now for a car, an automobile with which you might not even be satisfied any longer?

Most people will not think about these things. But it is really crucial to realize that taking out a loan is going into debt. A calculator is only able to show you some numbers. You still need to make the choice a good one.

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