Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn’t been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
I bought a new car in 2018 for 19K. Everyone I know flipped at me for ‘wasting money’ and not buying a 5yo+ 10K car that looked like shit with 100K miles.
It’s now worth 21K, after 50K miles.
I’m looking at trading it in for a 35K car in the next two years, and watching the value on that car never go down either.
If you expect that to continue happening you’re in for a surprise.
They definitely shouldn’t have flipped out at you about it, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Vehicles almost never appreciate in value; it just so happens that you accidentally timed the used car market perfectly.