u/Outside-Storm-7754

The financial stuff

First, let me preface this by saying I'm not gonna take the typical 'just buy a 13 year old Corolla' responses. The specific car I want is a Honda Civic Si; a brand new manual car I intend to daily drive.

I'm also not some bloke who just spends his money without a second thought; I'm currently 25 and have been maxing out and investing into my own TFSA and RSP since I was 20; first month of every year, my biggest priority is to max those 2 accounts out. The money I'm pooling for this car is extra money I've painstakingly been saving after my yearly deposits into my retirement savings.

My gross income is 36k yearly and I'm still with my parents. I'm not in any rush to move out - in my social circle its normal for us to still be with our rents until 30; and as I've said before, I've been more than diligent managing my TFSA and RSP.

Ideally I would've loved to buy the whole car in cash, but there are some caveats...

The car stuff

The Civic SI's in my area have an all-in price (excluding tax and BS fees) of $40,149 at a 6.69% APR.

The Honda Civic SI 11th generation is in its 5th model year; in years past, Civic SI generations typically range between 4-5 model years before skipping a year and transitioning into the next generation. It's typically around this time of year that the next year's Civic is announced, yet there has been no announcements from Honda and even the dealers I've called say they've received no news of it yet. The reason why this is important is because we don't know if the next generation of SI's will go EV or Hybrid - I strongly prefer a gas SI.

Idea

Now if you couldn't tell, I'm not very knowledgeable on what these dealer numbers or percentages or added fees actually mean or can entail for me. I'm just going to explain what my (admittedly with limited understanding) idea and plan-of-attack is and you guys can help me identify blind-spots or alternatives to ensure I don't get screwed out of more money.

At the moment I have about $25k saved up (not including additional saved for repairs and insurance). I fear it might take a bit too long to secure a new 2026 model by buying the whole thing in cash, so I'm thinking why not save up until I can comfortably finance with $30k down and make sure I don't get screwed over for paying it off early.

A 75% downpayment like this should ensure my biweeklypayments are very miniscule and tolerable in the meantime while I make it my priority to build the funds to pay off the car as soon as I can - my thinking is this gives me a lot of leeway even if the salesperson wants to take on their BS added fees and aren't willing to bump the price down much further? (At this point the only thing that should make me walk away is if they somehow manage to bump my biweekly payments above $150 and there's some weird restriction preventing me from paying it off early).

What am I missing here? What could go wrong with this approach and how would you add to it?