Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Real cost of car ownership

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You can calculate your real cost of car ownership. That is, the real cost just for you, that is. Not even the “to society” part.

Damn. We own our cars outright and that is still a lot of money we could save by not having them.

Comments

  1. Hmm. I think I calculated it wrong, because it’s not very much for us … about $150 a month more than our actual car payment, and we paid that off today. That’s for two people, two cars. It doesn’t seem overwhelmingly compelling to me.

    But then, we don’t drive. We spend about $20 a month on gas, given that we fill the tank about every other month on one car, and the other gets filled maybe every three or four months. I prepaid for five years of maintenance when we bought our car, even though that’s kind of a ripoff, just because I thought it would force me to take the car in for regular maintenance (which is easy to forget to do when you never drive). And it has, so I guess that’s a good thing.

    If we got rid of the second car — which we really should, we don’t need it — we’d save about $40 a month. That is just not a sufficiently exciting number to make me want to go through the trouble of selling a car, though.