I'm getting 13.7 mpg. I keep thinking about buying a car but I'm not sure I want any more debt than I have to with the way things are going.
You can buy an econobox with great mileage and have a car payment plus full coverage insurance payment or keep your paid off death truck that will do anything to include running over an econobox and pay the same for the gas. Remember an econobox still uses gas plus a monthly payment plus full coverage insurance on a new car. Yeah yeah you can buy used blah blah blah thing is you don't know what can of worms is under that used hood.
100% correct. If your truck is paid off, buying a gay ass Camry or something would be a bad idea. Well, unless it’s a $4,000 2009 Camry.
While that may seem like straight forward logic, you may want to actually run the calculations for your scenario, especially at 13.7 mpg
How much you drive will greatly affect your calculation.
You may be very surprised to find it is the same cost or cheaper to have a nice new vehicle.
Here is an example from my end.
I drive about 25,000 miles a year for my commute.
I had a fully paid for Honda Element I was driving that only got 20mpg no matter what I did driving wise.
Also being older and used, it did need regular maintenance and I seemed to go through brake pads every 2 to 3 years and such.
Now I did keep full coverage insurance on it because with all the crazy around here and all the illegal aliens driving junk, I've gotten good value for my full coverage insurance.
But putting 10 gallons in the tank twice a week can get expensive.
So I sold it and got a $30k fully optioned out Honda Accord Hybrid Touring.
Which I then only had to put about 9 gallons of gas in the tank once a week.
Fuel economy ranging from 50mpg to 40mpg average depending on time of year and driving, with overall coming in at about 44 over the total usage of the vehicle.
In just about 5 years I put about 100k on the vehicle, so around 2272 gallons of gasoline
I also had no need for new brake pads (still had 80% left at 100k also needed had 2 sets of tyres and pretty cheap standard maintenance.
The Honda Element would have taken 5000 gallons of gasoline, would have been 3 sets of tyres and at least 1 + most way through a second set of brake pads and higher maintenance costs due to the age and mileage.
Let's say we use $4 for the price of gas just since right now I doubt anywhere in the country is cheaper than that.
The new vehicle used 2728 less gallons of gasoline for $11,000 less fuel costs.
I wound up trading in the Honda for something else, and got $17k value back for it so the fuel savings alone essentially would have paid for the cost of ownership for that time and had I pushed it out to the 150k to 200k range then it would have been essentially fully paid for by the fuel savings.
So what it comes down to is that I was able to drive a nice new comfortable vehicle for essentially the same total amount as having kept the older vehicle.
Everybody's situation is different but it might be worth running the numbers as you may be surprised.
New cars are a bit more expensive right now, but they have increased in price a lot less than what used cars have, so it's not a bad time to sell a used car if you have a new car ready to be picked up.
In my case I ran a big spreadsheet calculating the total cost of ownership for my vehicles for awhile and got a pretty good idea of what everything cost to run.
Now I have a plug in hybrid and do my commute on electricity, that is a much more complex set of calculations and you have to also factor in how much government money you can get into the total cost and such. I expect my new vehicle will have a much higher cost of ownership because it's in a different class, but it replaces 2 vehicles, so that adds to the calculations as well.
