Car or no car how much will it contribute to debt?

MikeCross

An article in the Daily Telegraph of 19/12/2005 said "Car rental clubs to boom.
Membership of clubs in which people rent cars by the hour will soar over the next 12 months. Backed by the Government, the schemes are a way of cutting congestion."

This referred to a website: http://www.mystreetcar.co.uk/

which states: "The self-service pay-as-you-go car.

"Streetcar's new Volkswagen Golfs are available on demand 24/7 for rent by the hour, day, week or month.

"Book any car in the fleet online or by phone, and then use your Streetcar smartcard to pick up and return the car. It costs as little as £4.95 per hour or £35 per 24 hours. "

I don't know very much about this, but it may repay a few minutes, especially if you live near the centre of a large town, to find out about it.

Johnocyprus

Cars need not cost a lot. Our second car is a 1996 1 litre Nissan Micra which i've had for 6 years now. It's ridiculously cheap to own and a hoot to drive! Nissans of that age were brilliantly engineered and if you get a good one will cost little to run. The biggest costs of motoring are finance and depreciation, the Nissan now depreciates by about £100 a year! Get rid of that expensive newer car , pay off any finance and pay cash for a cheapie. Search the private ads and if you're not good with cars DO layout £100 ish for a RAC/AA vehicle inspection.

black-saturn

fanlandcheese wrote:

If you have acar and make journeys on a regular basis up and down th country why not try http://www.liftshare.org/. Find someone who wants to go where you want to and get them to help pay for your fuel.

This is such a brilliant idea and good for the environment too.

mekprice

i dont have the luxury of being able to give up my car i need for work. I own a landrover and cost of running can be very high. however the tax is cheaper than my last car a renault scenic. We are thinking of changing our second car to something like a yaris that does about 69 to the gallon. Does any one know of a car that is better that that for fuel economy

anniecave

My rules for cheaper motoring:

I would never buy & take out a loan or finance to pay for a car - if you can't afford to buy it, use public transport until you can - even at £70 a month for a bus&rail pass (Birmingham prices), it's still loads cheaper than owning & running a car
Never buy new, always wait until it's at least 3 years old (unless your company pays for it of course!). Cars depreciate SO much in the first year!
Always shop around for insurance, there was a £600 difference between my highest and lowest quotes last year
Reduce your car journeys if possible (I currently car share with my work colleague, i do one week, she does the other) - great!
Any others suggestions?

Savvy_Sue

Mentalminis wrote:

I would always recommend that everyone takes a CBT or a full bike licence as it makes you a better car driver also, you learn to look further ahead and plan your driving skills better.

I would agree with this: even if you CAN ride a moped or motorbike without further training, you are far more vulnerable on one than you are in a steel box with four wheels under you!

Likewise if you go for an unpowered bicycle, there may be training for that in your area and it's time well spent - the training itself may be free, but even if it's not it's money well spent if it keeps you safe.

But back to the original question: for those without children, the decision may be influenced largely by work and leisure activities, and the availability of public transport. NOT having a car will probably improve your health, as others have noted.

I certainly think a lot of families COULD cope with a single car rather than two, but because they've always had two, they don't see how. Yes, certain choices have to be made, but if money's a big issue then it's worth a long hard look at use of the car. And let's face it, plenty of people just don't drive at all, and even more go through stages when they can't drive, and generally survive! Without a car, you need to plan ahead a little more, because doing things on impulse can become a lot more difficult.

We used to have just one car, and we negotiated which days DH would walk to work (40 minutes), and which days I'd like the car to do things with the kids. Then he was given a company car (in the days when it was a tax break!) so we got used to having two cars. Then he downsized, lost the car, and we managed. Then someone in the family gave us an old car, and for a few months we ran two. But we realised we didn't really need two cars: it made some things more convenient, but the benefits didn't really outweigh the costs. So we went back to one car.

We do have easy access to public transport, although it's far from reliable for getting home in the evenings. And our kids are now old enough to walk and bus to their various activities if we can't ferry them around, which we do less and less often. We work fairly close to each other, which I realise helps a lot, so sometimes we end up ferrying each other around: DH will drop me at work, then go to a meeting or to deliver something, then bring the car back to me so I can get home or pick one of the kids up. We've ONCE had a crisis where one of the boys had an accident at school and DH had the car but couldn't get him, but that's what taxis are for!

However, if it's clear you do need to keep your car, it IS worth looking at what kind of car you're driving to see if you can reduce your costs. We were driving an old Saab until earlier this year. It was a lovely car to drive, very comfortable, but every time anything went wrong it usually required at least two trips to the garage to get it sorted, and cost at least £200. And it was going wrong more and more often.

We've now got a new Toyota Yaris on finance: yes I know we shouldn't have done but that's irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make. I was a bit worried about whether we could really afford the finance, until I sorted out the service history on the old car while DH drove us over to pick up the new one. Our repair bills alone for the previous 12 months were going to cover the finance COMFORTABLY.

And that's not all: our insurance went down SIGNIFICANTLY. Our petrol consumption has doubled (44.5 mpg after a month of stop-start commuting) - I keep wondering why the visa bill is so low! And we have NO repair bills.

Even if we hadn't bought a new car, I know we could have got a much more economical car. I just didn't realise how MUCH we could save! I wish we'd downsized a lot sooner! But not being car people - it's a box on four wheels used to get people and things from A to B rather than a status symbol! - it took us a long time to decide "yes we will change the car" and even longer to decide what we wanted.

And a good website for all things car: Honest John!

JCL

Worth shopping around. I regularly go to Edinburgh. Train costs £15.60 return but if you book through https://www.megabus.com or https://www.citylink.co.uk (same service but prices can differ between the two sites) you can usually get £1 each way so a saving of £13.60 a day!

Even with the annual train pass it would work out at £10 a day so its a significant saving. Yes, it takes a bit longer but well worth it in my opinion. Those clogging up the road with their cars making the same journey will certainly be spending more than £2 a day on fuel etc.

juliaw

Great if you can give up your car. Just be sure that you won't need a car again, for example, to take up a better job or if you have a baby. If you stop paying insurance you will have to start again building up a no-claims discount. If you let your old car go (particularly if you have looked after it well) you will have to buy somebody else's reject.

Not having a car these days is only viable if you live in a big city.

skintchick

Interesting to note that many who advocate not having a car then talk about being given lifts to the station, etc.

What if, like me, there is no-one to give you lifts?

I vote to have a car!

Mine costs me about £320 a month for petrol, insurance, MOT, tax and servicing, plus the loan I am paying off, which is a small price to pay for being able to go where I want when I want.

When I worked in London, my train ticket cost me £241 a month, and I can.t get to Tesco on the train...

bj-sailaway

Why haven't those funny electric two wheeled platform type bikes taken off here?!! All the rage in America, even if they do all look really funny. Don't know what they are called.