Owning a car - Vicious circle of debt - need advice

DeltaWing

I went through a similar thing about 10-12 years ago. I ended up buying a 250cc scooter (Piaggio X9) to commute from NW London into the City (along the A40). Later I did my full bike test and upgraded to a 600cc scooter for going down the M1 into London after I moved.

Scooters/mopeds are cheap to run and insure, but you should also think about what you're going to do in the winter - howling winds, pouring rain and cold temperatures are what you'll be up against. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, just making sure you've thought it through - I did it for five years and it was exactly the right thing for me at the time.

As for cars, at that sort of £300-£400 budget then you've got to think of them as disposable - buy one with a new MOT and run it for a year, if it's going to fail the next MOT then ditch it for another. Likewise if it needs fixing and it'd cost over £300 then you're better off binning it.

anniecave

I would have a look at realistically how much you are paying for the cars, how long are they lasting you, what you are paying on repairs/mot bills etc.

My Dad always recons to to buy a car at approx 3-4 years old then keep it until it dies, becomes unreliable or becomes too expensive to repair. Doing that, my spreadsheet says I spent an average on £1025.00 per year on the cost of the car and repairs, MOT, servicing and tax. That was on an S reg Fiesta I had for just over 5 years, so a reasonably small car.

Any options for buying a "decent" car always involve spending £000s so when the cost is spread over the life of the car, plus servicing/repairs/MOT/tax is added on then it's inevitably going to come out at that sort of amount.

If you're spending less than £1000 per year then I would continue to do what you're doing, but as the above posters have said, consider buying a car with lots of months to run on the MOT, then ditching it if the costs of getting it through the MOT is high, especially if you don't have access to cheap repairs.