Depreciation cost of ownership

jimjames

I prefer negative depreciation.


Last car was bought for £1500, sold for £2400 after 15 months.
Previous was bought for £700, sold for £1500 after a year.

forgotmyname

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Just to run some really basic numbers: 100k miles at 45mpg is 2222 gallons while 100k miles at 35mpg is 2857 gallons and 100k miles at 25mpg is 4000 gallons.

The average car buyer that pays for their own fuel generally wont cover 100,000 miles though. Especially not in the same car. So add in the cost of a change of car and your figures do not appear so good. Then drop the yearly mileage down to 8000 - 12,000. The depreciation will outweight the fuel savings.

reeac

jimjames wrote: »

I prefer negative depreciation.


Last car was bought for £1500, sold for £2400 after 15 months.
Previous was bought for £700, sold for £1500 after a year.

MGA bought as bits and restored. Cost £4000 in 1981-3. Now worth around £8000 so gained £4000 in 32 years or £10 per month.

bowlhead99

Classics held over long time periods are where things start to get funny when you're talking about depreciation per month (or lack of it).

If you inflate the £4000 to today's money by the RPI rates: you needed £13,811 in June 2015 to buy what £4000 would have bought you in June 1981. So, if your real-terms £14k drops to £8k, that's a cost rather than a "profit"

Obviously we all have our personal rates of inflation so some people don't put much faith in RPI. But a petrolhead knows the price of a tank of petrol. According to the AA historic price table it was £1.60 a gallon in 1981. Your £4000 would have bought 2500 gallons. That's 11,365 litres; call it £1.20 a litre and you need £13600+ to buy the 2500 gallons now...

DominicH

Mine's £75 a month. Cost about £9,500 in today's money, nine years ago. Now worth about £1,300.

PasturesNew

I can only remember the last two cars. One brand new, the other 4 years old.

Spent: £6k + £6k.
Trade-in: £1k
Cost to buy in total: £11k

Value of current car, complete guesstimate, £2k

Total spend: £9k

Covering years 2001 to 2015, 172 months.

Per month: £52.