![]() Most people aren’t willing to go completely car-free (although if you are, good for you!).īesides the option of picking a home close to wherever your work happens to be, there may also be the option of picking a job that is close to your home in the town of your dreams. ![]() And this is ignoring the cost of insurance since I’ll assume you’d have a car even if you didn’t commute to work. So the ultimate cheap driving in a paid-off economy car still costs at least 17 cents per mile. Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents ![]() Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. That’s one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. ![]() Now, I will admit that it is possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. Setting aside $10k to keep the new car on the road, they will certainly enjoy their $115,000 of extra cash after ten short years, and if they combine this trick with a few of the other MMM classics, they’ll be able to move to historic old-town Longmont as EARLY RETIREES within ten years, instead of being broke wage slaves still commuting out of here every morning when the year 2021 rolls around. The alternative I would have recommended to this couple, if they had asked my opinion, would be to make sure their house is within biking distance of both jobs, immediately sell both borrowed cars and replace them with a single ten-year-old manual transmission hatchback, and finally, let the good times roll. And they probably drive around quite a bit in expensive financed cars, mostly as part of a self-imposed commute. You’ll note that most 30-year-old couples today, about 10 years into adulthood, don’t even have $125,000 in net worth. And that’s with a commute that most Americans claim is “not too bad”. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 days per week.Īfter 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel*. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. Let’s take a typical day’s drive for this self-destructive couple. They brushed off the potential commute, saying “Oh, 40 minutes, that’s not too bad.”īut this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor. By the end of it, these people were verbally working out the details of a potential move within just a few months.īecause these two full-time professional workers currently happen to live and work in “Broomfield”, a city that is about 19 miles and 40 minutes of high-traffic driving away from here. Then the discussion turned to the comparatively affordable housing, and the other benefits of living in my particular town. “Yeah”, said his wife, “We should really move here!”. “Wow, I didn’t even realize this area was here”, the guy said, “It’s beautiful and old and the trees are giant and all of the families hang out together outside as if it were still 1950!”. I was talking to a couple I had just met, and the topic turned to the beauty of the neighborhood. It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block’s Annual Street Party.
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