I saw someone else post something similar except they bought new and I thought others might get some value seeing another example except of a used car and of how I tracked my car costs. For reference, I live in Los Angeles and I bought this car when I was just finishing up college. Links to pics below.
I bought a 2003 Honda Civic EX for $7000.0 02 10/21/2011 and eventually sold the car for $2000.00 in November of 2017. In that time I put 118,824 miles on the car. Looking at the first spreadsheet you'll see that the majority of the routine maintenance was done by Firestone and the majority of the major repairs were done by my mechanic Luis. Firestone diagnosed and Luis told me whether or not it actually needed to be fixed and generally fixed it with genuine parts and for a lower price. In Yellow you can see the work I did on my own, mostly air filters and lights. The total maintenance cost was $8,254.60. Over 6 years that's abut $1375.00 in maintenance a year, seems pretty low to me. I kept these records religiously and keeping them all made it much easier to sell a car with over 200K miles. People loved seeing the chart with all the colors.
From the very first day I had been using an app called Road Trip LE, every time I filled up I tracked the mileage, date, gallons, $/gallon and total$ spent. On the whole that added up to $13,265.42. Seems like a lot of money on Gas over the years but it coulda been a lot worse had I been getting 20 mpg. I no longer have access to the app that shows how many gallons but the MPG avg was about 31 which works out to 3833 gallons. I also spent $4,582.00 on insurance, this is without collision, I figured I never needed it on a car worth, at its peak, $7000.00
I spent $954.73 on tickets, over 6 years maybe that's not a lot, but maybe I need to slow down too. It would be interesting to know how much I would have saved in gas money and repairs if my average highway speed was closer to 65 and not 80. Alas we'll never know but I contend the time saved is definitely worth it. Especially when your spending over 20K miles a year sitting in that seat.
All in all, it seems like buying used was the way to go for my wallet, the total Cost was $33,524.50 over 6 years and 118,000 miles. This works out to TCO/Mile $0.28 or a per year cost of $5,587.41. Buying an 8 year old car I saved quite a bit on insurance, being a civic I got decent pretty good mileage and the reliability was great. The only times I was left stranded were related to the battery or that one time I saw water on the ground and thought my water pump had busted, I was wrong and drove it another year before it went bad.
When I look at the previous link for the owner who bought new, we can see that his TCO was $0.39, and considering I drove my car an extra 10,000 miles and has 2 more years of depreciation on it I think it was a good deal. I certainly gave up some amenities but my wallet appreciated it.
Let me know your thoughts if you have any.
Submitted January 31, 2018 at 10:45AM by lanaishot http://ift.tt/2Gwn2ca
