this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
613 points (93.6% liked)

Fuck Cars

9805 readers
171 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I just did an autotrader search and in my (very unaffordable) area, there were lots of serviceable cars under 10k. If you live in a place with a garage you can even buy a used EV and eliminate whole categories of maintenance costs.

The whole point is to buy something that requires smaller or no monthly payments, and then bank the savings and eventually buy something better. "A couple of years" can do the trick in some cases.

[–] irotsoma@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

$10k for a serviceable minivan or other vehicle that would work as a primary car for parents? What about the problem that most households need two incomes and very few can commute together due to different schedules and locations and adding even an extra hour or two of daycare in order to share a car is often as much as a second car payment.

As I said, $25k is probably plenty for a small sedan for a single person who only uses it for commuting and grocery shopping, but not likely for people with multiple children that a small sedan or coupe would not work, households with multiple income earners, households with teenagers who also need a car to work, or all the other scenarios where a single, small, used sedan that's just good enough for a short daily commute is reasonable.

$550 in car payments for a houshold is not unreasonable for the vast majority of households and usually doesn't equate to frivolous spending.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

$550 in car payments for a houshold is not unreasonable for the vast majority of households and usually doesn’t equate to frivolous spending.

I don't think I necessarily disagree with this but the reality is that when you buy new you're always paying more. When you buy new on credit, you're paying even more than that.

So, like I said in the beginning, I don't 100% agree with this dude about even this whole post. But it is cheaper to buy used and even pay for the maintenance. It's a point almost not worth making because of how obviously correct it is.