Money, Money, Money

A book arrived for me this morning. It dropped through the letter box just a couple of days after I ordered it - online of course. See, no car needed. Admittedly, I did not go to a small, independent bookshop (I would have had to have driven there as the nearest one is a good ten miles away) and as a result of my and other people’s buying habits these independent bookshops are going out of business (damn! Another thing to worry about!). Also, authors receive tuppence ha’penny when their books are sold through  places like Amazon where prices are slashed heavily. No such thing as a free lunch - or book.

Anyway, a package dropped through the letter box giving me the double thrill of opening first a  parcel and then a book, crisp, sleek and inviting. I feel a similar thrill when I pick up a hand of cards - what rich pickings are there, what ace of trumps to win the hand? No aces but the book How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, by Chris Balish. It promises tips on how to “save money, breathe easier, and get more mileage out of life”. We can but hope.

Chris is an American and the book talks about dollars and gas, but the principles are the same - money, environment, stress and so forth (I am sure I shall be telling you more about Chris as time goes on). My researches into the British market have not yielded much fruit yet. There has been the occasional article, a Newsnight journalist who agreed to give up his car for a year, and a number of websites but no British books yet. If I am wrong, let me know. I wonder, though, why this is. Is it that we are still so happy with our car culture despite the growing bills that giving one up appears eccentric, the territory of the dippy hippies, the counter culturalists. I don’t think I fit particularly well into these categories. (What? Having 11 cats is eccentric?)

Chris doesn’t seem to be eccentric either but he is certainly counter the car culture for reasons that were initially financial. He points out the hidden costs of cars, including depreciation. I said I reckoned that our car cost us about £4,000 a year, in part based on the amount per mile that the Inland Revenue allow me to put against tax, ie 40p a mile, an amount decided on long before fuel reached its current heady heights.  I expect the £4,000 is an underestimate. More than this, I hadn’t thought clearly about the fact that we bought the car for £2,700 14 months ago and now it is worth around £50 for scrap. That’s about £190 a month or £2,280 a year, meaning that the car has cost £6,280 in a year, give or take a few hundred pounds. And that doesn’t take into account car parking charges or the new tyres we bought not so long ago. There are various clever sums that you can do to work out your average cost per mile, but I won’t bore you with the details and you can look them up yourself if you wish (www.whatgas.com/car-finance/car-running-costs.html).

Of course, it might not have been that bad. If our old car had not been written off - by someone reversing in a car park and not seeing at least two of the cars parked there, ours and another poor innocent’s - it might well be going today and we would have spent a lot less. But you can’t foresee what someone will do (self included) and since we have had two cars written off in two years, both by people driving into the back of them, the odds seem stacked against us. 

So the long and the short of it is, having a car has cost us more than £6,000 in the last year. That’s one heck of a lot of money. So not having a car will, as Chris says, help us save money, though not as much as we would do if we weren’t planning to hire cars from time to time. Yesterday I worked out how it would help us‘breathe easier’. But will it really help us‘get more mileage out of life’? Well, so far I have been enjoying the walks to and from school so that it something. However, the sun has been shining recently and that makes everything better. Just wait until it’s pouring with rain and a wind is howling round my chilly head. Then I will be moaning.