Ever since I moved to Madrid, I’ve never used a car to travel, indeed I don’t own a car at all. When I was back to Italy however, I used to own a car, and I was using it on a daily basis. That resulted in me spending a lot of money that I could have used for other things instead. Take a look at the data below and judge for yourself.
True costs of cars
According to this tool, the average american spends more than $600/month on cars. Here’s a cost breakdown, but I encourage you to enter your own data in the online calculator.
- Cost of the car itself: $3397/year.
- Taxes: $323/year.
- Insurance: $964/year.
- Maintenance: $652/year.
- Gas: $1598/year.
- Tickets: depends on you.
- Environment: can’t really calculate this.
- Other: $426/year.
If you didn’t own a car, you could do many things with those money. For example you could save them into a retirement account with 5% interests and have $1,000,000 in the bank by the time you retire. Or, you could buy a brand new ipad every month if you desire so.
Advantages of being car free
Apart from money and environment protection, there are many other advantages of being car free. For example if you don’t own a car it’s more likely that you’ll have to walk a lot and thus you may improve your health condition.
It’s also a lot less stressful to be car free, as you don’t have to constantly worry about finding a parking lot, paying for tickets, and making sure that everything is ok in your car before taking a long trip. I don’t even have to mention traffic right?
Disadvantages of being car free
Of course, there are also disadvantages of being car free. First, it’s not always possible to be car free everywhere, for reasons varying to the kind of work that you do to where you live.
Second, you have to rely on public transportation, unless you’re willing to invest on a bike and you don’t have to travel long distances. If you live in a city, this is seldom a problem, but if you live in the country and public transportation is not an option, a car may still be useful to you.
Should you go car free?
Going car free is a big decision for many, but its advantages are too big to be ignored. If you’re unsure wherever going car free is good for you or not, I encourage you to go car-free for just one month. Can you still go to work or wherever you want? Do you have difficulties running your errands? Can you adopt a different kind of lifestyle that supports your new car-free attitude? After 30 day you’ll be able to answer this question and decide wherever you want to keep your car or not.
What do you think? Have you ever thought about going car-free?