In my internal debate over buying a new car, two expenses loom menacingly: an increase in my property tax, and an increase in my auto insurance. The increase in insurance will mainly come because I'll have to get collision/theft coverage. I dropped that coverage on my old car years ago, but I'd be nuts not to get this coverage on a new vehicle. I haven't priced this yet, but I know it's going to hurt.
In Connecticut, every town has a different mill rate. The mill rate (which is essentially a percent), together with the assessed value of your property, determines your yearly property tax - in this case, the tax on my car.
Last year my town assessed my car as being worth about $1000. (This reminds me, maybe I can get them to buy it from me? I don't think anyone else will give me $1000 for it at this point.) The associated property tax was about $30, practically nothing.
If I get a Yaris, I'll probably be paying around 15 times that amount - as much as $500 yearly. Which is just awful. The idea of that new expense makes me want to repair my old car and keep it limping along.
2 comments:
It's never cheaper to buy a new car than to repair an old one. It's a matter of safety features that you might want or just the lack of reliability that does the old car in.
"It's never cheaper to buy a new car than to repair an old one".
I can believe that this is generally true, although I'd like to see some hard statistics to support this. Do you know of any sites that discuss this topic?
The car talk guys used to sell a pamphlet that laid out a computation of how an older car eventually costs you more than a newer car (and estimated the cross over point - something like eight to ten years IIRC). But I don't see the pamphlet at their site anymore so maybe they decided their computations were inaccurate or no longer applied... too bad, I'd like to get these figures somewhere.
If it weren't for my growing concern over the safety of my tiny car in a world of SUVs, I probably would have decided to do the ~$2000 repair on my Geo Metro. I really love the car. Getting rid of it is gut-wrenching.
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