Some months ago, the driver’s side window of our minivan stopped working and wouldn’t go down. Next, as it got warmer, we noticed that the air conditioning wasn’t able to do much to cool the air if was warmer than 75° outside. And there was that self-inflicted damage to the car’s front grill panel, which occurred years ago, that I had fixed (literally) with duct tape and coat-hanger wire.
Then, a few days ago, came the straw that broke the minivan’s back, so to speak: the annual safety inspection. The news wasn’t good. The car wouldn’t pass inspection with a non-functioning window. The inspection also showed that the headlight lenses were fogged up with road-wear scratches and needed restoration and one headlight had water inside the housing assembly. All in all, it looked as if the car needed at least several hundred dollars worth of work to make it pass inspection (the window, the headlights) and more hundreds of dollars to make it comfortable (the air conditioning) and hundreds more to make it less of an embarrassment to drive (the front end grill). It was a 2004 model, so it seemed reasonable to use it for a trade-in and buy another car.
Given that our time with this particular 2004 Honda Odyssey (“Redrock Pearl” a.k.a. “Burgundy” with “Ivory” interior, evidently) has come to an end, it seems a good time to get an idea what it cost.
We bought our 2004 Honda Odyssey for $16,551 on March 9, 2010. That price included a 2-year warranty (which was probably not worth what we paid for it). It was a remarkably dependable car. We had only two completely unexpected repair expenses, which totaled about $1,700. (Of course, we did have the usual driving and maintenance expenses for gasoline, oil, coolant, transmission fluid, brake jobs, a couple batteries, and a serpentine belt. But those would have been more-or-less the same regardless of which minivan we purchased.) Let’s say that the cost of the car itself was about $18,250.
We drove the car regularly from March 2010 to May 2017, over 86 months total.
Considering the cost of the car and the time we used it, we spent about $210 per month or about $7 per day. (Again: this is only the cost of the car itself plus major repairs, and not the total cost of driving, which would have to include operating expenses.) Incidentally, the odometer was showing about 60,000 miles when we bought it and had reached 180,000 when we traded it in, so the cost of the car for 120,000 miles of driving was about 15¢ per mile.
Looking back, I am pleased that we purchased a used — ahem, “pre-owned” — car. Had we purchased a new car in 2010, it would have cost about twice as much, meaning we would have spent about $400 each month on just the cost of the car itself. In other words, over the past 7 years, we’ve been able to save and invest roughly $15,000 (which is, coincidentally, approximately the cost of the car itself.)
This method of saving money — buying used cars, paying for them as fast as possible, keeping them for a long time — allows us to save and invest over $2,000 each and every year. This can easily amount to perhaps $100,000 ($2,000 per year for 50 years) worth of investments over a lifetime. An extra $2,000 per year, with compounded earnings, for 50 years might grow to $500,000 or more. A half-million dollars for driving used cars? Sounds good to me! Remember: In order to have at least $1,000,000 in your retirement account by the time you need it, you need to save several hundred dollars each month (more or less, depending on when you start investing and the returns you get on your retirement investments). The savings you get from buying used cars can go a long way towards the amount you need to save each month.
We were so happy with our old car — the Honda Odyssey — that we decided to get another one. And guess what? It’s the new car that we could have bought 7 years ago! Yep, we now own a 2010 Honda Odyssey that will probably be saving us money for the next 7 years.
