I’m not going to beat around the bush; with two jobs, I make a pretty good living. However, I drive an uncomfortable 1993 Honda Civic base model, which lacks all the things you likely like about your car. When it comes to salary to car value ratio, I’d think I rank up there pretty high, and I’m proud of that.

Why? The quick answer is I hardly drive anywhere. Justifying a car payment with only 1000 miles driven each year is hard to do.

The longer answer? It’s just so damned cheap to rent a car. Back when I sold the S2000 (April 2008), I said I’d rent cars regularly since I was saving a bunch on car payments. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, but that’s more because we don’t travel far, and our cars do just fine for what we do (arguable, but that’s beside the point). I just rented my first car for a day trip this weekend. It is comfortable, runs perfectly, is clean, large, has a nice audio system, and it was only $35 for the day (edit: came out to $22 for some reason). What is a car payment? $300? $400 per MONTH!? I sold the S2000 nearly two years ago. I think my payment was ~$350/mo. Math time!

$350 (monthly payment) * 22 (months) = $7700.
$7700 (cost to own car for past two years) – $35 (cost to rent a car a single time [we really need to go on more day-trips) = $7665.

I saved $7665 by not owning a car. Sure, that car payment isn’t all lost since depreciation isn’t 100%, but you get the idea.

Erin thought it was silly for us to rent a car for such a “short” trip (she drives round-trip to Haymarket [65 miles] every day, we’re going out to Markham, but made a neat little loop to incorporate some other stops to make it ~3 hours of nice driving). I think car payments are silly.

Rather than look at my day costing ‘x’ plus the cost of renting the car, look at how much cheaper every other day is for me. Big picture here…

Of course this all only works if you can get away with hardly driving, which I can.

Note: I have been shopping around for cars recently. I know it’s dumb, but I’m a “car guy;” life’s tough without something to put a smile on my face. I likely won’t pull the trigger unless I find something perfect (2008 or 2009 Mazdaspeed3 GT in white) locally for a great price OR I may get the Civic back to street-able shape (long process) and like it again.

Note #2: I found it funny that I hardly consider having the Civic “owning a car” after rereading this post. I’m so over that thing.