Zen and the art of motorcar ownership: how much are our car ownership costs, really ?
For some time now I have been looking at our family car and thinking! You see, we have one car, I don’t drive to work and John works from home. We live in a city with good public transport, and infrastructure. When we go to the city centre we use the bus; and we do our food shopping in the local shops (ha, I really love my shopping trolley and it annoys and embarrasses John so much; this is a bonus, of course).
What I am saying is that it is very rare for our car to leave the drive more than five – six times a month. As to longer journeys, we probably do these three-four times per year.
You already know, that cars rank very highly on my list of liabilities; actually they are pretty high on any list of liabilities. One rationale to keeping a car is that it allows a level of flexibility that people don’t have otherwise (this is if people live in the city and there is acceptable public transport) and peace of mind through the knowledge that one can get in and drive off if and when it is necessary or they simply feel like it.
Now, let’s do the maths and see what having flexibility and peace of mind is costing us at the moment. The calculation of car ownership costs is very simple monthly expenditure per month and doesn’t even account for depreciation. Pure spend on keeping our under-used car. Continue reading
Gaming and life: lessons from Cashflow
We all know that children learn best through games and play. We all suspect that there is no reason why this would change for grownups but at the same time most people forget how to play (and learn) sometime in their early to mid teens. Recently, John and I have come to realise that we have started taking life far too seriously and as Elbert Hubbard said ‘Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.’ Add to the equation our youngest son who still wants and needs to play with us and, of course, ought to be learning life skills, and our choice will hopefully make sense. Continue reading
The Money Principle Budgeting Tool: let’s play
I am sitting in bed with my leg up and it is 35C in Sofia. I am hot, bothered and not very patient – with myself and with the world. Under this circumstance what better way to pass time than to finish something I have been promising for some time now and have been working on for even longer.
In a previous post I argued that whilst budgets don’t do much for me (in fact budgets get me seriously vexed) I am a firm believer in budgeting. I also discussed three kinds of expenditure: constant, changeable and variable. Continue reading
Why I say ‘negative wealth’ and not ‘debt’?
Those amongst my readers who either ‘know me’ from elsewhere in the virtual world or are very perceptive (or both) have already noticed that I hardly ever – in fact, it is fair to say that I never – talk about ‘debt’. Except to strike it and substitute it for ‘negative wealth’. It is time to clarify why I talk about ‘negative wealth’ rather than about ‘debt’. I have come up with four main reasons for that. Here they are. Continue reading
