Driving a car for more than just a few years- wise?

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Driving a car for more than just a few years- wise? Posted on September 15th

Reading this blog post and seeing the pictures of drivers posing with the vehicles that they’ve been driving for decades, now and then, made me realize that most of us probably think differently about cars. Most of us probably drive cars just for a few years or to a certain number of miles before we start thinking about getting rid of it. Why is that? Some of us justify this by saying, ‘Well the repairs are just not a wise investment!’

There’s some flawed logic for you. First of all a car is never an investment! It never appreciates over time unless it’s some kind of collectible vehicle and if it was, it’d be under wraps in a garage…not on the road.

Secondly, the amount of the repairs can easily be justified if you look at the number of months a new car payment would take to pay off the repair. A friend in finance made me look at it that way when I was facing a big repair bill on my trusty old Ford Explorer. He said well if you are paying x for the repair, how much would your likely next car payment be per month? Divide it out and then you’ll be ahead after that number of months. I’m glad I had that conversation with him because I basically paid off that ‘big repair’ last year and am now back with a car that is paid for and has been for a number of years.

I sure wish more people were like the folks in these pictures. Buying a vehicle you love and sticking with it through thick and think is an admirable quality. Another reason I love the below pictures is that they are beautiful cars from Europe and in picture #4 from the top is a white Alfa-Romeo sedan, which my dad had and was the car I learned to drive on.

Talk about a trip down memory lane.

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