cold, hard cash

The basics – the savings made by NOT having the car. As I work through the year I’ll tot up additional costs (car hire, cabs, trains etc) and see how that compares to what I would have paid had I been driving in my own vehicle.

Even putting depreciation to one side, there are significant sums that come out of the bank account even before the engine is turned on. Here are the ones I would have paid this year:

• £240 Car tax (vehicle excise duty)
• £250 Insurance (almost certain to go up this year)
• £187 Parking permit from Wandsworth Borough Council
• £300 Servicing/MOT – average of the past few years, but various warning lights on the dash implied a bigger bill this year
• £60 Green Flag (who were very good at getting us off the motorway)

The total here is £1,087, just for the privilege of being able to see my car parked in the street.

To be able to drive the thing, I need to get some petrol. I reckon I was getting 25-30mpg (depending on how much town or motorway driving I was doing). At £1.40 a litre (4.5 litres to a gallon), that works out to around 20-25p a mile; obviously more if petrol goes up.

We’ll use this as a basis for ‘offsetting’ so if I need to get a cab for five miles when I would have driven before, then I need to knock around £1.00 off the fare to see how much extra the journey has cost.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll be quids in by the end of the year, but let’s see.