All right. To my US friends, once again: The monthly cost of anything does not matter. What matters is the total cost.
$46000, auto loans are usually 6 years. Used to be 5 but banks get more interest by stretching it to 6 and can offer a more attractive monthly payment.
You can’t even see the BS anymore, can you?
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, but I could have been clearer.
. . . A more attractive monthly payment (more attractive to those who didn’t bother to do the math to realize they’re paying an extra $3000 over the life of the loan)
I probably read too fast :)
I left Virginia as my vehicle registration renewal date was approaching. They were charging me $1,000 a year just to have my car registered in their state! So I moved to a state where I can register this same vehicle for only $200 a year with no inspections, and as a bonus, no state income taxes ♥️
Oh no! Anyway….
Despite Richmond’s free bus service, ample bike lanes and ever-improving pedestrian infrastructure, most locals still rely on cars, making rising ownership costs hard to avoid.
Americans really are addicted to cars and oil…
napkin math time. some of what follows i looked up but will not cite because i am on my phone and find text editing on this infernal contraption to be torment. some of it is pure conjecture because multitasking is also torment. when possible i will return and amend the numbers, but for now intend to favor cars whenever possible.
Richmond has 108,990 households. Let’s round that down to a nice even 100k. If the average household has 2 cars, that gives 200k cars.
Something like 30% of all cars carry a loan in the US. Let’s be nice and pretend everyone in richmond got a killer deal on financing their cars and the average payment is lower than it really is. We’ll go with the $525 average used car payment cited in the article.
60k*$525/mo=$31.5m/mo. Call it $30m and we get an eyewatering $360m/y, just in loan payments. this does not include insurance, fuel, and taxes, or paper costs like depreciation, or shared costs like infrastructure, or abstract costs like hours of their lives stuck in traffic, or externalities like healthcare spending caused by sedentary lifestyle and exposure to pollution.
Richmond, a city of 230k with a median annual income of about $65k, spends $360m every year on paying banks back for the privilege to incur all those other costs a real analysis would have factored in. Greater Richmond Transit Company’s approved budget for FY2027 is just over $100m.
I can very confidently assert that Richmond spends more than $3.60 on car loans for every $1.00 it spends on its entirely free transit system. Perhaps some of those households are genuinely better served by this expense, but I’d wager the vast majority of them are much poorer than they need to be, just because they reckon cars are a necessity.
