car free

Car Free: Living In America Without A Car

March 27, 2017 By Alexa Mason 24 Comments

It comes as a shock to most people I meet, but I don’t own a car. Three years ago I was thousands of dollars in debt and something had to give. I decided that it would be my car.

When I made the decision my friends and family thought that I was crazy. Truth be told, I even thought I was crazy. Nobody that lives in the suburbs lives without a car. If you think about it, there isn’t anything more un-American than not owning a car. Yet that was exactly what I planned to do.

When I made the decision to be car free, I wasn’t even sure if it would be possible to live without one, but there wasn’t really any other choice. It was either that or continue to drown in debt. Three years later, I can’t imagine life with a car. It was by far the best financial move that I could have made and it has resulted in be being debt free with a fully funded emergency fund today.

The decision to sell my car was not an easy one. I am a single mother with a four-year-old child. She was one when I made the decision. As mentioned, not having a car in the suburbs is a concept that most people can’t even imagine. The nearest grocery store and shopping center is about 5 miles from my house, so going there by bike is not what most people would consider convenient. Today, even though I would have no problem affording a car, I choose to transport myself by bike.

Just because I don’t have a car doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when I need one. On days that it rains, I have a number of kind friends that will allow me to carpool with them into work. If I need to buy a large amount of groceries that my bike can’t handle, I will either have a friend drive or call a taxi to get this accomplished. There are times when I have to take a taxi or occasionally even rent a car, but I still come out far ahead financially doing this than if I owned my own car.

There is no doubt that not having a car poses some problems, but overall they are small to what I gain in return. I realize that not everyone can go car free, but I believe that a lot more people can than think it is possible. Here are some of the reasons that I ditched my car and continue to not want one:

I have no car payment

One of the reasons I originally needed to get rid of my car was that the $300 a month car payment was something I couldn’t afford. Instead of paying for the car I could use that $300 to put toward more important things. Originally, that was to pay down the debt I had, but now that I’m debt free, that payment will help my little girl go to college and build a retirement fund for myself.

I don’t have to pay for car insurance

An added benefit beyond not having a car payment is not having to pay for car insurance twice a year. For me, That adds up to nearly $1000 that goes toward savings instead of out the door.

There isn’t any pain to my pocket book when gas prices increase

While everybody else is worried about the price of gas and the rising costs of operating their cars, I don’t think about it at all. Since I don’t have to purchase gas, it has very little effect on my lifestyle and I don’t need to figure out how to squeeze higher gas prices into my monthly budget like I used to.

I don’t have any car repair bills

Before I made my car free move, I was living paycheck to paycheck. When I was doing this, a breakdown was not a mere inconvenience, it was a financial disaster. I would all of a sudden have a several hundred dollar car bill that needed to be paid right away in order to get me back on the road, but not the money to pay for it. I no longer worry about unexpected car repair bills. My bike needs to get a tuneup from time to time and may get a flat tire on a rare occasion, but any repairs or upkeep is far less expensive than anything a car would cost.

I’m healthier

I didn’t think I was lazy when I had a car, but I now realize how wrong I was then. Being car free gets me off my lazy butt and outdoors much more often than if I had one. Riding a bike for transportation has made he much healthier than I would be if I owned a car.

I got rid of my gym membership

It only took a month after I bought my bike and sold my car for me to realize I no longer needed my gym membership. Biking allows me to get plenty of exercise — far more than I ever got from workouts at the gym — on my own and there’s no need to pay $30 a month.

I have a much healthier bank account

The final result is that I have much healthier savings than I would ever have if I still owned a car. In fact, I’m sure that I would still be in debt living paycheck to paycheck. It took what seemed like a radical move to get me out of my debt cycle, but from my current perspective it wasn’t a radical move at all. It was a common sense financial move that allowed me to establish the financial foundation I needed.

Do you have a story about saving money or earning money that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear about it.

Photo: Fernando de Sousa

Renting vs Owning A Car

January 18, 2011 By Jeffrey Strain 8 Comments

While most people are surprised to find out that I don’t have a cell phone, they are even more surprised when they also find out that I also don’t have a car. As with the cell phone, the reason I don’t have a car has nothing to do with lack of money. I can afford to buy a car and it would fit into my budget of spending less than I earn.

After deciding to travel 2 weeks each month this year, I decided that I would need a car for many of the trips I wanted to make. I knew that I would be driving a lot of miles during my trips, but wouldn’t have a real need for a car during the times I wasn’t traveling. I assumed the obvious frugal choice would be to buy a quality used car for about $5000 and drive it into the ground. Then I decided to run some numbers and was surprised to see that renting a car ended up making the most financial sense.

I knew it was possible to rent a car for under $20 a day including all fees which would come to about $300 a month or about $3600 for the year. While this is less than the $5000, I would not have a car at the end of the year. The value of the car would make both costs about even. With this in mind, the advantage went to buying the car because I would have it to use all the time instead of only two weeks a month.

I then began to think about other costs associated with owning a car. Registration, fees and taxes would be a couple of hundred dollars. The difference in insurance costs would be about $1000 a year more for owning a car (when renting, using my credit card covers collision, but I ended up taking out a non car owner liability insurance policy to make sure I was covered there). Car maintenance would be a few hundred dollars a year at a minimum, and that was assuming that nothing went wrong with the car. Taking all this into account, I figured the two options were about even: buying the car would be more expensive, but it would give me access to the car all the time.

There were two main reasons that I ended up opting to rent instead of buy. With the number of miles I would be driving, the chance of nothing going wrong with the car during the year would be a poor assumption. Costs could be a few hundred dollars or thousands and there was no way to predict this. With a rental car, if anything went wrong with the car, the rental car agency would take care of it so there was no chance of additional costs surprising me.

The other reason was that owning a car actually would limit what I wanted to do. I wanted to travel. If I owned a car, it would mean that all my travel would need to be within driving distance. If I wanted to fly someplace and rent a car, it would add even more to the cost of my transportation (since the car I owned would be sitting at home).

I could drive long distances, but this would mean spending less time exploring the areas I wanted to see while traveling. For example, I am currently traveling Arizona and New Mexico for 11 days. I flew to Tucson where I was able to rent a car for $193 including all fees. Had I owned a car, I would have had to drive to Tucson which would have taken 4 days (2 days there and 2 days back) and would have cost about the same (the airline ticket compared to the cost of gas for the car would have been about the same).

I’ve been surprised at the number of times I have found out that what I at first assumed was the obvious frugal choice ended up not being the most cost effective for my personal situation. It is the reason that I always run the numbers (making sure to include as many of the incidental costs that usually get forgotten) before making final a decision.

Here are more of my favorite articles for your reading pleasure:

Answer the call of black gold and buy an oil well
Raise your credit score by 200 points
Save an emergency fund with the 52 week savings challenge

Technologies I Live Without and Save Big

October 19, 2010 By M. Butler 19 Comments

My friends think that I am crazy because I shun many of the technologies that they assume are necessary in this day and age. The truth is that just because something may be a bit more convenient, it doesn’t make it a necessity. People can live with a lot less than they think and might be quite surprised to find that shedding many of the “essentials” they believed they could not live without is a lot easier than they imagined.

I know how difficult it is to believe this at first. I was one of those people until my finances forced me to make a decision on what was most important to me — and I chose food over gadgets. I wasn’t happy at having to make the choice, but I did find that after I made it, I liked my new, simpler and less costly (which meant a lot less stressful) life to my previous one. I ultimately chose not to go back even when I could.

Here are a few of the things that I live without that you probably consider a necessity, but I have been living without for at least a couple of years now.

Car: Last year I wrote about how I am car free and all the savings that it provides. I no longer need to be car free, but there still is not one in my driveway. All the reasons listed in the original article I wrote still apply, and I have found that although it would be nice on occasion to have one, that convenience doesn’t justify the cost which would now be my daughters college education.

Cell Phone: I know that cell phones can do a lot more tricks than they could when I did have mine, but I still haven’t found any of those tricks to be worth the price that it would cost. I must admit that I do miss having one when I’m supposed to meet friends in a place with which I am not too familiar, but I still don’t think that those rare occasions are worth the cost.

TV: I ended up getting rid of my TV through default rather than a planned withdrawal from the set. My old TV broke down and although I did plan on replacing it, there always seemed to be one reason or another that the replacement was delayed. After a few weeks, I realised that if I could go that long without a TV that there was really not a good reason that I needed to get a new one. I also found that I suddenly had a lot more time to do other things that I never seemed to have time to do before like read and do my hobbies.

iPod: This is the one gadget that I never owned in the first place. I do enjoy music to some degree, but it is not my life. I’ve never felt that the benefits of purchasing a digital device and a whole new digital music collection would be enough to counter the cost. This may be one area that I give in and give it a try in the future, but as of this moment, I don’t know how many years down the road that may be.

I’m not saying that everyone should get rid of the above mentioned items, but if you are anything like I once was, there are probably a lot of things in your life that you currently consider “essential” that really aren’t. You may also find that if you try giving some of these essentials up, you may actually find it beneficial not having them in your life. I know because although that was not what I had assumed when I needed to find ways to cut costs, it is something that I have found to be true now that I have done it.