A Beater is a Beater

Rethinking my "real cost" outlay for the BB: $3900 was the purchase price in May. 7.725% Sales tax is not collected on private party car sales in Washoe County Nevada, so that saved me $301.27, and the $300 I spent on window tint was not totally necessary to make the car road ready. I will count the fluid changes, window regulator, and DMV fees for an adjusted "basis" of $4600.00 ($3,900+$1,000 maintenance/DMV-$301 sales tax).

The rationale behind the adjustment is not to simply make me feel better about the purchase, though I did negotiate the price down from $4800, I did not thoroughly road test the car, nor did I run a Carfax before buying. All of this led to not discovering the non-working A/C, the low oil level at purchase, the condition of the front suspension, and the fact that the car had failed emission testing twice before being repaired and had been in an accident in Florida on Christmas eve in 1994...though the title to the car was clean in California and remains clean in Nevada.

OK, the adjusted basis DOES make me feel somewhat better about the car, and I hope to learn from it so that if next spring comes round and I cannot upgrade to a better-than-beater car, I will at least have a stronger inspection and purchase method in place.

At 35 miles per workday and somewhat less each weekend day, I'm looking at about 1,000 miles per month and another 10,000 miles on top of the 121k on the car now. Two more oil changes between now and the end of May, 2011 at $35 per change at Preferred Auto, barring any unforeseen breakdowns, will bring my final basis to $4670 at that point. Making the wild assumption that I can sell the thing for $2500 then, my total cost of ownership, not including gasoline, will be about $2170 over the course of twelve months, or $180.83 per month, $5.95 per day, or $0.17 per mile assuming a total of 13,000 miles driven.

Admittedly, this is being selective in what I count as driving expenses, so they should be qualified as "beater driving expenses" that likely will not apply to normal cars. AAA says that a medium sized sedan costs $0.173 cents per mile to operate, not including insurance or DMV fees, though this figure DOES include gasoline, which they reckon to be about $0.12 per mile. SO, I am an idiot, obviously, because I'm REALLY paying close to $0.30 per mile to run this beater!

In the next installment of Beater Blog, I will refine these calculations so as to provide a more accurate and thorough analysis of actual operating expenses of the Beautiful Beater.