Completely off-topic, but still relevant about buying cars

[Brian Garrett]

So my wife and I are the type that like to buy brand-new cars and then drive them for 10 or more years.  Ten years ago we bought an Acura TL with the thought of keeping it for 10 years and then re-evaluate at that time.  So I started to look at new cars.  I was leaning toward the Toyota Highlander as a possible replacement.  Nice car certainly.  But when I sat down and started running the numbers, the overall cost was going to be around $500 to $600/mo if I took the total cost of the car (we pay cash), along with fuel, insurance and maintenance.  

As we were leaning towards that option I stopped and asked myself - would we spend $500 to $600/mo if we used Lyft?  When looking that the Lyft app, there's always a car within 5 to 10 minutes of our house (and we live in the suburbs), we live right across the street from a grocery shopping center (not even major streets to cross), my wife works from home (and is a bit of a homebody), we typically run all of our weekend errand messages together, and I work about 15 minutes from the house.  If there was ever an emergency, better dial 911 over driving anyway.  If we need a bigger car for a long trip we can always rent one with the cash we weren't spending on a new car.  

To me (and my wife) it started making absolutely no sense to buy a car.  She was immediately on board and was ready to sell the TL.  We sold the TL this past week, took the cash from the sale and put it into a new bank account that we are going to be using for all property investing purposes.

It's not exactly "property investing" - however I think it's still a better/smarter use of our money.  :)