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☕ DrinkCoffeeAndProfit
Smart money moves before breakfast
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Inspiration Quote for the Day
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”
Seneca
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The Morning Ritual
The Most Expensive Thing in Your Garage Never Sends You a Bill.
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Go stand in the garage for a minute. Most households can name what the car payment is, roughly what the insurance runs, and what a tank costs this week. Almost none of us can name the biggest number out there.
It does not arrive in the mail. No statement ever shows it. The number is quietly happening to the vehicle while it sits still in the dark.
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Together With Doroni
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☕ Doroni
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He Spent Years Building Military Drones. Then He Built a Flying Car.
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In One Sip
► The motor club has run the same ownership study since 1950. Its `2025` edition puts the average cost of a new vehicle at `$11,577` a year.
► The largest single line is depreciation, at `$4,334` a year. That is the value walking out of the vehicle whether you drive it or not.
► Insurance runs `$1,694` a year in the study. Financing adds `$1,131`. Neither is the big one.
► The figures assume five years and `75,000` miles on a vehicle with an average sticker of `$38,938`.
► The quiet part. At `10,000` miles a year the cost works out to `$1.00` a mile. At `20,000` miles it is `66` cents. Drive less and every mile gets more expensive, because the big costs do not care how far you go.
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Why It Matters for Your Money
Read that first number as a monthly figure and it changes shape. `$11,577` a year is about -`$965` a month, per vehicle, before a single repair goes wrong.
Of that, -`$4,334` is depreciation. It is the largest expense in the whole exercise, and it is the only one that never generates a piece of paper. So it gets left out of household budgets almost every time.
Now the useful direction. A household that sheds a second vehicle it barely uses frees up something close to +`$11,577` a year. That is not a saving on gas. That is the whole cost line disappearing.
And the per mile math cuts the other way too. A car sitting in the drive most of the week is the most expensive kind of car to own.
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The Wealth Angle
Here is where it gets interesting. Depreciation is not a fee somebody charges you. It is the market repricing a thing you already bought, in public, every single day.
We are trained to watch the prices of things we might buy and to ignore the prices of things we already own. The garage is the clearest example in the house, but it is not the only one.
Two things can be true. A vehicle that gets you to work is doing a job, and paying for that job is not a mistake. A second one that moves twice a month is paying rent on a parking space with your money.
I price everything I own the same way. Not by what I paid, and not by what I hope it is worth. By what it costs me to keep for another year.
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☕ Key Insight:
A cost with no invoice is still a cost. The expenses that quietly do the most damage to a household are the ones you never have to sit down and pay.
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Coffee Break Move
Pull two pieces of paper: the insurance declarations page and the registration. Add the yearly insurance, the registration, and twelve loan payments. Then look up your vehicle's trade-in value and subtract what it was worth a year ago. That last figure is the one you are never told.
If you are comfortable: divide the total by the miles you actually drove last year. The answer, in dollars per mile, tells you more about that vehicle than any sticker ever did.
If you are stretched: an older paid-off car has already taken its worst depreciation. Keeping it another year is usually the cheapest move available, even with a repair bill in it.
The garage is quiet this morning. It is still charging you.
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