Originally Posted by
bragi
As I've read through this thread, it occurs to me that, yes, cars are a very bad financial choice for some people, but that there's a much greater injustice that exists in real estate. Cars make people poorer, but keeping a roof over one's head makes one poorer still. Why is it that people in some places are paying ridiculous rents or mortgages? Where I live, a one-bedroom basement apartment goes for well over $950/month; a modest, two-bedroom, 1700 sq ft house can cost well over half a million dollars, usually more like 750K. The cost of a car is tiny by comparison. Many small local businesses have gone belly-up in recent years, not so much because business was bad, but because they couldn't keep up with increased rents demanded by landlords. Who owns the real estate, and why are these people so greedy? Are they the same people who demand poverty-level wages for workers so that Wall Street investors can get a dollar more per share? It's definitely a good idea to shed the car if it's more than you can afford, but meanwhile there's an elephant in the room that everyone is working very hard to ignore. We need a new set of Wobblies.
To a degree I was pointing out much the same thing. But I wanted someone sles to respond to your observation. (I believe the ISWU that is Picketing Walmart and the airlines are something like the IWW used to be but I doubt they are the solution. But we tend to talk in circles.
We see people saying cars are too expensive for the average person and then post some inflated amount as what a non driving car free person would consider average. In this car 44k over 5 years. Then we ignore that people spend well oer that for five years of rent when they are trying to live where they will not have the expense of a car. but if the average person un the US is supposed to make 48,300.00 a year is 9k for a car excessive? Not saying either number is true. But the point is someone's eyes will get poped open by $8800 transportation costs but shrug off rent in their area that is well in excess of twice the cost of transportation. When I lived in Bellevue you could rent a house for way less than you you could in Seattle Oueeen Ann area. I don't know how it is now but we ended up buying in the Lake Wood area of Bellevue and drove to Seattle to work. Well I rode a motorcycle to work at the PI.