Owning a car makes life incredibly easy. You have the freedom to drive wherever you want, whenever you want, you can obviously take passengers with you on your travel, and depending on what sort of car you own, you can also carry a lot of cargo in the boot.
It’s so much better than relying on public transport or lifts off other people, and with the huge range of choice from car dealers such as Pinetreecarsuperstore.co.uk, you can be sure to find a car within your budget that meets your motoring requirements.
If you don’t already own a car, but you want to buy one, the important question that you have to ask yourself is, can you afford to buy and maintain one? Here is some helpful advice to help you determine whether you can or not.
Paying for the purchase of your car
When you buy a car, you have the choice of either buying it with cash or financing it with a lease.
Paying cash for your car is considerably cheaper because you don’t have to pay for any finances charges such as interest, arrangement fees and settlement fees, but if you can’t afford to do this then you will have to work out whether you could afford any monthly finance payments.
Ongoing budget
The most important factor to consider is your budget; not just the budget for spending on buying the actual car, but for ongoing maintenance costs as well as the various costs you need to pay for in order to legally drive the car on public roads.
Here are the types of costs you will need to pay for on an ongoing basis:
Insurance – each car is assigned a ‘group’ from 1 to 50 (1 being the cheapest) which insurance companies use in order to help them calculate how much they want to charge you for your car insurance. Generally, smaller cars and those that are mass-produced are cheaper to insure than exotic imports;
Car tax – also known as road tax or officially known as “VED” (vehicle excise duty), most motorists need to pay tax on an annual or bi-annual basis. The exceptions are cars in lower tax brackets (typically electric cars, high-efficiency diesel or hybrid cars, vehicles built before 1st January 1973, and disabled badge holders);
Fuel – this one is pretty important, because, without it, you aren’t going anywhere! Cars with bigger engines tend to be more thirsty, whereas smaller engines or diesels are more fuel-efficient;
Maintenance – servicing, ad-hoc repairs, MOTs.
Before you decide upon a particular make and model, you should get some insurance quotes to determine what sort of insurance premium you are likely to have to pay for it, and you should also find out how much it will cost to tax it.
The other costs (fuel and maintenance) will depend on the condition of the car you buy, and how often you intend on driving it.
If you don’t plan on driving the car very often, you might find that it is cheaper to simply hire a car as and when you need to, rather than buying one.