On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.
Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.
One of my cars is terrible (2000 Mazda). I waste, but not much. I'm repairing it quite often. A single $500 repair is one (very cheap) car payment on a new one. I'm way ahead keeping the old beast going. I can replace the whole car 3 to 6 times over before I get to the price of a new one.
What I do pay with is inconvenience and my time to drag it into the shop. That's value too, but purely financial costs I'm winning.
Overall in the end, I'm going to pickup a cheap (15K), affordable car to replace it with. Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra range of vehicles. At those prices, the financial gain is outweighed by convenience for me. So we all "have a price". At least until more of those Tesla Model 3's have been out a while, I'll spend more than I normally would on one of those beauties. :)
A lot of people say it's not worth fixing a car that's worth less than the repair. I disagree, it's money in vs money out. Same concept as calories in calories out. Obviously, the comment you quoted would be correct when you start dealing with outliers/extremes. There's money pits, then there's real money pits.
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...
I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...
The problem is that an unreliable car is far more likely to cause sudden "emergency" events that require a lot of liquid money upfront and if you don't have that money this might cause a chain reaction so you lose your job and then your home.