Don’t pay for 95% (2016)
5kids1condo.com
5kids1condo.com
> Friends visiting from out of town? I’ll pay for their hotel, so I can live in a smaller, cheaper, better located condo for the rest of the year.
Then friends won't visit, it's more of a hassle to schedule - however infrequent these visits are they'll be even less frequent.
> I have to schlep a bunch of kids far away? I’ll get a Modo minivan, a local car share, for a few hours. Let someone else maintain that gorgeous van.
You'll go fewer places and do fewer things if everytime you want to go somewhere you have to deal with getting a rideshare van.
> Need some outdoors time? Walk a couple blocks to a park. I’m not interested in mowing something I only use a couple hours a week.
No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently.
It's the same for the rest of it, there are good reasons to reduce some of these things but the reasons he gives dismiss the true value.
Even owning a car vs. rideshare, sure rideshare can work out to be cheaper (sometimes) but having every travel decision be a purchase decision is a lot of overhead and is a constant pressure not to go somewhere.
> Then friends won't visit, it's more of a hassle to schedule - however infrequent these visits are they'll be even less frequent.
I would MUCH rather stay in a nearby hotel (and have my guests stay in a hotel). I would feel less like I was imposing.
> You'll go fewer places and do fewer things if everytime you want to go somewhere you have to deal with getting a rideshare van.
I think there's likely some truth to that, but it also means I rearrange my life to plan for this better and also to make those outings more meaningful.
> No backyard cookouts, no sitting on the deck, you'll go to the park less frequently
The analogy I use is the gym: I can do workouts at home, but the mental routine I have for getting up and going to the gym means I actually go much more often. Similarly, if there was a nearby park I liked I'd use it much more frequently. I know I felt that way when I lived in the city vs. where I do now in the burbs (note - the burbs weren't my choice ;)
You must be well-off with well-off friends.
My friends would feel pretty bad if I were to pay for their hotel, and it is not an insignificant cost to many (especially since I'm living in the Bay Area).
Crashing on a spare couch? No problemo.
(Even if the economics of the spare couch work out in the favor of the hotel room. There is a utility in the spare couch beyond letting guests sleep on it, and that understanding takes away all the feelings of imposing, at least financially.)
However, all of that ignores the fundamental difference. You're not my guest when you're in a hotel. I can't wake you up for breakfast and make you coffee. We can't watch movies on the couch until either feels sleepy. And so on.
You can't rent the experience of sharing your home with someone if you don't have a home to share.
>You must be well-off with well-off friends.
As always, It Depends™. I have friends allergic to our pets, some have significant trouble sleeping on inflatable beds or couches, etc. Some have kids, so one couch / one bed won't cut it.
The only way it's reasonable for them to visit without having pretty major issues after a day or so is when we're all up for setting up a hotel + transportation (or similar)... which ends up meaning it's less often than some other friends.
I don't think extravagantly so, but I have worked in software for a couple decades and saved a lot.
But I think you're confusing the fundamental question here. Sure, when I was in my twenties I crashed at friends' places, and they at mine, all the time. But the article is specifically about the tradeoff of getting a smaller, cheaper, apartment, vs. getting a larger house in the suburbs with a spare guest room. The idea that it's usually a cheaper option to pay for the occasional hotel than to specifically purchase a larger house with rooms you rarely use. Obviously the "crash on my couch" is a different dynamic entirely.
Well then you are well-off. Most people can't swing 5 nights in a high CoL city without months and months of saving. Offering to pay for someone to stay in a hotel creates an extremely bad dynamic when the receiver couldn't easily afford that on their own.
>he idea that it's usually a cheaper option to pay for the occasional hotel than to specifically purchase a larger house with rooms you rarely use.
Yep, but the important distinction is that a hotel room isn't equivalent because it's a very easily measurable monetary burden on the host.
Couldn't agree more. In most cases I'd rather crash on a friend's couch than sleep on a comfier hotel bed if it means we can hang out until we pass out and not have to worry about getting me back to my hotel.
I'm curious, have you actually paid for friends to get a hotel room while they were visiting you? How did that work?
I'm trying to imagine how I'd even offer without making it awkward. I don't think I could avoid making an already uncomfortable wealth disparity even more cringe-worthy.
I think if I had to go that route I would at least rent an entire house on an AirBnb so I could stay with my friends - that way they're actually staying with me, rather than in a hotel in the same city.
I agree on the larger AirBnB option; I think that's a great way to keep everyone together and (both physically and emotionally) comfortable.
Also, it means that they can basically never propose to come visit you (as they'd put you in an uncomfortable situation of having to approve/deny the hotel expense) and would only come by when you initiate the idea of a visit.
I think it depends on your relationship with the friends. There are some friends where I'd be really sad if they didn't stay with me or I didn't stay with them. We cook and drink together, and stay up late watching movies or TV or just talking, to the point where we don't want to worry about having to get one of us to a hotel.
One of my oldest friends has a cat that I'm mildly allergic to, but I will always sleep on his couch when I visit, even though the cost of a hotel room is well within my budget, and a hotel bed would probably be more comfortable than the couch. It's just so much more fun to stay with my friend. I get that this isn't for everyone, but that's kinda the point: everyone has different tastes.
> The analogy I use is the gym: I can do workouts at home, but the mental routine I have for getting up and going to the gym means I actually go much more often.
I've tried at various times to do the gym thing, but I just can never motivate myself. I think it's the overhead that kills it for me, the need to get myself ready to go, transport myself there, get into a routine, change, get myself home, etc. What ends up working for me is going for a 3-5 mile run in my neighborhood. I just change my shirt and pants, throw on running shoes, and go outside. I'm glad you've found a routine that helps keep you on track, but, again: everyone's different.
But I think it as all just preferences on a spectrum.
But on the other hand, I own a lot of specialty tools that probably only see a few minutes of use per year each, if that. Not having them means waits, sometime long waits, or making something to make do.
Someone who chose to have kids probably prefers the car. What makes sense to own depends on what you do.
But of course you count the cost of the car and not just the gas, otherwise you're not actually comparing costs.
No.
Depreciation is something you consider if you intend to resell the vehicle. It's independent of wear and tear. It's a financial concept, not an engineering/mechanical concept. Jeep Wranglers, for example, hold a better value compared to the average even if they have higher mileage and age, especially if its in a mountainous local market.
Wear and tear is mechanical repairs and maintenance. Oil changes, tire changes, spark plugs, etc.
A good amount of people buy a certain car and maintain it, intending to run the vehicle into the ground completely.
If you really want to do the "simple math", don't forget about the opportunity costs associated with the wait times, scheduling around someone else's schedule and delays due to public transit and rideshares. That's where you realize just how much a car actually saves you. I used to live in Seattle and Portland for a few years (each). I bit that poisonous apple of, "I don't need a car since I'm going to live in the city". 15-20 minute car commutes would be about an hour on average on public transit (that's if they ran on time). Never. The. Fuck. Again.
See my 4runner that's older than I am. I am happy to give it its $400 per year in oil changes and amortized tires, along with $1500 repairs every other year because I know its repair ROI is extremely high (vs. whatever car make the reader believes is unreliable); every repair I make to it represents another XX,000 miles on the road.
(The 4WD and e-locker helps too)
And you don't get any input.
If I purchase something that provides a capability for a given period of time, there is precisely zero reason why I should not think of it as a fractional cost per use. And there are many reasons why I find it a useful thing to do.
I have no idea why this should be controversial.
> I used to live in Seattle and Portland
Your actual claim is you prefer living the car lifestyle somewhere non-urban. Good on you, but irrelevant to me.
Very much not the case in cities with excellent PT, where car trips can be far worse.
While you're factoring in intangibles, don't forget to factor in externalities caused by air and noise pollution.
If you want to bring up the value of intangibles, you then dont get to cherry pick certain intangibles that prove your point as to use them as the basis for your argument. You have to take into many intangibles, both pro and against your own stance to have a decent argument, let alone a realistic solution to the problem.
And if you actually pay attention to the argument, I dont mention to do ONE thing, as you straw manned me as saying to move to the suburbs. I say everyone needs to judge their own situations in an honest and logical fashion to better choose a solution for their personal needs. Not just listen to a random elitist trying to get on their highest of high horses to shame the rest of the population in their superficial future signaling. If you live in a heavy urban area with good public transit and high parking fees, hell no, dont own a car. It's a bad idea. But to imagine the exact same solution can apply to everywhere else in the world is a sign of a small minded twat that's never experienced life outside of their tiny bubble.
Literally what I felt you did and why I said to also consider environmental externalities.
I did not make any argument beyond that. I also did not claim you said to move to the suburbs. No idea where you get that from. It's just a thing I'm considering doing, because I can't stand the noise and pollution in the city much longer.
In such case, yearly depreciation is the cost of replacing the car with a new one, divided by the number of years until you replace it. In my calculations, I estimate I'll be driving my cars 20 years each, and base deprecation costs on that.
I don't have a garage, so if I bought a car, I'd likely have to go walk a few blocks to it. When I rent one, the "extra hassle" is I spend a minute on a phone app reserving it first.
I don't see it as a barrier, and at least at my use, way cheaper than a car. But the real gain is not dealing with parking, moving for street cleaning, parking tickets, broken windows, etc.
That's the problem for me. I don't have a driver's license because public transit is good enough for 99.9% of trips. There are situations where it would be nice to be able to drive a car (esp. to get a rental car for countryside vacations, or for large Ikea purchases). But getting a driver's license doesn't make sense when you never really use it and fall out of practice, so my money is better invested in the national public transit flatrate card.
Does this actually happen? I'm serious. I'd like to hear some stories of offering to pay for your friend staying at a hotel room while they are coming to visit you (and them actually accepting that offer). How does that even work? I mean socially, in terms of etiquette, embarrassment, and power imbalance?
Couple of examples...
On average, I need a car once or twice a week. Maybe three out of every four trips something really dinky like a smart car would do the job, whereas on one out of four I need the mid-sized estate car that I actually own. I live in a small village so to hire a car I'd have to get on a bus to the nearest town, then walk to the car hire place to get the car. That probably adds an hour to an hour and a half every time I need an estate car. Am I going to deal with that BS once every two weeks? Hell no. Even if I did, over time would it cost less than simply owning the damn car? Maybe, but it's pretty fricking marginal. I'd save a bit on fuel, no doubt, but economical cars hold their value much better than those that are less economical so the price of the cars (I always buy used) might not be so different.
I don't "use" my back garden a lot as a place to hang out, but it's certainly a handy place to leave the motorbike when I don't want to put it away, and also a great place for cutting up wood, MDF, and the like when I'm doing DIY.
The space has value that goes way beyond the amount of time that I use it for.
I could list plenty of other examples where this is true.
I think we can agree, this lifestyle is only for people living in the city in downtown or midtown with all amenities nearby.
Furthermore, the "uncertainty cost" is real. I have to rent a car. Will one be available? Will it be well maintained? Will the check out and check in process go smoothly? Can I get to the car? Etc. Etc. Each one and opportunity for things to go awry and end up in a bad day.
My completely-without-evidence theory is that there is some amount by which we can cut the allowed number of rideshare cars on the road at any time, and while wait times to get a vehicle might increase, the overall time will be the same or less because transit time will be reduced with less congestion.
To be fair, the government’s resistance to the rule of law, international promises or basic human rights is incredibly annoying too, so at least they are being consistent.
When I did the math the insurance was close to 50% of my cost. Rest was depreciation, then gas, and maintenance.
it really comes down to how you interpret the arbitrary 95% stated in the article. I agree with both the article and you. I need to sell that mandolin which I play maybe once a month but the patio sofa is here to stay even if I sit on it once a month because they are really nice to look at every day during golden hours. That's 100% usage for me.
To spend 5% of my waking time using my car I'd need to drive for 48 minutes every day, which I'm not even close to. I think it's unfair to count time when I'm asleep as time when I could possibly be using something (other than my bed!).
I think all of this debate points to one thing: the article is written from, and generalising from, a very myopic perspective, and shouldn't in any way be given serious consideration by many people for whom it doesn't and can't apply.
About your backyard, you're using it when you're not actually in it.
The garden, yeah, maybe, but I haven't used it in any capacity since last Friday.
Similarly people thought ebooks would be significantly cheaper, however counterintuitively they're not much cheaper and sometimes more expensive than a physical book because digital books are more convenient for many people.
A book author has basically 100% market monopoly on his/her books. He can set a high price and people who want to read the works will still pay.
Whereas ride sharing companies interchangeable and are in full competition with each other, which, in a healthy market, should bring the price down to the point where they're all only making a marginal profit. The cost of alternative mode of transportation does not come into equation (well unless it's overall cheaper and better - then it will kill the entire market segment).
My province in Canada shuttered the government-owned bus service a few years ago, so that isn’t even an option anymore. There haven’t really been any significant private offerings that have popped up in its place. If you’re in a small town with no car, you’re pretty much screwed!
On the surface, why have any fixed server infrastructure at all, anywhere? Well, if you don't, you're putting friction in front of anybody not authorised to spend to develop / test / prototype something. Yes, you can give everyone a cloud account and let them use that. But even then you'll have people cautiously limiting their usage to avoid accidentally overspending. By contrast, when that server is sitting their idle half the time, I actually feel guilty for NOT trying out some whacky idea on it. Of course, it can work exactly the opposite way - if you DO give all your developers complete freedom to run stuff in the cloud then they have even more liberty than if you give them a fixed server to work with. But I suspect few organisations would tolerate the potential cost risk from that.
It's a subtle mental difference but I think it can play into outcomes in a significant way.
I could see how for small companies, "spinning up a VM" would be a thing to consider carefully - but for bigger ones (and especially for "big data" workloads), cloud computing is really a no-brainer.
For unmetered usage, imagine that due to some circumstances, you end up having exclusive access to 2 powerful physical machines where you could do anything you want. These machines will be idling 95% of the time, but when you need it, they are ready to serve you immediately, with zero friction.
For metered usage, that would be public cloud, as you described.
Hey, when some people think of the outdoors they think of a communal BBQ in the apartment quad. When some people think "park" they see green grass. When they think 'walk the dog' they mean go to a fenced acre with sections for small/medium dogs. Such people are urban dwellers who probably shouldn't venture past city limits.
But some of us own labradors, huskies or even wolfhounds. Walking them means a car ride to a river with a few miles to run. When we think "park" we think Zion or Jasper ... not Central. Some people like to rollerblade to the corner starbucks with their Havanese dog on a retractable leash. I prefer to save my coffee money and spend it on a proper car to haul me, my canoe and my chocolate lab to a river beside a mountain.
Remember the old Nissan commercials: Dogs_love_trucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYZrvG5BkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XCKSXvhbQU
I see a lot of merit to what the author is saying.
However, he completely ignores externalities. Yes, car is not used 95% of time. And he is saying, let's target the 5%. The problem is that it's not 5%, it's rather 3% of planned trips where his model works really well and 2% when you need a car right now and oh... the demand for local car share through the roof, so please wait for next 20 minutes.
And the same is true for everything else. People are buying extra on one hand to use it, but on another case to be an insurance that they can accommodate unplanned.
Not everything needs insurance. And real insurance has costs that are pretty close to the expected average risk, while buying things just in case could be much more.
And the 1/10000 calculation was not the chance of huge trouble, it's 1/10000 to be unable to get a ride to have any trouble at all. The vast majority of those incidents are going to be worth much less than a thousand dollars. The chance of an event being that major is another factor of 1% or less.
Am I going to pay a thousand dollars a year to avoid a one in a million chance each of missing some important business meetings? Definitely not. Especially when other factors I can't change are much more likely to make me miss a meeting.
I mean, if I had odds that low of major illness I probably wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance either!
As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.
Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
If it happens that often then the article wouldn't advise you against having a car.
> Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
If you're going to the emergency room you'll probably be waiting plenty long once you get there.
With COVID, I avoid taxis & ubers; I can take a zipcar-like rental with relatively low overhead, but one isn't always available next to me. When it is, it's sometimes not very clean. Those services have small-ish vehicles (and mostly electric ones) that are fine for city & surroundings, but if I want a weekend getaway I need to use real rental, and that's a lot more overhead (plus, if I get out 3 weekends per month, just the rentals would be more expensive than the car costs - and that, at a lower quality of the rented car; with COVID I don't get out as often, but previously, I used to).
I think living without a car definitely makes sense for some people; and definitely doesn't for others. But that depends a lot on your conditions, location and lifestyle.
That's why doing the math once and then no longer worrying about it makes sense. I generally am opposed to paying for what I don't use (prevalence of unlimited data plans in the US drives me nuts), that's why the article resonates with me - I usually frame it as "don't optimize for the edge case". What the post misses to me in the house example is that homes usually at the very least maintain their value, so the added expenses are only related to maintenance (higher property tax, cost of heating, cleaning, etc).
Unlimited data plans are totally worth it (particularly with visible where it’s only $25/month on party pay).
Reducing the amount of decisions you have to make frees you from drudgery - I’d argue it’s one of the best places to leverage money.
I don’t believe it’s possible to do the math once and no longer worry about it. Every time you call a ride it’s a purchase decision.
In my case, I know I don't expect to call a ride every other day, at most once or twice a month (even less now when bars are closed – but that's an edge situation). I know the approximate cost of a ride, typically €12, surge pricing may go up to twenty. So at the most, I expect calling a ride to cost me €20 a month.
That's less than what resident parking would cost for a car for the same month (a few years ago it was €9 / week). So the ride-sharing wins. I can think about this once and re-evaluate the situation every year. Yes, sometimes I may spend more on rides, sometimes less, but on average it's a cheaper way of getting around. So even though every time I call the ride it's technically a purchase decision in that I can decide not to do it and walk / bike / take the metro (assuming it's still open), it could be argued that I had already decided that in this situation I would call a ride. So no decision fatigue.
Note that driving my own car isn't exactly a "decisionless" process. I have to think where I'll go, whether I'll have easy surface parking (free) or whether I'll have to purchase underground parking. Plus, bonus points for underground parking being paid by the hour, so now I have to make a decision every hour about whether I want to stay out (purchase more parking) or leave.
Also, with regard to the data plan, we don't have those in France (that I know of). My plan has 40 GB and I've got it because it was cheaper than my older 15 GB plan. I know my usage never has me go above 3 to 4 GB. If an unlimited plan was available for a few more euros, that would be a net cost to me, for no practical gain in peace of mind or anything.
I suppose not everybody has a "boring routine-based" life so this approach may not work in each and every situation.
I still take the subway, I don't worry about it at all. The weather is part of the decision, the 2 EUR something aren't. I don't even know how much it is, exactly.
That's highly individual. I pay approximately that much with pay-per-GB data plan. Except now that I'm constantly home, I don't use the data, so my bills are lower.
> I don’t believe it’s possible to do the math once and no longer worry about it. Every time you call a ride it’s a purchase decision.
Same - it is an individual matter. I can definitely remember cases where I worried about not using something after I paid for it in advance and feeling bad (gym memberships immediately come to mind). Paying in advance makes every moment of your life into a "should I use the things I paid for now or later?" decision.
Plenty of people in the world live in much smaller places. See HK apartment or the "average" Tokyo apartment as examples.
I owned a car for 19yr old but haven't for 14 of the last 20 years. I don't miss it. But I live somewhere where I don't really need it.
Not owning a car and taking uber everywhere seemed okay when living in a dense city, until covid happened and Uber all but ceased operations for a while.
The small condo in the city was a great choice when you went out most nights and worked at the office but it sucked terribly when circumstances changed and everyone was home all the time.
The main blockers for me are transaction costs - sure I can rent a car when I want to drive to the mountains but the amount of extra time and effort required means I’d probably not bother.
To be clear: it can work - I lived in central London and never bothered to own a car but, well, I don’t now because even something trivial like carrying around three car seats every time I wanted to take an uber would be so cumbersome I’d never do it.
That's not paying for 95%, that's paying for 99.99%
The math works out this way too - global economic impact from Covid is probably $16T in the US alone.
If I could have spent half my yearly income in 2019 to have a normal year in 2020 I would take that deal in a heartbeat and feel really good about it.
I don't think your math works though. First off we were talking about individual life choices, living small in a big city and paying to rent services/tools as you need them rather than living on a larger property, owning most of the tools/services you need. This isn't a one time cost, its not spend twice as much in 2019 for a normal 2020, its spend twice as much _every year_ in case a 2020 happens.
As for the covid impact, the US GDP was $21T in 2019, there's no way the economic impact in the US is 75% of last years GDP. That's like a civilization collapse level of recession. Lots of business seem to be doing fine, lot's of people are back to work.
Renting/buying a small home and using public spaces like parks and transit/walking, or renting/buying a large home with your own yard, buying your own car, etc.
The large home will serve you much better in a pandemic, cause many of those public options will be closed, but is that worth paying for when a pandemic will happen maybe once or twice in your lifetime?
It's not specifically a pandemic. It's the idea that it's worth being somewhat prepared to deal with things if a major event occurs.
Similarly with cars (in a couple, you are designated driver half the time, you have to look for parking, etc.; although I do have to own a car to go to the mountains, that's one use case that is simply not covered by rideshares and such), backyards/parks (doing stuff in the backyard is just boring, it's much easier to convince me to go to the park).
Indeed one would expect the "95%" owned versions to be inferior to the specialized ones; after all, the latter are specialized for a particular purpose, rather than a compromise faux replica like a guest room or a backyard.
But the thing op is talking about are visits to friends specifically, not visit in the same city. Those are the sort of visit when you come in for 2-3 days and both families intend to spend evening together and do activities together. So, the late night return is not the issue, because evening is spent together. And yes, saving money for visitor is one of purposes. Other is to make logistic of "being together as much as possible, being able to drink together after kids were put to sleep" is another. Yet another is to make it easy on granda when she visits or even babysit.
It is clear that you dont do those, which is obviously fine. But other people do.
I wouldn't want to rent a van for the same reason I never invited friends over when I couch surfed the first few months I moved to a new city
I guess it just depends what matters in your life. Some people like nice cars, its a depreciating assets and poor investment choice but if it makes you happy that's a lot of hidden value not being accounted for
In these cases, we trade money for convenience, instead of money for finished goods we can't or won't make ourselves (eg, pros are less likely to hurt themselves, so I hire them).
Then there are forcing functions. If you want to lose weight, don't keep snacks in the house. When my place had a postage sized lot, most of it in shade, I volunteered on a public spaces project and met a lot of cool people. (Also, I can highly, highly recommend walkable neighborhoods.)
I would wager that the author has better than average organizational skills if they can pull all of these things off. But perhaps instead of thinking of it as a grocery list, pick a couple of them that are easy to put down again, try them on and see how they feel. You can always buy a pickup truck later, or rent a bigger apartment.
I was thinking about what this person would consider the worst offender on this front in my lifestyle: early in the summer, we bought a teardrop camper trailer. I calculated how many nights of hotels it would take to even out the price, and it was a lot. But it also unlocked a bunch of trips this summer that we would have never taken without it. We could have rented a similar trailer for each of those trips, and we did look into that before we bought the trailer, but again, it was a hassle. In practice, we simply wouldn't have taken those trips. So a straight utilization comparison is not the right one.
I used Zipcar for ~3 years in San Francisco (closest location was 6 minutes away by foot), then bought a used car (my apartment has a garage spot for me). We're a family of 2.
Zipcar was nice, but I avoided using the car most of the time. When I bought a car, I found some sort of relief, and I of course ended up using the car way more frequently than Zipcar, while still biking around in SF most of the time. I did many more outdoor/weekend trips, in the order of 5x/6x.
When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.
It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.
Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.
In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe.
When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.
Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.
I’m considering moving the family to Austin but have mostly been only looking at the new suburb developments in the south- and northwest.
This is a common refrain, but I've never seen more than one-or-two anecdotal accounts of this happening. Do you have citations or articles that support common CPS intervention in cases like this? In my experience CPS is primarily focused on abuse and malnutrition, and tries everything possible to keep families together.
Parents act like the world outside is scary and dangerous, despite declining crime rates. I think that many younger kids are in dual-income families, and are at after-school care from 3-6 every day. Those that aren't are often in after-school activities, and aren't home, bored with time to burn outside. If the kids are home, they'd rather play Fortnite or Call of Duty with their online friends than build a fort in the riverbed.
The phone calls create a chilling effect as parents tell other parents. So if you even want to avoid the helicopter parent trend, society forces you to be their chauffeur.
So no, kids don't get taken away immediately, but the singular phone call is enough to stop it in %99 of cases.
But here are some links (go through the links that the articles give too):
* Started by some new stories: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/27/fr...
* The linked article author went through an entire lawsuit about this with BC's CPS: https://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-...
I bet if you did 10 minutes of google research yourself you could find plenty more.
They recently lost a legal battle but are continuing to appeal. http://5kids1condo.com/i-took-the-government-to-court-for-ki...
However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.
As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.
There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.
The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.
On the flip side, I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs. Blowing lights or stop signs or excessive speeding are all more common in the city often directly in front of police. That wouldn't fly in the suburbs, and moreover people sort of expect traffic laws to be followed within reason (people still speed, but it's not normal to go 70 in a 45). Further, I have a strong suspicion that there are more hit-and-runs in the city than the suburbs. In the burbs, streets are wider and the speed limits are higher, but they have push-to-walk buttons and almost everyone stops well before the light turns red.
https://injurylawyer.com/pedestrian-accidents/high-rate-of-p...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-15-mn-58713-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448007/
https://www.collinslaw.com/blog/shocking-report-reveals-subu...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/019443609029503...
My theory is this is a result of the traffic, ironically. You spend 2 hours out of your day commuting at 12mph at best, so the minute you have 100 yards of asphault ahead of you, many people opt to just whip to 50-60mph on 35mph roads and 25mph residential streets to savor the speed. If you hit someone at that speed, death is practically guaranteed.
what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.
You must not live in Grizzly country. It's a serious concern.
[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.
I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.
Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.
Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background
Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s.
> If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap.
Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow.
Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).
The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then.
Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)
Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.
In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.
1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...
Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.
What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?
Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.
A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.
The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.
That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.
But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".
Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.
Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.
> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.
Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.
However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.
I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)
As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.
I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.
And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.
Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...
Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.
> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues
I think you mean "present" issues.
The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.
I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.
I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.
At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc.
At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night.
I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.
This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.
I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.
Getting back to Philadelphia where everything collapsed back to "Dad, can you drive me to ..." was depressing for everyone I think.
meshugaas - noun (slang): Crazy or senseless activity and behavior
It amazes me how much this doesn't seem to bother people. New York smells like pee. Everywhere. I've only been a few times, but it has always smelled like pee. I don't feel like "all three times I went, everywhere smelled like pee" really deserves anymore chances when no other place I have ever visited or lived has ever smelled like pee, with the exception of a dirty horse barn. Is all of New York a dirty horse barn?
Maybe New Yorkers just like it? I mean, it has to be that. Because nothing in New York is all that great, such that you'd put up with the constant smell of pee.
Certainly not the pizza.
Joking aside: NYC has a lot of smells, but human urine isn't actually one I pick up all that often (except for sometimes in the subway). As for why anybody would live here: it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses, as well as the most thoroughly developed urban environment in the United States. Those are sufficient draws for many people.
Still love to visit NYC though.
How does that translate into everyday living for people who don't have a job in culture creation (media, fashion etc.)?
Like, Broadway. That's a big, inside joke, right?
I’ve lived in NYC for almost seven years, and I’m just starting to feel comfortable. Not because I’ve changed too much, but because I now know what I like, what I don’t like, and how to seek out the former and avoid the latter.
It helps if you have friends who have already lived there for a long time, and who have similar interests, they’ll be able to short circuit you. Otherwise I’d recommend knowing yourself and researching, in that order.
The places that are most well known are the places with the biggest marketing budgets. (you mentioned Broadway). Most New Yorkers avoid those like the plague, fwiw. They’re built for people for whom money is not limiting factor to hedonism.
I wasn't meaning to imply that most people take as long as I do.
DC and NYC are geared towards different people, and that's OK. pg has written nice food for thought on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
In NYC you learn quickly what's safe and what's not. I was taught that, at a very early age. You learn how to spot the difference between someone who's homeless and someone who's dangerous. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, you learn to duck into places like shops if you think someone is following you, etc.
It sounds awful listing it out like that, but those were just what we learned growing up. It was just how we took care of ourselves.
One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.
That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.
But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.
I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).
It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing).
It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)
Pretty ridiculous statement here.
So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do."
>Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.
Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)
My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.
As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time).
Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.
And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either.
I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.
Of course the rational break-even level math for some of these purchases can be analyzed, including taking into account tail risks and hassle costs.
But I think the point the author is missing is that some things are affordable luxuries that people enjoy. For a long time I didn't have a car in the downtown part of a city I live in. Public transit+rideshare+zipcar was a totally fine substitute (like the author).
But owning a car is better/easier/more enjoyable/more freeing! We didn't do a fine-grained analysis on how much using zipcar+hertz would cost vs buying a car. The car isn't costing a significant percent of our income, we were annoyed with alternative and wanted it, so we bought it.
If you used a blender 2x a year and it cost $1 to rent vs $30 to buy, would you really consider going through the hassle of saving money to deal with renting a blender? I'm not suggesting a car is the same significance for all, but certainly it can be rational to own one even for people in the same position as the author.
The trouble comes when optimizing for enjoyment today causes pain tomorrow.
I'm pretty much there. And having got there, I'm not convinced (yet) that it's the right goal at all. Hard to divest from it, however, since enjoyment is hard to walk away from.
Accounting for depreciation, interest, insurance, actual service bills and petrol, I ended up with A$0.25 per km and A$4150 per annum, so ATO-sanctioned business travel compensation always rightfully seemed to be a handout to me.
A new BMW can easily cost 6x as much, hence "average body temperature".
An oldish paid-off relatively inexpensive car will absolutely do better than that on average. But it's actually not unreasonable that the business deduction bases costs on something like a late model leased midrange sedan like a sales rep might use to drive clients around.
I moved last year and got rid of a lot of stuff; to my surprise, not only do I not miss the things I got rid of, I find myself wishing I'd kept less.
I think there's another take on this advice, that it's not about optimizing spending, but simplifying your life and obligations by avoiding the burden of ownership and minimizing debt.
I rarely use my car, I'm the exact kind of person this is aimed at. I haven't used it in *monthts. But when I need it, it's there. There's car rental place about 500 meters walking distance from my home, but they aren't open 24/7. There is also a ride share car parked at about 1km from my home, but it's only one car and if someone else took it I can't use it.
These things only work when you know well in advance you're going to use it and even then, they might not be available at peak times. There's only so many ride share cars available, and if everyone wants to visit their parents on Christmas, there's not enough of them. Car rental companies aren't going to buy enough cars to cover their 5% peak use either.
Neither would I.
I paid €2600 for my car (2007 Mitsubishi Colt), about 20 euros a month for insurance, and 26 a month in road tax.
I am doing exactly the same thing as you. Bought a ~$3k old used car that is always there for me. I do use it more often, ever week or two, though.
It is even more shocking to me that people would buy a car on credit (except when it has a business purpose, i.e. you can comfortably cover interest payments with the increase in revenue). You're not supposed to use credit for consumption!
I put 80,000 miles on it in 2 years... I think I got my money's worth.
It's kind of like shorting the market with OTM options. The eventual payout can easily cover years of "failures".
Secondly there is a huge difference in safety.
On a three year old car? I really doubt it.
You can get lower rate if you use your own stocks as collateral, i.e. if you use brokerage margin. Heck, these days margin lending is so crazy common that there are even ETFs that package leveraged equities for you to go anywhere between -300% via 0% to 300% long, just change the allocation with a few clicks (or taps on your phone).
Leveraged ETFs are almost never appropriate except to monetize a very short term view.
The Volvo heads to the shop on Wednesday. I'm concerned that I'm in for an expensive bill from the mechanic (~$1000) for various ailments. Never an easy analysis on a car with a KBB value of like $2500. But on the other hand, I'm driving a $40K car.
Another benefit of second used car is that if friends and family come to visit, they have a car to use.
Still, despite so far putting 150% of the "value" into repairs I realize it does not matter. Large Ratios of a small number are nothing compared to even small ratios of a large number.
Once the repairs are done I get to know the state of those parts. Absolute worst case, and the engine needs replacement, we're still only talking about 1 year worth of depreciation on a new car.
Will I need to replace the engine? Likely not. Would it have been slightly cheaper to spend 2x on a better used car? Sure, but maybe that one would have been a lemon too.
The scary part of used cars is spending money on repairs. Yet even expensive repairs are cheap. They are only expensive relative to the market value, but the market value is based on that lemon market risk.
The end result of having bought a far too cheap lemon: I've still spent less than a properly vetted vehicle and now I know some good mechanics down the street. The vehicle itself now has parts which are known quantities.
I'd really love an excuse to buy a new car. I've got the cash for it, but nothing modern cars can provide justify paying an engine replacement of depreciation every year.
I look for that excuse myself regularly now.
I think the biggest "excuse" is new accident avoidance tech. A friend last year hit a bear. She didn't see the bear but her Subaru did, and probably saved her life.
That's what surge pricing is for.
Nonetheless this condemnation, once legislated, have removed the very practical ability to purchase important services or goods when they matter the most to you. Instead we end up all over-buying just to ensure we have it at the key junction.
If surge pricing doesn't exist and all cars are taken, you're simply SOL, period.
In small towns or bigger villages, the number of taxis/ubers, whatever might only be around 10 to 20. Once they are gone, you have to wait till they are a viable again.
We have a decent sized yard, and my right now my wife is planting a fig tree because that is fun for her.
If those months are not hyperbole, you might find that when you need it, it doesn't start. (That just happened last week to a friend of mine who had to bring his kid to swimming class, after leaving the car unused for a few weeks.)
It addresses this problem 99% of the time.
Having a yard/garden with kids is wounderful, open the back door and shove them outside without shoes to play for accessible easy outdoor time.
Half the fun of Friends staying over in the guest room is when you can have a few drinks and everyone relaxes knowing no one is traveling. The next morning you can all have breakfast together.
Car shares are great for going to the shops on Tuesday, getting a car for Christmas when you want to see family is a different ballgame.
We have kids, and live in a rural area, and honestly, many summers, don't get a ton of use out of our property and home because we spend most our free time and income on travel. Generally, we're gone at least 2-weekends a month on car trips, fly away for a few weekends a year, and try to fit in 1-2 international trips as well.
Obviously, all that's changed in the last year.
With COVID, we've felt incredibly lucky to live in a rural area where our kids were able to spend basically all summer just "playing outside." No need to interact with other people on mass-transit. No shared elevators or public spaces.
When we did start socializing a bit, it was very nice to have a nice private, outdoor space to (more) safely entertain our guests in.
COVID is hopefully a very temporary, one-time event. But it has changed my perspective.
Still, while I agree that the article takes optimization to sort of silly lengths, I do see a solid point behind it.
I apply the same philosophy to boats, RVs, vacation-homes and the like. (Though, I admit that COVID has tested my resolve there a bit). Expensive investments that aren't really going to make sense unless you're using them far more than our family would. Plus, with any major purchase like that, you're "locked-in" to doing that one thing if you're trying to maximize the value of your investment.
Buy a vacation home, and you're going to have a mental barrier going on vacation somewhere else. Buy a boat, and you're going to feel like you're wasting money when you spend a week of vacation somewhere besides a lake.
TL;DR: Like most things in life, it's a balance.
I would probably agree with OPs sentiment in the context of vacation homes. They're not necessarily a great investment. They sort of lock you into a location. They're another thing you have to manage. And so forth. I'd much rather just get a hotel room, a B&B, etc.
I've even thought of buying a small place in the city. First of all, I'm really glad I didn't do that in the last year or two. But, really, while I wish I had done it 10 years ago knowing what I know now about property values, I also don't miss having another property to manage and I can always get a hotel if I want to spend a weekend in town every now and then.
There are some really bleak effects on affordability in urban areas, but for someone who owns a vacation home they use two or three weeks out of the year, it's great: employ someone local to handle keys and cleaning, cover mortgage/taxes, maintenance, and maybe enough profit that you don't feel so bad going somewhere else once in a while.
In turn, someone like me can rent it! The best of my experiences with AirBnB have been this exact sort of rental, while the worst were situations where I discovered that the rental was illegal.
The way the math works out is that I would be able to pay for three nights per month in that hotel for the difference between a 1br and a 2br in my building.
I don't think everyone reading this article needs to shoehorn their own situation into the analysis, but for me it makes a ton of sense. I kind of want a 2br, but I really wouldn't use the space that often and I have excellent alternatives.
I dream of that day, but I don't expect to see it for another 4-5 years at least given the nature of the beast in this field in this city.
In many suburbs for example it's common to need the car to do basically anything.
The US used to have corner stores and fairly walkable places, but it's something you find in the older parts of towns and cities, and it may have decayed since it wasn't prioritized much for many years.
Notice above I qualified it with Europe or Asia. If you go to South America, or Africa odds are even the city you are going to doesn't have good transit for most people. (A handful are building, but there are lot of cities that could have good transit that don't have it)
I was born in a small city in Spain where most people still need a car to go to work, do groceries, go to a restaurant, etc.
Visit the slums of Mumbai, or the shanty towns of Lagos, or the favelas of Lima. These may be high density, but they're certainly not "walkable". Either in the sense of being pedestrian friendly or having many services easily accessible by walking/public transport.
There's a reason that the motorbike is one of the most popular consumer products for middle income countries. In the vast majority of the third world, the populace is desperate for any sort of personal motor transportation.
As for vehicles, I have a mid-sized or so SUV and sometimes I transport people but I often transport stuff from the home improvement store, etc. I have no interest in owning a small vehicle and then have to rent on a semi-regular basis.
And, yes, I own tons of stuff that doesn't get used much. But most of that stuff can't be easily rented or borrowed for the times I need it. Should I rent an electric drill or a weed whacker every time I need one? There have been whole business models based on this idea but they ignore the transaction costs.
There's monetary and temporal costs. Instead of having to spend minutes to an hour to arrange and get a rental, you could have the item waiting in another room, ready to be used.
I think this one is not quite like the others. if you only need a car for one week each year, you don't lose much by renting. but putting your friends in a hotel is not really a substitute for having them stay at your place imo. if I only get to see a close friend once a year, I want to make the most of the time that they're in town, cooking breakfast together, staying up talking until we can't keep our eyes open, etc. it's really not the same if a day of hanging out starts and ends with transit to/from a hotel.
I agree on the car if you're really only using it for a trip or two a year. (Indeed, I wouldn't even consider owning a car in that case. I probably would if I were going away a couple weekends a month though.)
Couch surfing is also a perfectly reasonable alternative.
If you either determine that you use that car a ton, or you do the math, work out exactly how often you'd need that car, and what the costs are for the nearest viable alternative solution, and the car's TCO is cheaper - great. You did what this post is trying to tell you to do: Stop thinking about an unattainable hypothetical 'I shall be using this at maximum usage all the time', and start thinking about what you actually need, and how often you'd need it.
Perhaps the lesson to learn is simply judge and balance your own unique situation to your needs, and drink a large cup of stfu when it comes to judging others for what their needs are rather than push your own choices/agenda upon others?
It could also be buying that DSLR camera for going photographing twice a year instead of renting for these occasions, or buying that 3000$ workstation to play games that require that power once a month instead of going to a net cafe (or using Stadia or whatever).
You could drive somewhere 15 minutes away and back, twice per day, and still be under 5%.
The car-agnostic ideal won't work outside of major cities. The backbone of America is car travel. People outside cities have more space and more stuff. They expect hauling and utility function in their vehicles. This isn't changing.
Maybe if you can convince suburbanites to downsize, you might have a point. But that's also a city-centric viewpoint imposed by limited space and desire to move easily. Neither of those things are desired in the suburbs.
City dwellers don't get it because they don't live that life.
Price difference between smaller car and larger car: $15000
Lifetime of car: 8 years
Frequency the larger car is needed: once per month
Additional time to pick up and drop off rental: 3 hours
Money saved per hour: $52
So it seems that if someone values their time more than ~$50/hour, they should buy the larger vehicle.
Edit: Forgot to take into account the rental fee: $150
Money saved per hour: $2
It looks like it doesn't make sense to rent, as buying would allow the convenience of using the larger vehicle any time, especially if it is more than once a month.
And I think most people would trade an hour driving for $50.
You can add "additional time to park in the city because you have a big-ass car" to your calculations :)
I doubt those in the suburbs will have any trouble parking. That's a city problem.
Sure, anecdotal, not perfectly scientific or even at a good enough scale... but I don't really believe the 10% idea. I'd love to see where their scientific data is on that.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july...
Let's say 10,000 miles a year, 30 MPG for small car and 15 MPG for large car, and $3/gallon gas. That give an extra $1000 in gas per year for the large car, or an extra $83 per month if a large car is needed once a month, or $28/hour saved for the inconvenience of the hours spent picking up and dropping off the rental.
Either way, the delta is much smaller than what I was expecting, in the range of a couple of hundred a month at the high end, depending on which way the numbers swing. It can be something that's not worth worrying about, for someone who has a middle class income.
FWIW, 15 MPG would be low for my F150. A Volvo wagon gets 25 MPG, for example. This ain't the 70s :).
I have a mid-sized car, and I go to Tahoe 3-4 times a year, and probably end up being the driver 2 or 3 of those times. For me, it makes sense to rent a 4WD/AWD SUV with snow tires for those 2 or 3 winter trips, especially since I'll split the cost of the rental among the friends who ride with me.
There's also the comfort/style/happiness factor: I like my car and generally don't like driving big bulky vehicles that are high off the ground; having an SUV as my primary vehicle would make me unhappy.
Maybe. Maybe not. The point is to do the exercise for your use case. If it costs you 1.5 hours and rental fees to get a minivan and you need it once a year, that's one side of the scale. On the other side you have purchase, insurance, maintenance, depreciation, storage and fuel costs.
The point is to be honest with both sides of the scale and to actually do the comparison rather than taking an automatic answer "I need to drive extra kids to camp sometimes, so I must own a minivan." Maybe. Maybe not. Just be conscious about the choice, not automatic.
Own what appreciates, rent what depreciates.
That's not accurate. With a lease you're just paying for the depreciation directly, at a predetermined rate.
It can definitely make sense, though. I leased a Bolt for my wife for $6K for three years. Even if she only drove it once every week or so it would be hard to do on-demand rental for less.
But what's not discussed in this article is the friction of this sort of lifestyle. The time when you couldn't get the rideshare when you needed it. The time lost using less efficient public transport. The hassle you go through every time you need to do... anything.
And as the children get older? Well, the lifestyle gets old too.
Don't pay for what you don't need and won't use. I agree. Just keep in mind you're paying for more than just the few minutes you're actually in a car.
I rented a mini van once for a road trip over a national holiday. I got to the rental office, was in line for an hour, and then they told me it was no longer available. Not even a sorry. Drove our two cars instead.
It takes 15 minutes each way to the nearest Home Depot to rent gardening tools and another 20 minutes in line. Then factor the drive back, and the return trip and it adds up to to 100 minutes of my time. Also, if you are using the tool more than a couple of times, it’s probably cheaper to buy. The only things that make sense to rent are specialized, expensive tools.
Guest bedrooms can be used for many things. If you are sick, you can isolate yourself to prevent other people in the household from getting sick. You can have actual guests over and you don’t have to drive them to/from and get to spend more time with them.
Whenever CalTrain breaks down, Uber prices surge. You either wait 30 minutes or pay quadruple prices. SamTrans will make you wait for the bus that comes every half an hour.
So the pluses are availability, reliability, optionality, and lowered transactional cost.
The author is essentially advocating a low-margin lifestyle. There is little spare capacity or other tolerances engineered into their choices. They may have cash in the bank, but they don't have any reserves of interior space, exterior space, or transit capacity. Instead, they rely entirely on being able to acquire that on-demand.
That works out most of the time, but it's a risk. And, like any other risk, it needs to be planned for, and it carries its own emotional and experiential weight.
I'll be a lot of people are regretting not building some slack capacity into their housing and transportation right now, when public transit is potentially dangerous and the whole family might be working from home thanks to COVID.
If the best place is anywhere in the middle of those two extremes (e.g. to have 5x the capacity), it won't be possible to achieve while everything is based on individual private ownership. We'd have to share, and build the slack capacity into the shared pool of vehicles.
A plunger can probably expect <0.1% use of it's capacity. But being stuck without one really sucks, the cost to rent is... once you account for the spent traveling back and forth would be higher than the cost of buying, and as a result literally everyone just buys them.
On the flip side a 20 year old fast food worker with $0 in their bank account probably just plain can't afford to have 5x the housing capacity they actually use. That would bankrupt them. So they just don't do it.
Having a yard is exceptionally valuable with kids. They can be free to run around, play yard games, explore - all without draining the emotional reserves of parents. You can do this while you make dinner, work, or do other things that are unrealistic at an urban park. And you can play with them too. It is not that expensive to get someone to care for your yard if you have some financial flexibility.
In a family there are many kind of resources - time, money, energy, emotional reserves. Scarcity in the first two are easy to focus on because they're quantitative. But scarcity in the latter two - especially emotional reserves - is actually the limited resource in many families. Having to deal with the stresses of children (even if they are mostly well behaved!) puts a real strain on relationships. And the friction from an urban environment, especially one like SF which is not child-friendly, or a giant megacity that has very high density, just drains away the scarcest resources that a family like mine actually has.
If you have some financial flexibility and need serenity and quiet to be your best, combining kids with an urban environment in exchange for spending less is a very poor allocation of resources. It's an example of optimizing for the thing you can easily measure, instead of what's truly important.
Having done both, I can tell you they are very different lifestyles. There are certainly perks to the downtown lifestyle, but it isn't all peaches and roses.
Taking the bus is a huge mixed bag and depends a lot on the transit system layout. Taking a newborn on the subway and transferring to a bus to see a pediatrician sucks. Hyperactive kids fighting all day when you're trying to work from home from a shoebox apartment sucks. You don't get as much leeway in your choice of schools (and btw, the highest ranking ones often aren't downtown). Etc.
By contrast, the north american suburb lifestyle generally involves driving kids around pretty much all the time: they might go to a nicer school that is a bit farther out (did I mention good school areas have expensive real estate?) One might drive out virtually every weekend because getting ice cream at ikea takes as long as it does to walk/bus to the nearby supermarket. When one drives, they can also pack more activities in one day: Going for groceries then checking out a dozen books from the library in a single outing isn't a recipe for back pain. And you can actually get home before lunch time. Etc.
With a bigger house, your parents can come stay for a few months (this is very common in many cultures).
Yes, you can save money by living the downtown lifestyle, but there's certainly a hit in various aspects of quality of life.
I could not imagine raising my kids in an apartment, it sounds like a nightmare to me. We lived the American suburb lifestyle you described. I loved every minute of it while it lasted.
It’s generally true that you have two options—you pay a big capital cost for a chunk of capacity which is available to you whenever you need it, or you pay operational costs for renting as you go. This applies to guest rooms, cars, and computers.
The maxims aren’t very good. “Don’t pay for something you don’t use” is weak advice, because sometimes it’s cheaper long-term to pay for unused capacity than it is to pay for usage when you need it. And this all gets muddled to hell as soon as you factor in the opportunity costs. Each option has a different amount of risk.
“You’re paying for 5% usage, 100% of the time” is just not a solid foundation for making these decisions.
But the vast bulk of the things I own and don't use on a daily or even weekly basis are things that would either be a hassle to rent or pay for as a service, would end up costing more using them that way, or simply aren't practically available at all as a rental item.
On that point, my next machine will be in the cloud. 32 GB laptops cost around $1,500. For the same cost I can buy 6,250 hours on a VPS ($.24 / hr) which is three years' working-hours use. It's even cheaper if I only need all 32 GB for a fraction of the time.
In return I get zero risk of theft, zero risk of hardware faults, zero capital outlay. The best part is that I can try it for a month for $10[1] and if I don't like it I can revert to the status quo!
[1] I'll probably start with an 8 GB machine
The build finished ten or fifteen minutes later, and I swapped it back out for a smaller instance. It’s nice.
As an example of the latter: I've tried bikeshares but they just made me long for my own bike: they're all too low for me, they usually have three gears at best, they have hard-to-move solid tires, the cargo area is usually in the front instead of my preference of the back. The cheap, beat-up seven-speed I own is a lot more fun to ride on.
On the other side, with the bike share, I don't care about what happens to the bike after I'm done with it. Someone could rip it apart for scrap money or throw it into a river for all I care. Me finding another one in working order is trivial, compared to replacing my stolen bicycle. Plus many of them are electric so I can do it in a full suit.
With ZipCar, the cars are usually either (1) changed last minute to a different garage, (2) have mechanical issues (I showed up once and the battery was dead), or (3) strong smell of smoking. A few times I have had multiple of them occur in the same reservation (the third garage we were sent to had a functioning car with check engine alerts).
I have tried rental cars, but then what if you want to go away for a week at a time? What if the car doesn't have an EZ-Pass? How do you get to your final destination from the car rental place? A few months ago I waited one hour for a Lyft driver to pick me up (in a jalopy van on a toll-less route with no AC) to take me to the car rental place.
There is something to be said of having a functioning car waiting for you near your place of residence, even if it is only for 5% of the time. I imagine the same applies to other things in life.
There are lots of what-if scenarios which are individually unlikely but cumulatively probable. If you have the resources, why not prepare for them?
"Your guest bedroom is occupied one week out of every 52." Mine is 4 weeks a year, and we have a murphy bed in it so we use it for other things the rest of the time.
"Your kids use the yard less than 40 minutes a week." WHAT?! They're out there 24/7. I have to drag them in kicking and screaming!
Silly article. Stop pretending you know how to grown-up.
I can imagine the hotel argument working out better mathematically, but it's definitely very much dependent on where you live. In a rural area you'd probably be crazy not to get a bigger home. In an urban area, a hotel could make sense.
You're supposed to analyze for yourself if you need to own a car full-time, and if the answer is yes, perhaps a smaller one might do? If you're constantly shuttling large groups around, then the answer to both might be yes, and that's fine too.
Then again I used to walk to school and today I walk or cycle to most places. I wouldn't be able to do that if I was living in one of those US suburbs.
Sure, you can get an easy car share 95% of the time, but the 5% of the time that you actually need one is also the same 5% of the time that everyone else in the city needs one -- the long weekend when everybody wants to head out to the countryside. Likewise hotel rooms and the facilities in parks. So you may need to plan waaaaaaaaay ahead if you depend on access to these shared resources.
How certain are you that the brakes won't fail and the CV joints won't go in the middle of a hijacking or a blockade of burning tyres in the middle of the national highway (a weekly occurrence in ZA)? Or that you'll be pelted with rocks by a mob of protesters on your way back from work (common)? Or that an unroadworthy minibus taxi will swerve in front of you without signalling (a daily driving experiience in ZA)?
My Subaru Forester is costlier to maintain than a rental, but I know all its faults and limits. I know fast I can corner without sliding and I know I can get out of a sticky situation with all-wheel drive and a 2.5L turbo. I hope I don't need to, but I can outrun most hijackers and drunk drivers (there are many).
Taleb says only insure against risk of ruin. I regard my SUV as tail-risk insurance in case shit hits the fan.
The minibus taxes aren't roadworthy and drive like demons. So most people in Gauteng own a car with anti-hijack coatings on the window, or they Uber.
In Cape Town there is no longer a working rail system because the trains were burned by the protesting populace. Even when the trains were running (with huge delays), you'd get pickpocketed on the train. You could never risk travelling at night if you had anything valuable on you.
If you want to maximize value of something, finding alternative uses for that item usually results in lower cost of ownership. My yard currently has about 200 square feet of garden in it, which provides a substantial amount of food to eat, at no additional cost than the water and minimal gardening supplies to keep it going. My kids can also use the yard, along side my garden, maximizing value. Once my house is paid off, my yard has a realized cost of close to zero. Friends can setup a tent in the yard with an air mattress instead of needing a guest room.
That fancy mini-van? I can also be the person that rents that out as a potential income source. Suddenly, something that was a liability is now a revenue stream, and I still have the convenience of using it basically whenever I want.
Most things you'll find you use only 5% of the time you own them, but their cost is low so they get no mention or attention. Other things are stupid to justify in terms of financial costs. Kids are expensive, and looking at them as an asset or a liability is laughable.
Instead of figuring out the percentage of time the item will be used, try and instead maximize value from it. Split the cost of a lawn mower with your neighbor. Rent out your car on a car-share app. Car pool to school and work. When trying to purchase a big item, try and figure out what you really need, and fight your ego. Can you buy it used? Is a specific color really worth thousands of dollars? Life isn't something that can be explained through an algorithm, don't try and run every decision through it.
The question presupposes the answer.
I fondly remember being a kid and riding around in the van-with-a-tv owned by the family who for whatever reason enjoyed being the family who drove the van-with-a-tv filled with their kids with all their kids' screaming friends.
You don't want to be that family, and that's fine. But you should be explicit in stating you don't want to be and are not that family. Don't convince yourself you could rent that minivan in the case that it becomes socially necessary at some unspecified time in the future. Everyone in your life has almost certainly already heard you quote your statistics from the article, and they have adjusted accordingly so as to route around you-- for example, when they decide how to vectorize transport of their offspring.
Hotels are expensive. Rental cars and Uber are expensive.
If you even take a few Uber trips a month, you're probably better off owning an affordable car.
If you have visitors regularly, you should probably buy a house with that extra bedroom. It's an asset that you can sell and recoup virtually 100% of your investment later on. You can't sell all the hotel rooms you've previously rented.
Having a yard turned out to be a fantastic thing to own this year since parks were all forced closed. Trust that you will always have access to that local green space (and that it will be safe and accessible) turned out to be misplaced.
if you're buying a house, it probably makes sense to get one more room than you typically need. like you say, it's likely that you recoup the cost at the end anyway. if you're renting, it's a little different. a decent hotel room is $100-200 a night in most cities. that's not cheap, but having one extra bedroom probably adds at least that much to your monthly rent.
I argued in a different post that a hotel room isn't necessarily a substitute for a spare room. it's a much less intimate way to entertain visitors. depending on the guest, that could be a pro or a con.
My wife and I live in the city and downsized from two cars to zero after doing the math last year. Granted your definition of "a few" might be different from mine, but it takes way more than my definition of a few rides to break even.
If you ask someone to itemize the costs of car ownership, they tend to miss or underestimate a few. The big ones are insurance and depreciation. I am confident that my total rideshare costs over the past year are less than just the difference between my city insurance premium and my suburb premium on the same used car, and my record is spotless. The math is surprising. (Any cost of ownership estimate or calculator I share here can be reasonably challenged, so try it with your own numbers.)
This isn't to speak of the other costs and risks of non-ownership. Every situation is different. We are lucky to have subsidized public transportation passes, corporate discounts on rentals, walkable commutes, grocery stores in every direction, etc.
I did this exact analysis on my car some years ago, after 5 years of ownership. I took into account all repairs/maintenance, purchase price, depreciation, insurance, gas, city fees and parking (yes, I keep track of all those expenses).
It came out to $288.77/month.
In reality, it was a bit less, given that 2 years later someone wrecked my car and their insurance paid more than it was worth (with no major repairs in those 2 years).
I then bought a much, much cheaper used car (about same value as my old one when it was wrecked), so the cost would be significantly less what I show above ($100 out of that $288.77 was just depreciation).
Depreciation seems to be the major cost, and my car was fairly used (8 years old when I bought it, but low on miles). Don't buy a used car for more than $10K - mine was less and you can still see the amount of depreciation! A lot of people think they're beating the game by buying a 2-3 year old used car, but the depreciation will still be really high. Of course, you can get good cars for under $4K, but it may be risky to go long distance in those.
Of course, the other trick is to get a reliable car. Pick only models with good histories (buy the Consumer Reports guide as one reference for this), and do a buyer's check before buying it. If you go to a used car lot and they don't let you do that check, then refuse to buy it.
I've had excellent savings (and frankly, minimal hassle) from buying an 8-year old Mercedes diesel with 180K on it, a 7-year old Honda CR-V with 165K on it, and a 7-year old Alfa Spider with 24k on it in my younger days. The Mercedes was bullet-proof but painted with an eco-friendly paint system that ensured they prematurely rusted (oh, the irony of taking a perfectly functional car off the road to save the pla). The Alfa I sold running well with 125K on it a few years back as we were planning to have kids. The Honda is still my SO's daily driver with around 215K on it.
I do my own wrenching on the cars, which also keeps the costs down, but even if I paid an independent (non-dealer) mechanic to do everything, decent cars just don't break that much any more. (The Alfa was extremely reliable. From 1993-2009, it broke exactly once and that was the failure of a Bosch distributor, nothing to do with the Italian heritage. The Mercedes took no major work over that time. The Honda did need a clutch which was $750 in parts and would have been around $1000 in labor.)
Not feeling the need to carry collision insurance is another big money saver.
a lot of people just want the shiniest new thing they can get a loan for. I do think there are some legitimate reasons for buying new/CPO though. a lot of people (somewhat frivolously) plan to own a car for about five years, so buying new/CPO leaves the car in its original warranty for the majority of the time they own it. this probably isn't better economically, but knowing that a) cars are less likely to break during warranty, and b) the dealership will fix it for free if it does might be worth it for the peace of mind. there are some cars (mostly cheap performance cars) that I simply wouldn't consider buying used out of fear of what the previous owner may have done to it.
somewhat of a tangent, but I was looking at a couple online TCO calculators recently. not sure how they do their calculations (or how accurate they are), but I got some very surprising results. for all the models I was considering buying, the five year TCO was almost the same for CPO as it was for new, only lower by a few percentage points.
Of course, if the author is subtly implying that everyone should live in a city, then, well, not everyone wants to live in a city nor should they have to.
Having a car/garden/guest bedroom adds to your quality of life. I had these conversations before when I was in my twenties and almost owned nothing (no car, tiny apartment without a garden). Now that I'm married and more settled I moved my preference a little bit more towards the "paying for things I don't use that much". My wife and I share a car and I have an electric bike (during the week my wife takes the car to work, I work from home). We have a guest bedroom which also acts as my office (when guests are here I work from the kitchen table). We don't have a yard but will definitely make this a priority in our next home.
So the question really becomes: "What percentage of idle time are you OK to have". You will always have >0% idle time on anything on you own.
And if it's truly about cost effectiveness: What's stopping you from renting out your car/room and to an extend even your yard (saw an app today where you can rent private pools)?
Is your car cheaper, even if you only use it once a month or less?
I drive a 16 year old car that has been paid off for many years. Insurance is <$1k/yr. Average maintenance & repair is pretty low since I don't drive a heck of a lot (1-2x trips/week typically).
Is it strictly cheaper than rentals? Maybe, maybe not. But it's cheap enough to not matter, and instead optimize on convenience rather than cost.
I'm even considering buying a new or very lightly used car in the nearish future, which would cost considerably more in the short term, but I would hang on to it for a long time barring unexpected circumstances. Cost (within reason) is not even a top 3 factor compared to convenience, comfort, and safety.
I also find that in the modern world it's often cheaper to buy low quality stuff and treat it as disposable ish. For example I bought a very cheap electric chainsaw with the intention of destroying it (very sandy environment) because it was less expensive than renting the right tool for a job, and now I still have it if I need to cut a small branch or something.
We have a guest room. It's also my wife's home office and creative space and gets used every day. When we have guests, she's happy to relinquish the space to welcome a guest into the house (it's not an imposition).
Then the guests have a nice, relatively private room in a nice part of town and can hang out with us easily - a lot easier than negotiating the rather weird idea of paying for their hotel or airbnb-type rooms (which would, IMO, be a strange negotiation to have with most grown-up people we know).
A fifth wheel costs about $35,000. Many of my neighbors have models that cost $50,000+. You need to factor in renting out the campsite for a week, fuel to tow your camper there (it might be 100-200 miles away), and the fact that you need a large pickup truck to do the towing.
You could rent a lot of hotels for that kind of money, or rent a cabin to stay in, and drive there in your car. "Roughing it" seems expensive.
Having had a RV (which I lived in all summer - I didn't move it), and done real tent camping I object to calling any form of RV roughing it. I've been 10 hours be canoe from the nearest car before (it took us a full week - I've talked to some who did the same trip in a long day which is where the time estimate comes from), I know what roughing it means, and a RV isn't it.
At some point, you should probably think of hobbies as hobbies and not demand that they be the most efficient means of producing an outcome.
I agree the way most people go about buying RVs seems sub-optimal, but hotels or even cabins are not necessarily equivalent goods.
So far there's been one exception to this, which is super early morning and multi-day hikes that I can't get to without a rented car. That's it.
Likewise, I'm visiting the prairies where I'm from, and spent an hour today raking away all that leaf falling and dog poop action the yards have been getting.
I do enjoy long distance drives, so my partner and I rented a car for a month and split the cost. At about $400 each not including gas, it's in the range of the same car plus insurance monthly, but we don't pay for what we're not using.
All this free time at home had me thinking of roadtrips, boon docking, overlanding, and camping. So I bought a European 4WD SUV. Basically a money pit in fuel, maintenance, parts and reliability. Financially, it doesn't make sense. But all the money I didn't pay in car loans, maintenance, fuel, and tolls went to saving for a car I truly wanted.
For me, buying a car makes as much sense as buying a gaming PC. It should be something you really want and willing to spend money on. If you need a car for work, get the cheapest one you can and factor the mileage into your salary. I've turned down many offers with small pay bumps simply because the expense of the commute made the salary bump a net negative.
obviously that doesn't work if you really need a personal laptop, but how many people fit this criteria? I only use my laptop a week or two out of the year when I go on vacation. I'd probably get more out of vacation if I left the thing at home anyway.
Not everything has to be cost-optimized some things can be just for pleasure or for the peace of having something available when needed.
What I do think is that for a lot of people many of these purchases are just a default path to follow.
He has a point. In big cities the carsharing model is very meaningful. Or the park-instead-of-backyard. It is insane to try to own all this in a big city. It's never gonna work for _everybody_. At the same time the argument only stretches this long. You own a stove? A musical instrument? A toothbrush? Insane! You use them less than 5% of the time!!
For his blog post that's totally fine, he is trying to make a reasonable point and naturally pushes its boundaries. And look at his profile, that's basically his job. But in the comments here which just go 180 degrees against, it's less forgivable. Of course there are examples where this does not work, like those that I mention above. But they are ridiculous. His point is valid nevertheless. He makes you think, that's great. But many comments here don't do that. They just want to ramble.
And that's sad.
If you need a car adjusted for the needs of disabled persons (whether it's yourself or a member of your family), or if you want to put up a picture frame or a poster in a short-term rented room/office, then those adjustments will be treated as deviations from the norm, and "corrected" at the end of your rental term if you leave them in place.
Part of human condition is the need to self-express, and you cannot really do that with short-term rented items (and to some extent, even long-term rented items). This can discourage personalisation and customising your environment altogether, which may feel like being in a prison.
That said, I think people who have money have the right to spend it on whatever they want. It is totally valid to purchase something for the option to use it on-demand, regardless of the cadence of that demand. Why should I be discouraged from purchasing a cottage that I'll only use for one week a year to give my family a great vacation experience?
I think there's an idea here, though -- we should encourage re-use and renting things we own, but not force it. If sharing was as easy as possible wouldn't people... share more? Think about that.
Another example given is the yard. Interestingly, usage of the yard would have shot up for a family with young children during this period. Here, again, I assume the author knows that a yard is a multipurpose area: playing, lounging, working during parts of the day (laptops make it easy to camp out in the yard for part of the day), swimming (assuming a permanent pool or an above-ground pool). If you use the yard for some combination of the activities above, then you would almost certainly not be able to substitute the neighborhood park for it.
On the whole, I do not see how the 'You are not using 95%' premise itself holds here.
We overpay, sure, for extra "capacity" which seems wasteful. But when the burst demand arrives and you're not caught flat-footed (need a car now, need our online game/app to handle surge now, etc etc), the peace of mind makes it seem worth it. The entire wage economy exists to scratch this itch. Various auto-scaling strategies may creep in. But as soon as you lose business or lose an opportunity due to its lag time or "sensible" upper bound (or whatever), it is very tempting (and often makes sense) to abandon them.
Another way of saying it: "The point of life is not to min/max everything."
The tail case is often the only case that matters.
I'm not likely at all to reach anywhere near 50% even...
I wish I lived / worked places that were more walking friendly and etc but that's just not the case.
My second bedroom has become an office. I bought my first car a few months ago (after 8 years of living on the outskirts of London) and it has dramatically improved my pandemic life.
Take the example that there was a situation with your parents or grandparents that need care for several years, the guest bedroom scenario would beat the overoptimized condo scenario.
You would just need to think about one outlier event to justify the purchase.
One way to think about not overoptimizing life is that you want to be able to accommodate events you did not expect to happen (which will happen).
In this context, I commend the author.
At the same time, it seems that in addition to frugality or "non-spluring" he is advocating a life of precarity, and strong dependence on each of a bunch of commercial corporations, and this I don't like as much.
If you don't own that 95%-unused asset, then either you'll always end up paying the highest price for the equivalent service because you need it now, and this quickly becomes un-economical, or you have to plan everything ahead, at all times. The difference is just the convenience of a readily available asset.
It's with thoughts like that I think that we destroy our lifestyles.
For many, it's too costly to own a car these day, leasing the couch on airbnb may become an obligation more than a choice. While ordering from door dash since fast food is cheaper than cooking at home. We already let the plumber, electrician and whatnot take our cash for things we could easily do with a bit of learning.
If it'd be financially difficult for you to live in a city center with enough room for a guest bedroom and a garage for your car, and you really really really value living in the city center, then you'll probably sacrifice that car and guest room.
But nothing beats the convenience of walking out/down to your garage, hopping in the car, and driving off. Being able to host friends in your home is arguably more hospitable than putting them up in a hotel (though the hotel is an awesome gesture if you don't have the space). Having a (fenced, perhaps) backyard means allowing appropriately-aged kids to play outside mostly unsupervised.
If you can afford the extra expense without reducing your quality of life in other ways, then I think it's absolutely worth it, but... it is expensive, though, in money and time. I have a car, but I could probably make more than $4k/year renting out my garage space, and the cost of insurance, registration, maintenance, and depreciation adds at least another thousand or two to that. Given how little I drove pre-pandemic, I'm pretty sure a ZipCar membership, or using something like Turo, would be more cost-effective. But I know people who drive a lot more than I do, and I'm not convinced they'd save all that much (if anything) ditching the car and switching to rentals.
There's also the right-tool-for-the-job argument. My car is fine for the city and nearby. When I want to go to Tahoe in the winter, I rent a car with 4WD/AWD and snow tires. So it's not like owning a car eliminates the need for rentals, and frankly I just don't want a big bulky snow-weather car for city/local driving.
From an environmental and community perspective, yeah, using shared things is way better. Fewer cars produced and shared among more people is a good thing. Higher housing density (within limits) is a good thing, and having a guest room that sits unused 95% of the time probably isn't a great use of space. Going to a park and interacting with your neighbors is great. Riding public transit and reducing traffic and emissions is great. Those things do have a cost, though, and I think Americans especially are raised to be more individually-minded than community-minded.
>>> Ego is part of it.
The article held together well enough without the ad hominem.
Logistics is part of it. Renting a minivan in my locale takes a couple of hours, and must be planned in advance. The minivan that my family owned for 16 years wasn't exactly a status symbol, even when new.
With the schools, playgrounds, libraries, and museums closed, the city life lost a lot of its appeal. And with my office closed, WFH with kids was... difficult.
We’ve moved to a bigger house in a small town.
It’s better for now. As far as when the world eventually settles into the new normal? I guess we’ll see!
It has been a long time since I counted as a kid, but my recollection is that it was more like half an hour per day, at least. This was also the baby boom, so there was apt to be not just my brother and me but eight or more other kids there, playing kickball, tag, touch football, etc.
"Don't cross a river because it is 4 feet deep on average."
Say you weigh 150lbs, and your car weighs 3000lbs. 95% of the fuel you burn or electricity you spend is used to simply move the hunk of metal that is the vehicle, and 5% is used to move yourself. Not great efficiency by any means.
Living in the country is awesome because of the awesome things about living in the country.
Some people prefer one or the other, even to the point of thinking their way is superior.
Welcome to humans.
The guest bedroom makes for a decent storage space
A yard has aesthetic value and you might be living in an area like greater NY metro area where land is worth more than the house built on it, so it's going to make financial sense down the line.
The perspective of the author doesn't seem to come from the same background and experiences as many of the people reading the article, especially since the comparisons of the decisions they made to the "normal" are based on a very strange normal. That's fine, but it might be nice to get a sense of where they come from and what type of lifestyle their social group is living. Looks like "modo" is a canadian service - maybe canada is wildly different from the US but at least from my brief visits to metro areas in that country a significant portion of the lifestyle for the people I met in the toronto area seemed to be a lot like your typical american urban/suburban lifestyle in the US. I guess I just don't recognize the people "paying for the other 95" since I can't imagine anyone buying housing in an urban area with condos and public transit and parks that also sees property land area as purely recreational space instead of a financial investment, or people with young children that can't afford a 50k car that would think it makes more sense to rent out a minivan everytime they need to take the kids anywhere rather than get a 10 year old odyssey that'll keep running for 10 more. And I certainly can't imagine anyone that would decide to get a smaller house without a guest bedroom for financial reasons and then be so magnanimous that they're willing to pay for their friends hotel's when they visit! If they're not visiting to hang out with me at my place, why am I paying for their vacation? I wouldn't expect them to pay for mine!
That was a sort of odd touch for me. Mind you, I obviously don't know the details--maybe an old friend that he knew didn't have much money. But, yeah, I'd consider an offered guest room a nice offer but I'd never expect someone to offer to pay for a hotel if they didn't have the room.
my calculations (sorry if formatting is off)
depreciation:
13000 purchase (5y old ex-lease car)
1000 after purchase: change of timing belt + water pump etc
resale: 5y after
6000 ?? residual value
1800/y depreciation
annual maintenance:
250 (1000 for 2 sets of seasonal tires every 4 years)
1000 (insurance + road tax)
40 official checkup
200 basic service (oil, filters)
1000 ?? fixing things + parking + road tolls + tickets
2490/y maintenance
fuel (europe) 6.5l/100km diesel 20.000km annual mieage 1.3 €/l diesel (don't buy at highways)
1690/y fuel
garage 75/m (comes with my apartment) 900/y garage
total cost: 6680 €/y
total cost: 0.334 €/km
I also figured I do 500 trips during school year (40 weeks, 12.5 trips per weak)
total cost: 13.36 €/trip
This is surprisingly high. I need to find a way to make more trips :)
OK, that includes holidays in which I do half of my annual mileage (10.000km) but in the end most of the cost is fixed: depreciation + maintenance. Sadly, even at free electricity EV is not going to be much better. Only 100% ride sharing will bring a cost reduction that will influence decisions.
With high availability/robustness you'd need to invest up front, having things ready to go. But that increases your initial investment.
But I sure am glad I have my own treadmill, power cage, and car right now