Car Next Door, a car expense calculator, has revealed that Australians spend significantly more on their cars than they thought, with many car owners unsure about how much money they’re blowing on things like registration, fuel, insurance, tolls, and depreciations every year.
Nick Jungfer, 27, and his partner Maddie Rhodes, 26, ditched their two cars after moving from Adelaide to Sydney and experiencing a dramatic increase in their cost of living.
“When we moved to Sydney, we were looking at paying almost double the rent we were previously paying, and we needed to find different ways that we could save money. It just made sense to ditch the cars, which we couldn’t afford anyway,” Jungfer said, as reported by news.com.au.
The car sale left the couple with enough money to buy a new laptop, pay for a trip to Europe, and save a new home deposit. After some calculations using Car Next Door's calculator, the couple realised that they shelled out over $70,000 in the four years Rhodes owned her car and two years Jungfer owned during this time.
Car Next Door's online cost calculator tracks car expenses such as registration, insurance, service bills, parking, and depreciation. It determines what you spend on your car and compares it to what your money could have been used for.
Car Next Door founder and chief executive officer Will Davies said finding out the average Australian car costs was a “real eye-opener.”
“Cars are one of the biggest expenses we have, and when you look at all the outgoings like registration, fuel, insurance, tolls, and depreciations, they quickly become a huge financial burden,” Davies said, as reported by news.com.au. “The amount of money spent on cars that are parked 95 per cent of the time is just mind-blowing. We end up enslaving ourselves to these vehicles.”
Car Next Door has reported a 245% increase in customers during the COVID-19 pandemic as Australians seek ways to save money, with over 12,000 people joining the platform every month.
“Months of working from home and hybrid work situations, along with rising costs of car ownership, financial pressure, and economic uncertainty, have been a big motivator for this change,” Davies said.
