The cost of driving a used car

Doing some math with six years of receipts for our used Mazda MPV....

To preface the numbers, we bought this car used, a few thousand miles past the warranty expiration, and we quickly learned that Mazda's engineers had gotten rather good at engineering parts to just barely survive the warranty period.

Total repair costs (not including oil changes and the like), divided by months of ownership:  $212 per month.  It needed a repair once every three months, on average, although actually there were more in the first few years than in the last few.

One of those repairs, though, was a transmission rebuild.  Taking that out, repair costs per month would have been $172 per month.

Purchase price minus the sale price when we sold it, divided by months of ownership, equals $90/month. Purchase price alone, $119 per month. (We paid all this up front, in cash.)


This why I allot $200/month for car repairs in our budget, and try to keep enough savings on hand to cover a major repair (or most of the price of a new used car).