How much do/have your cars cost you per month to own?

[TurboHatchback]

After reading through yet another interminable argument about finance vs ownership I thought it might be interesting to make a straw poll to see what peoples cars cost them per month and how they pay for it. This is not about running costs so I will ignore insurance/maintenance/repairs/fuel/tax etc, I'm just looking at the cost of ownership (not running costs).

I.e. if you bought and sold a car for cash then Answer = ( Purchase price - Sale price ) / Months owned

If you lease a car then it's just the monthly lease payment.

For PCP its a bit more complex but essentially the total cost of the agreement over the entire term divided by the number of months the term covers.

So for me:

1995 Fiesta Si, bought at 13yrs old. Paid £800, kept for 2 years, sold for £550. Cost per month = £10.42

2004 Clio 182, bought at 6 years old. Paid £5000, kept for 3 years, sold for £2850. Cost per month = £59.72

1988 Mercedes 560SEC, bought at 23 years old. Paid £3250, kept for 18 months, sold for £2500. Cost per month = £41.67

2006 Jeep Commander 5.7 Hemi, bought at 6 years old. Paid £8000, kept for 3 months, sold for £7150. Cost per month = £283.33

2006 Golf GTI, bought at 7 years old. Paid £8000, owned 9 months so far, could probably sell it for ~£6750. Cost per month probably around £139 so far.

I had a couple of others but they were older cheaper cars which I either broke even on or made a profit so they're not included here.

Over to anyone else who wants to contribute!

[TurboHatchback]

boroandy87 said:

Peugeot 206 - Purchased £4000 - Spent £1000 on repairs (turns our accident damaged and on the register) Sold £2200 3 Months owned So £933.33 p/m March 2006 - June 2006

I bet that stung a bit.

Abagnale said:

Current car cost 21k. Owned for two weeks = £42,000 per month. Hoping that will decrease a little.

Presumably you could sell it for more than £0 though so that isn't really valid. Unless you drove it home then set fire to it of course.

[TurboHatchback]

Willy Nilly said:

There are some very optimistic figures in this thread, I suspect most of them plucked out of the air.

I don't do many miles per year which makes the cost per mile higher, but I suspect my Jazz will cost about 45p per mile, but that is for everything, depreciation, fuel, tax, insurance and including some high maintenance costs. Didn't think it was worth putting much in for interest...

Not at all, I know exactly what I bought and sold my cars for and when I did it.

I could have asked for total cost per mile but that would require a huge of amount of calculation and remembering every penny spent over the entire ownership which is unlikely. You could include major repairs (not scheduled maintenance) into the costs which would be fair but I think the figures are interesting either way.

bentley01 said:

Two BMW M3s cost me the most. Bought new a coupe which dropped 8 grand in 11 months. This was replaced by a M3 cab which did the same. I clearly did not learn my lesson the first time around!

That's insane, I get itchy about losing more than £1500 a year in depreciation let alone £8000!