> * Cars - it's a lot harder to save when you're basically forced to spend $250-$600 a month for basic transportation. You might point out that there are alternatives, and there are, but in the US it means paying a TON for rent in order to live in one of the few nice neighbourhoods in the country.
As a soon-to-be resident of the NYC metro area, I was shocked to discover that the monthly costs of those alternatives effectively added up to a car payment.
Perhaps the car payment, but consider: fuel, depreciation cost (almost always overlooked), insurance, parking, and maintenance.
If you can live without a dedicated car (taxi, Uber, car-share, rentals), it's often a surprisingly affordable option. The critical loss is in the flexibility of auto-based transport, though again, that hinges greatly on the alternatives offered by the location.
Humans existed without cars for nearly 200,000 years.
> Perhaps the car payment, but consider: fuel, depreciation cost (almost always overlooked), insurance, parking, and maintenance.
Well, depreciation is irrelevant if I consider the entire car payment a sunk cost. Anything I get for selling the car is a bonus. Otherwise yes, there are additional costs.
> If you can live without a dedicated car (taxi, Uber, car-share, rentals), it's often a surprisingly affordable option.
That is the part that hinges on location and the trade-off between transportation costs and domicile costs.
> Humans existed without cars for nearly 200,000 years.
Humans existed without cities for about 197,000 of those years, but I'd rather not go back to that.
As a soon-to-be resident of the NYC metro area, I was shocked to discover that the monthly costs of those alternatives effectively added up to a car payment.