For the last 15 months I've been car-free. In that time I've also moved out of home, about 10 miles away from work and my parent's place. I have a sizeable mortgage in a HCOL on a median salary, so the purse strings are pretty tight already, but I've managed to make double mortgage payments each month partly due to being fairly lean (home-cooked meals, flatmate and no car).
I've been bike-commuting pretty happily to work and back for the past year, enjoying the guaranteed baseline exercise and de-stress. Compared to the 8-9 hours I am at work, the 1h 15min of bike commute is very manageable. I'm in the best shape I've been in my whole life.
For context, I'm a teacher, so I have a few 2-week breaks during the year during which this routine is disrupted, and I find it a bit of a pain being car-free:
- to pop into my parent's place for a short visit takes 1.5hrs round trip.
- unlike riding before 7am, the traffic is much worse during the middle of the day.
- riding during the midday hours means more wind, harsher sun.
- short visits to work to do planning or photocopying are less likely to happen with a 1h 15min round trip ride (that's going hard on a road bike).
- transporting heavy textbooks to work is a bit of a pain using a backpack.
So I almost gave in and started looking at second-hand moustachian vehicles.
I hit a major bottleneck - for the bare minimum knock insurance, compulsory injury insurance (this is Australia) and registration, a used $3K Yaris/Echo/Corolla banger would cost me something like $1.5K a year in fixed costs, before adding on fuel, maintenance and repairs. I couldn't justify it when for 44 weeks of the year I function perfectly happily without a car. There had to be a better way. I think I've found it.
I'm now renting a car for the second week of my break. It's a near new Toyota hatchback and costs me $21 a day with a $2K deductible in the event of an accident.
I love driving a near-new vehicle, new-car smell and everything, but I get to hand it back before I worry about keeping the birdshit, sun and scratches off it. I won't have to move my bikes around to make space for it in the garage either, because what do I care if it sits outside? And instead of redrawing a few thousand off my mortgage offset account I fought hard to build up, I can use pocket change from a side gig to pay the weekly rental. I could, if I wanted to, rent it out for 10 weeks before it approached the annual fixed costs of owning a beater second hand car. More likely, I could myself renting 4-6 weeks a year during breaks.
Anyway, just wanted to share. I think this is an awesome solution for a single moustachian who wants a car for leisure use during specific periods but doesn't need one to commute to work.
