I've Paid About 48¢ Per Mile to Drive My Car

I've owned my car now for over 8 years.    In that time I've just now hit 70,000 miles total.   I paid a little over $14,000 for it in 2007 and its worth around $4000 today.

I'm estimating my expenses but I'm probably pretty close in my estimates.    I figure this is likely correct within 10%.    I just don't have detailed accurate records of everything I've spent for 8 years, so I'll have to estimate.

The depreciation I figured using the current private party sales estimate value from Edmunds versus what I paid originally 8 years ago.

I figured gasoline costs based on using historical numbers for our city off of Gasbuddy.com     Those numbers are going to be a bit inflated since they're using the city average value and I pay below average prices for my gas.    For example right now the city average is about $2.90 and the station I go to has gas for $2.71.   

The costs for insurance, oil changes, tires, repairs & maintenance and taxes are all estimates based on my memory and there is more margin for error in these categories.  

Lastly I added a figure for the opportunity cost which is based on figuring 4% interest on the original ~$14,000 purchase price over 8 years.  I'm pretty sure I could have made 4% with that money.

Here's the summary of costs over the years and the totals :

depreciation	$     10,000
insurance	$       5,600
gas	$     10,182
oil changes	$          560
tires	$          500
repairs/maint	$       1,500
tax	$          400
opportunity cost	$       4,544
TOTAL	$33,286
per mile	$0.476

So the total cost there is $0.476 per mile or roughly 48¢.

Thats more than I'd have guessed.      

If I'd done a very quick almost off the top of my head calculation I think I'd have come up with about 30¢ per mile cost.   That would have been based on the $10,000 in depreciation, figuring "a couple thousand more for other stuff" and then guessing a price of $2.70 for gasoline.      I would have underestimated the cost of insurance and the opportunity cost.   And I apparently remembered the price of gas wrong over the past eight years, most likely because my memory is biased towards what I paid last week for gas more than 7 years ago.

--