Several months ago, I had an interesting thought concerning the actual cost of working on my car. Back at my old apartment, I had the option to rent a garage for an additional $75/month on top of my rent for the apartment. I never took this option because I was too cheap for that sort of thing, and had managed for years to get by with brushing snow and scraping ice off my car during the winter. But it occurred to me that assuming this price was the same across other apartment complexes, it means that having garage access at an apartment costs roughly $900 per year. In other words, if you want a garage space in order to work on your car, you need to be saving $900 from the effort each year just to break even with the cost of the garage, and you need to be saving more money from the effort for this to actually be worth it.
This makes me wonder how much work you need to be doing on your car for it to be worth having a garage attached to your house, if you own a house. How much work do you need to do every year for the cost of a house with a garage to be a better deal than the cost of a house without a garage?
Now, there are plenty of non-financial reasons to have a garage. I can vouch: not having to dig your car out of ice every morning in the winter is BEAUTIFUL. It is AMAZING. This garage here pulls a little bit of heat from the house, too, so even when it’s freezing in the winter, my car doesn’t quite get that cold.
But this is especially interesting now that I work from home full-time. Not having to dig my car out of the snow is a small luxury on days I simply want to go do something early in the day.
I do have the option to continue renting from my friend wherever he moves, and that’s probably the route I’m going to take, but when I wasn’t quite sure this would continue to be an option, I started to think about this. After all, before our old roommate moved out, I didn’t really have access to the garage here, but I did have access to my parents’ garage, for the handful of things I needed to do on the car. With my parents planning to move out of state, I had to start asking myself what I would do about working on my car. If I needed to get an apartment, I’d have to pay for the garage, meaning I would need to be doing over $900 worth of DIY savings each year to offset the price of the garage in the first place. Similarly, if there is a discernible difference in price between houses that have a garage and those that don’t, people who own houses have to ask themselves how much they are paying for the luxury.
This is fascinating to me.
If you owned a house but it costs an additional $60,000 to have a garage, it means that, not only would you need to be saving the equivalent of $60,000 + interest over the course of the mortgage in DIY car savings, but you would also need to calculate the opportunity cost of that money invested, which, using the 4% rule, would be $200 per month, inflation adjusted, basically in perpetuity. But I don’t actually know how much a garage adds to the general cost of house (I suspect other factors make a bigger difference).
Over the past year and a half, I’ve probably saved several thousand dollars doing things on my car (largely preventive maintenance), but how much more will I need to do going forward? Would these future projects theoretically pay that $900? [I’m technically paying $50/month for this garage space, but half the garage would otherwise be empty if I just parked outside, and my rent is already pretty cheap, so it would have been pretty silly to decline and keep parking outside]
I’ve heard over the years that it’s helpful to run your life like a business. I think there are some limits to this, but I do believe it’s important to keep these things in mind. There are all sorts of luxuries that are baked into the “American dream”, but people often lose their shit when they find out that these things actually cost money. But I think things like this really add up. And, I hate to say it, but if you don’t do any work on your car at all, the non-financial benefits to having garage space are hopefully worth the price you pay, whether you live in an apartment or a house, because those non-financial benefits might be costing you a lot. If you can live with that, great. Again, having a garage space is awesome. Just know it comes at a price.
I still love my car, but it’s never lost on me that a car is one of the most expensive things you will ever own.
These ideas can easily be extrapolated to any hobby that requires some form of capital, be it space, time, equipment, etc.
[I should briefly mention, most apartment complexes forbid automotive work on site, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t sneaky ways to pull it off sometimes, if you are efficient and can avoid detection, though I don’t necessarily condone this. As for houses, sometimes all you need is a driveway that allows you to get the car off the street, and as long as there aren’t any neighborhood/HOA rules preventing this, you can go to town. I don’t believe this negates the principles I’ve hinted at in this post, but it may simply mean that saving money requires some creativity, which I highly approve of]