I am not a member of the 1% by any means, but one key to my personal financial stability has been not owning a car for the last 21 years. People shell out enormous amounts of their income to buy, lease, maintain, repair, replace, and park personal vehicles. And that doesn’t count what you are paying in terms of your home value, property taxes, and gas taxes to maintain all that car focused infrastructure out there. Nor does it count injuries and deaths due to crashes (well, to some extent you pay for that through your car insurance and health insurance), and certainly not the costs of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes due to the opportunity cost of driving relative to spending that same time on some form of physical activity. Finally, people and nature are paying the costs in terms of air and water pollution and heat in more abstract ways (pain, death, knowing ecosystems are being destroyed) if not in dollars.

And of course, for many communities people choose to live in, that personal vehicle is absolutely necessary to get to jobs, school, and put food on the table. I’m just saying where you choose to live is a choice, at least in the longer term. If you want to live in a less car dependent community, you may not be able to change your situation overnight but you could set a goal to change your situation say within 3-5 years. Anyway…

This Jacobin article (which is an unapologetic socialist magazine?) has some interesting facts and figures on what Americans are spending on their private cars.

The country just crossed over a critical threshold last month: 5.1 percent of car owners are at least ninety days delinquent on their loans. This is almost touching the record high of 5.3 percent, reached during the nadir of the Great Recession in 2010. Young people are unsurprisingly hardest hit, with 7.5 percent of car-owning Gen Zers delinquent. The trend for all is upward for the past eight quarters — and expected to continue.

Auto insurance rates are up 56 percent in the past five years; car repossessions are also at post-Recession highs, at 1.73 million so far this year; and car repair costs popped 32 percent in the past two years alone, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s new tariffs. In 2023, a Federal Reserve Bank survey found that car repairs won out over rent, mortgage, health care, and food as the cost that Americans were most concerned about.

Consumers have responded to all this pressure by extending the terms of their loans to decrease their average monthly payments. Yet interest rates have kept rising. The average American is forking over between $550 and $750 a month on their car note, a number that used to be a monthly rent a decade prior. Today 20 percent of all newly originated car notes are over $1,000 a month, and you’d be mistaken to think that only the top income quintile is represented in that number.

$500-1000 per month is a lot of money, and I think that is just the loan payment.