The reason I traded cars from my Simca to the Gremlin was that the driver’s side of the Simca had been destroyed in an accident. (It’s a long story, but it wasn’t my fault, REALLY! Even if I did get the ticket!) So when I sold it, sans doors, for $150 to a guy who was going to make one good car out of two wrecked ones, I felt really bad about losing such a good car when I had paid so dearly for it. (Well, $850 was a lot of money to me then.)
In his usual wisdom, Dad gave me a rule of thumb for finding out if I was getting my money’s worth from my cars: “If you were renting, you’d gladly pay 5¢ per mile for the use of the car, right? Well, determine how many miles you drove it, then multiply that times the 5¢ per mile and see if you’ve come out ahead.” Using this logic, I figured some 20,000 miles or so that I’d driven the car, did some quick math…
20,000 x $0.05 = $1,000.00
and figured out that I would have paid $1000 in this “rent-it” scenario. Having paid only $850 for it, I felt pretty good. I had MADE $150 on the deal, and still sold it for an extra $150, making a total of $300 profit overall! Not bad for a college sophomore.
Today, you could probably use 25¢, 35¢ or even 50¢ or more to do the same calculation for your purposes, or if you really want to feel good, call up the car rental agency and ask what it costs to rent a car like yours. It won’t put money in your pocket, but it will make you feel better about the money that left it.
At this point, you would by now expect some correlation to how many miles you get on another person and how to multiply it times some figure to see how satisfied you should be with your spouse or friend. However, I’ll let you figure your own relationship on this one and save my reputation to get you to read on from here. So, just use this one to feel good about your car.