Own a beater & just rent cars for travel?

[leyland]

We do it all the time. We can rent from Enterprise for $20/day on weekends and the rental car gets better gas mileage then the car we would have used. For example, on a 800 mile round trip we will save $20 in gas by renting and spend $60 for the rental therefore netting out to costing only $40 to rent instead of drive out own car. If you figure 30cent/mile to drive our own car (excluding gas which I already accounted for) then it really makes sense.

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Originally Posted by Cb Last month I made a ~2500 road trip to Austin in our 2000 Camry to get a head start on spring and meet up with some guitar buddies. While driving with the windows down & Joe Ely Live at Libery Lunch in the CD player I did what any of you would do...mental arithmetic on the economics of using up ~2.5% of the miles we'll get out of a car we bought for $8500 and will dump for ~$500 after putting ~100K on it... It seemed to me like I might be able to rent a new car with no mileage limit for less than the ~$200 I 'used up' on my trip. Well, Friday I torqued my knee and wasn't able to replace the front brake pads on the Camry, so my wife rented a car for a ~1000 mile trip yesterday. $170 for the week... Do any of you folks rent cars for long driving trips? Cb

[Dawg52]

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Originally Posted by Gearhead Jim Set of tires from Tire Rack (discount store), mounted & balanced locally, cost $1,600. Tire life is about 20,000 miles or a little less, hence the 8 cents per mile. But they stick like Velcro. Corvette with optional handling package, runflat tires. As mentioned, it's all part of the "travel experience", although sometimes the scenery is a blur. We do have to make some other financial adjustments to cover this extravagance. This is probably one of those expenses that will decline drastically when we grow up, oops, I mean get older.

Lord have mercy! $1,600 for a set of tires. A buddy of mine just bought a Corvette, I will have to tell him what to look forward to on a replacement set.

[Sam]

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Originally Posted by Gearhead Jim Set of tires from Tire Rack (discount store), mounted & balanced locally, cost $1,600. Tire life is about 20,000 miles or a little less, hence the 8 cents per mile. But they stick like Velcro.

I tried extreme performance tires once in 97. $800 for 4 tires. They lasted less than 20Kmiles. I tried really hard to feel the difference between these and the regular ones ($480/set, 40Kmiles), but could not find anything tangible.

[youbet]

We've taken several vacations in rental cars. Our fleet, at that time, consisted of older, high milage cars and I was able to find great rental deals by picking up the rental at the nearby airport. It made sense.

Haven't been doing it lately since we have a good vehicle for traveling and many of our trips tend to be more spontaneous since RE. It's hard and/or inconvenient to find those great rental deals when you, at the last minute, decide to leave a day earlier or extend your one week trip by a couple days because you're having a good time and aren't ready to come home yet.

[FinanceDude]

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Originally Posted by youbet We've taken several vacations in rental cars. Our fleet, at that time, consisted of older, high milage cars and I was able to find great rental deals by picking up the rental at the nearby airport. It made sense. Haven't been doing it lately since we have a good vehicle for traveling and many of our trips tend to be more spontaneous since RE. It's hard and/or inconvenient to find those great rental deals when you, at the last minute, decide to leave a day earlier or extend your one week trip by a couple days because you're having a good time and aren't ready to come home yet.

Excellent point....... I suppose a lot of folks got down to one car when they FIRE, so decisions need to be made. Right or wrong, I believe having ONE reliable car is a must in my life.

I have been burned before........ :P