# What a car costs per month — beyond fuel

> Fuel shows up every week, everything else arrives once a year and surprises you. How to work out the real monthly cost of a car, and why it comes out at twice what people assume.

Asked what their car costs, almost everyone quotes fuel. It is the one line
you see every week — and usually **less than half** the total.

The rest arrives rarely: insurance once a year, an inspection once a year,
tyres twice, servicing irregularly, repairs exactly when you are not expecting
them. Each of those amounts is big enough to wreck the month it lands in, and
rare enough that nobody plans for it.

## What actually goes into it

**Fuel.** The one line everybody counts.

**Insurance.** Annual, so in a monthly budget it appears as a single blow.

**Roadworthiness test.** Small, but annual and with a deadline that is easy to
forget — and driving without one costs many times more.

**Tyres.** Two changeovers a year, and a set wears out every few seasons. Plus
storage if you have nowhere to keep them.

**Scheduled servicing.** Oil, filters, pads, fluids. It depends on mileage, so
at twenty thousand a year it comes round more than once.

**Repairs.** The one line that cannot be planned, and the one that can
single-handedly exceed all the others put together.

**Parking and charges.** Paid zones, a garage, tolls, car washes.

**Depreciation.** The most commonly ignored line, because it never leaves your
account. A car worth ten thousand today and seven thousand in three years is
costing you roughly eighty a month whether you drive it or not.

## Working it out without guessing

Take **a year back** and list everything that went on the car. A year, not a
month, because otherwise you will miss precisely the items that matter. Divide
by twelve.

The result usually surprises people — not because it is high, but because it
is **twice** the figure they would have quoted from memory.

Then add depreciation: look up what a car like yours, of your year and
mileage, sells for today, and what a model three years younger costs. Divide
the difference by the number of months.

## Recording it so it stops surprising you

The problem with car costs is not their size but their **uneven spread**. The
month with insurance and tyres looks like a disaster and the next three look
like a triumph, even though the average is identical.

There are two ways to smooth that out, and they work best together.

**Recurring costs** for anything with a fixed date: insurance, inspection,
seasonal tyre changes. The [recurring costs module](/help/recurring-costs)
puts them on the dashboard timeline before they fall due and totals your fixed
outgoings — the amount that leaves every month regardless of any decision you
make.

**A category with a limit** for fuel and small stuff, since those are what get
away from you.

For the bigger one-off jobs — a timing belt, a full set of tyres, a serious
repair — a [project](/help/projects) fits better, because that kind of expense
usually arrives as several payments and does not fit inside a monthly limit.

## When it is worth working out properly

An honest monthly car cost matters at three moments.

**Deciding on a second car in the household.** People compare purchase prices;
what decides it is running cost times two.

**Comparing against the alternative.** Public transport plus taxis plus hiring
a car for trips is often cheaper than it looks — but only if the other side of
the comparison is the full cost of the car rather than just its fuel.

**Working out how much you could borrow.** The loan payment is not everything:
lenders look at fixed costs too. We cover what goes into that in the article on
[borrowing capacity](/blog/what-affects-borrowing-capacity).

A car is rarely a bad decision. It is quite often a decision taken on half a
number — and that is the only thing here worth fixing.

---

Źródło: https://ordiarion.com/blog/what-a-car-really-costs