Rethinking our mobility

When considering financial independence, one thing becomes clear very quickly. Mobility is an important part of your expenses. Of course mobility is often a necessity to even get to work so, it's an expense needed to generate income. Mobility is an expense that can go from very low to very high easily. A big culprit in causing this dynamic level of cost is car ownership. Cars are simply really expensive to own. Unfortunately it also seems to be society's norm for mobility. Luckily we live in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands cars are not entirely the norm. It's not unheard of to use a bike or even take public transport. However, these forms of transport, Especially outside the biggest cities, are still mostly used by teenagers and kids

Current situation

We don't live in a big city and often when my work requires me to go to a different city. Often these cities aren't close enough to be able to use a bicycle. Those distances require motorized transport. Be it public transport or privately owned. This is the main reason we ended up with 2 cars. We both had jobs that required us to travel a distance to high for a bike.

Having a car is great. You are always able to go anywhere you want. Want to visit a friend in another city? no problem. Need to go to a meeting 60 kilometers away? no problem. Need to give a friend a ride? no problem. Having 2 cars means you can both do these things at the same time.

After a while you get used to having 2 cars. You start abusing them for the wrong purposes. You get lazy. Need to get groceries from the store that is a 5-minute walk? Take the car. Need some supplies from a store that is a 10-minute bike ride away? Take the car. Have a new job with an office next to the train station? Take the car. Once you have a car you get used to it and you feel obliged to use it. Often it feels easier and faster than the alternatives. Sometimes it even is, only feeding the idea.

COVID-19 helped us notice how often we really need the car. With work from home orders the cars started getting less and less mileage. It even made us realise that even though my partner stopped working we still kept the extra car. This left us with 3 bicycles, 1 motorcycle and 2 cars. which is absurd for just 2 persons. Curious what all this was costing us we listed the expenses.

We knew up front that an Audi A8 is an expensive car to own. So this was no shock. What shocked me was the grand total we would spend every year for 30000 kilometers of travel. Nearly 12000 euros. It's massive. That's even with favourable division of kilometers. In reality the kilometers would be more skewed towards the audi.

Even though we spend this much money a year on mobility, we still have moments where our options are lacking. With some regularity we miss having a tow hook that we did have on previous cars. The luggage space in the Audi isn't small, but it's often not high enough. Also long items are hard to transport because the seats don't fold down. Usually we just cary items with the suzuki swift with the seats down. It fits nearly the same amount but allows for bigger items.

Also transporting the dogs is a lot easier in the suzuki because they can easily go in the back. They have ample space to move around and lie down. In the audi they only have the rear seat to lie on. Which doesn't give them much room to move around, and it requires regular cleaning of the seats.

Moving forward

So all that's left to do is decide what our situation should look like. We decided on a few things we want to keep being able to do.

• We want to keep going on walks with the dogs in the forest.
• We want to be able to visit friends and family.
• We want to be able to get big items into our home.
• We want to be able to get to work locations.

When going over these requirements, we noticed that they rarely overlap. Most of these events are done together. Requiring only 1 car.

What if they do overlap? What options do we have left? On most occasions we can take an alternative to the car. We can use a bicycle, the motorcycle or public transport.

There we be times that those alternatives won't be enough, but it's a rarity we can accept.

So in the coming year we will be selling our Audi. We will be keeping both suzuki's as we expect this will help us cover most of our mobility needs. Perhaps in the future we will replace it with a slightly bigger car, so we can carry more and bigger items