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Even households earning $150,000 a year are struggling with credit card and car payments
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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If a median new car is 50k and used car is 30k that's a out 1k or 600 per month note alone.
Insurance is 100-200 per month plus gas and maintenance prolly another 200-300 per month so for a single adult to "drive with dignity" it costs 1k to start
Now double it for a couple and household is 2k on vehicles alone.
Makes me wonder if high school kids still get cars like people did pre covid lol
This cost structure doesn't make sense. When suburban family has to run a fleet of 3-4 cars
Insurance is way more than $100-200 a month. For my partner and I (both women with fairly clean histories since we don't drive much) to insure a 2020 Fit, it was about $2500 for 6 months. That was the cheapest we could find for basic coverage.
We ended up fleeing to Canada and importing the car. Insurance costs went down to almost 1/3 of that, a little under $2k for the year
I own and fully paid off the car fwiw
Edit: exact amount was $2493.00, after discounts
1 car two driver 2500 per 6 month... You must be from Boston
Close, NY
What does fairly clean histories mean, honestly? Over 400 a month is crazy high. Did you make claims on minor issues that should have just been handled outside of insurance, i.e. dont just factor in deductible cost but monthly increase on your premium after a claim is filed in the future? Were you getting multiple small traffic citations? One big one? Etc.
I had one claim probably 7+ years ago after a chunk of metal fell off a truck and fucked up my car tire and bumper. I was not at fault. My partner has zero. We're both in our 30s and have been driving since we were young, but we had been car-less for a few years prior to buying this one.
I've had to deal with a lot of profiling bullshit before but nothing that affects insurance. Nothing stuck either, just a lot of going to courts to clear my name.
But other than that, idk. Parking tickets, maybe?
Sorry you had to deal with all that profiling bullshit in the past that just sounds so infuriating and down right disrespectful, hopefully where you are at now you dont have to deal with that as much if at all.
As for the insurance rate, the only things I can think of is maybe being without a car for some period just increases the risk profile in their algorithm for deciding the rate. I'm not sure about the statistics for this, but maybe they also correlate having many parking tickets with people who have more accidents. I.e. there may be a study that shows people with more parking tickets tend to get into more accidents or something.
High schoolers don't l. Driver's license acquisition rates are going down too, since they can't afford to have a car
I did not get cars for my kids, that is so far out of reach. With the first two, I couldn't even let them get real drivers licenses, the insurance increase was gonna be too much. With the second set, I got an electric bike for my commute and let the one going to university use my car if she would drop off the younger one at high school and even that - one teen driver no additional car- raised our insurance by $400 a month. She paid half of it and one of her sisters paid the other half, it's down to extra $150 now she is 21. Remember - that is without adding another car, just the driver.
When I was in high school my mom kept like 2 cheap big beater cars for us (one sedan and one Suburban back when those were more like trucks) and she drove a new little red Supra. I think to buy a Suburban, a Supra, and a sedan this year would cost $170,000. If the first two were older that's still an enormous expense, like an unimaginable expense.
I can currently find a bunch of used, decent Toyota corollas in the 7-10k price range. Liability insurance should be like $50/month.
Your estimates seem quite high to me.
I have no.accidents and I pay triple that for legal minimum liability
That's wild. I pay less than $500 a year for like $100k in liability insurance. Maybe I'm just old and have a good record.
Do you have tickets?
One, red light camera. Must be my zip code
this guy was the 1k beater, 5 years ago
good job at reading
Even about 25 years ago, $1000 would get you a car without major cosmetic damage but it'd have a couple hundred thousand miles on it. You can still get that for around $3k today. I see them on craigslist right now. Where I live, minimum wage has increased 2.5x since then.
There's your beater for roughly the same number of minimum wage hours worked.
Tell 'em, boy
$50 a month where? People here spin signs saying $30/month insurance but that is not insurance. Actual liability coverage here is hundreds a month. $200 would be low.
Oh, I just checked and I was wrong. I pay $61/month to Progressive for liability on a >20 year old small pickup truck in California. $100k per person, $300k per accident, in case I crash into a pile of Ferraris or something.
The liability is $50/month but uninsured motorist insurance is most of that additional $11.
I'm paying for insurance in case I get hit by someone who doesn't have insurance? Ridiculous.
Our uninsured motorist is almost 1k every 6 months, plus bodily injury even more, the property damage coverage is not as expensive as the people damage insurance (which makes sense). It's like a vicious circle - insurance is high for uninsured but then as it costs more, more people get uninsured.
Wow, that's expensive. I'm a cheap ass. I've always had cheap, old Toyotas.
I can see how it's nice to have a more modern car but I just can't justify all the expenses. I'd rather retire sooner.
Yeah if I can keep the 2014 Honda going I will. Was going to keep its predecessor, the Civic but someone ran me into a phone pole and totalled it, in 2014.
Partly because it's manual and that's hard to find now, but I love it and it's paid off and I don't drive a lot.