Cost to own spreadsheet?
 

Who uses a cost to own spreadsheet for their vehicles? I'm looking to use one for my new-to-me Focus and would rather benefit from someones else's efforts than fight the same fight myself. I'm looking to track total cost i.e. purchase cost, insurance, maintenance and fuel. I know it should be easy using columns for date, odometer and cost but what has me hung up is the ever evolving price/mile formula. If you want to help a slacker, please post up your spreadsheets. I swear I've seen a few on here before but I can't seem to find them right now...

Thanks,

Estimate depreciation instead of using purchase price
I don't worry about tracking it myself, just try to keep making cost effective decisions along the way

I picked up the car for almost nothing so depreciation doesn't really bother me. I like the cost per mile feature on the fuel logs here but I want to track total cost of ownership. I think I may have come up with the formula but am not really sure it works properly and I'd like to see other aspects people add to their own sheets that I am probably overlooking.

I don't really keep track of a total cost either. I have my fuel log here, and I keep a maintenance spreadsheet on my cars so I know what was done when.

Depreciation? :confused:

The entire purchase price is "depreciation!" When I decide to get rid of a car I'll get something for it, but how much I'll recover in the sale isn't a factor in which car I buy. The purchase price is spent money, depreciated away on the spot.

Depreciation isn't really a factor to me, if I used it vs purchase price of my saturn, it would affect my cost per mile by less than $0.01 / mile at this point. If you bought a $10k car a month ago, drove it 1k miles, and wanted to figure total cost per mile, after one month It would be figuring $10/mi from the purchase price alone. After a year or 2 that affect would be reduced but still there. I thought the point of figuring cost per mile was to help determine when switching to a different vehicle would become cost effective, if you figured in the whole purchase price right away, it would never make sense to buy a newer car that cost anymore than a current required repair on your current vehicle

I'm not spending the whole purchase price right away, and I buy a car estimating I'm going to get in the neighborhood of 200k miles out of it.
So while over six months I'm behind somewhat, I couldn't have made the last car legal, reliable, etc. for anywhere near the few hundred I'm "behind." I also wouldn't have the long time window of not needing repairs. That's money very well spent, regardless of how much I wind up selling the car for- I'm using it.

The last time I did the math on cost of ownership on the Black Widow (about six months ago) came in right at 17 cents a mile.
That included the price of the car, tag renewals, car parts, tires, insurance, and all the gas, divided by the total miles driven (about 20,000 miles at that time).

That's the kind of thing I'm looking for. I'm guessing you track it on a spread sheet? Would you car to share it? Basically I want to track every dollar I spend on the car to see what has been sunk into it and see how much the car is costing me per mile driven.

I created a really simple one just for you, spif!

Rock on with it, and let me know if it needs any tweaking!

Warning: If you add the "original outlay" column and immediately start to cry, switch to the "feel good" version (just don't add the original cost of the car, tags, title, etc. . . .in that column)
That will give you more of a feel for what it's costing you per mile, minus the original shell-out

I like having the original outlay included, because the cost per mile drops dramatically with every tank. ***Note that I didn't add a "payments" column.*** If anybody really wants me to, I'll drop that column in, but I didn't want to upset everybody with the spreadsheet!
True cost of ownership is a lot higher than most people realize when you're making payments!

(You may have to enable editing on the spreadsheet to use it)