Lightbulb moment - cars

Once in a while I'd blog about my personal life in here.

Yeah, if you've been reading this blog, you may realize that I'm sort of pining for a car right now.

As a family man, I find the idea really appealing, especially when I take my family out. The population of Singapore these days is at crazy levels and jostling for space on the MRT for example has become somewhat of a rugby game. With a stroller in tow, shopping bags and a bouncy 18 month old boy, sometimes we can't even get on board when a train comes, because there is simply no space.

On hindsight, driving a car isn't really any better. Replace 'scrumming with other people' with 'scrumming with other motorists on the road'. But it'd be nice to have both options available. You won't know if you're not in my situation and I don't know how to explain it any further.

I remember back then someone saying to me when I told her that we (my wife and son) were taking a cab home after a family dinner. She said, " I used to always take the bus with my sister and all her kids and all the stuff when we were in Perth."

Trust me. Perth: big space. Population: 200 (not true of course). Singapore: 710.3 sq km. Population: 5.08 million. Not apples and apples.

So yeah I've been doing my research. Been at it perhaps since July 2009. I tried to keep my criteria simple at first based on price. Noob! And then as I learned more about cars I also started considering other criteria like economy, transmission, seat material, boot space, rim types, OPC vs normal plate, etc etc.

Owning a car in Singapore is expensive, so I guess right now it all boils down to 'value for money'.

This morning it just occurred to me to question myself again about the 'OPC vs normal plate' argument. In the end I told myself, hey if I could get a normal plate car which has a yearly road tax of about $600, I might as well go get it, since every other yearly costs like COE and insurance are going to be the same anyway be it an OPC or normal plate car.

Consider this:

OPC car: $20 tax each time I want to drive outside of regulation hours. Imagine if I were to do that twice a month for the whole year. That'd be $480 a year. And add $70 to that for the new yearly OPC scheme? $550.

Normal plate car: The yearly road tax differs from car to car, but I've checked, and there are almost new used cars out there that appeal to me that have $600 or less yearly road tax. For example the Picanto, Kelisa and Aveo.

Does that make sense to you?

Whatever the case, I made a pact with my wife to only get THAT car earliest on December 2011. So yeah, meantime, I'll just keep learning more about them. I've no choice anyway.

My current SgCarMart search criteria note to self:
For cars with 9 yrs of loan left - $27500
For cars with 8 yrs of loan left - $25000
For cars with 7 yrs of loan left - $22500
For cars with 6 yrs of loan left - $20000
For cars with 5 yrs of loan left - $17500
For cars with 4 yrs of loan left - $15000
For cars with 3 yrs of loan left - $12500
For cars with 2 yrs of loan left - $10000
For cars with 1 yr of loan left - $7500

PS: Hmmm... based on this criteria, financially at the current economic conditions, the only reputable cars I can afford are perhaps, COE cars.