Is A Car A Necessity?

I read a lot of personal finance blogs and one thing that they all seem to agree on is that to save money, you need to cut back on everything but the necessities. But what exactly are the necessities? Surely they differ for everyone. Someone may consider their gym membership a necessity if they desperately need to get fit whereas others may think it is simply a waste of money. Others may think that a car isn’t a necessity but again it depends on the situation. Today I want to talk about if a car is a necessity and what my personal take on the situation is.

Picture the scene. Back in 2013/2014, we had a Hyundai i30. It was a great car but we were considering upgrading to a new one shortly. Steve’s friend needed to get to his sisters urgently so Steve took him and on the way there, the engine blew. Costing ££’s to fix which we didn’t have at the time, his friend eventually took it from our garage to keep at his and look for an engine. In the meantime we used Steve’s mums car. A tiny little Peugeot 206, it really was a squeeze to do anything in it. We were really struggling if we wanted to take our parents out due to lack of space and we definitely needed the upgrade. At this time, we had managed to give our friend some money to find an engine with for our Hyundai but unfortunately nothing was on the scene.

With our car completely off limits and Steve’s mums car on its last legs, we had to think about our options. In our case…was a car a necessity? For transporting me and Jack anywhere ..no, not really. There was always public transport. For Steve to get to work? Yes. At the time he worked even further away than he does now and he definitely needs his car to get to work now! We had to weigh up our options. We’d given our friend most of our available funds to search for an engine so there was only one real option for us if we didn’t want to be left without a car – a car on finance.  We just didn’t have the available funds to get a vehicle that would fit our needs- while you have to be careful of mis sold car finance, it can be incredibly useful in times like this if you go about it in the right way.  We had the bonus of Steve’s mum allowing us to use her car for a part exchange (she could no longer drive and we drove her to places anyway so it was in her interests for us to have a decent sized, well running car), so we knew what we needed to do to ensure we we weren’t left without a car.

In our case, a car is definitely a necessity – and I think that for the most part, it is for most other people too. Whether you’re like us and need your car for the commute and taking out elderly or disabled parents or whether you need it to take your kids across the town to school, a car is probably a necessity for most households.

What do you think?

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