Rogue

Having a look at my income vs expenses it looks like I might maybe just a little bit perhaps be able to afford that car of my dreams.

Follow up:

However, it does result in me having to tighten up the purse strings a little bit. Currently I'm probably spending about $150 a week on food. Added to $120 a week in rent, $18.90 a month for phone line, and $50 a month for Internode's net.

If I were to buy the 2004 RX-8 at $54,000 it looks like it's going to cost me around $500 a month in insurance (approximatly $5,700 a year). Add to that the likelihood of paying around $1000 a month against the loan or whatever for the car it adds up to about $2700 expenditure a month. That's dangerously close to my income.

Now I'm going to need to pay for fuel as well, so at $1.30 a litre for fuel (premium unleaded) with 12.6 Litres per 100Km consumption based on an average of 1000Kms per month (excessive, but averaged with trips to Victoria and Adelaide) I'll be spending approximatly $163.80 per month on fuel.

That takes it up to $2862.30 per month of expenditure.

So to budget for that I'm going to need to severely cap how much I spend on variable costs, like food and the inevitable impulse buys. So if I spend no more than $100 a week on food (by actually cooking and so on, not every second meal dining out) I can get an extra $200 back into the budget. That money can go into the savings which will be eaten up eventually by the servicing on the car I imagine.

The other possibility is that I get the car insured in my parents name, which I'm not too keen on. Although I imagine it would probably drop the insurance costs a great deal. However since I'm not exactly a proven driver, all it would take would be one bingle to completely ruin my parents flawless insurance claim record.

Now to help things out what I could also do is something I swore I never would; get a second job. If I get a weekend job someplace doing something simple (cashier/salesperson at a store maybe) then I could earn probably around $18 an hour or something. I don't know about that figure but it's what I used to earn at Safeway in highschool. Given a 5 hour shift I could earn an extra $90 a week, which given a 33% tax rate would give me $60 extra cash in my hand each week. That's roughly $237 a month (given shift availability) which would at least pay for the fuel.

Hmm... thinking, thinking.