What exactly can you buy for £13,500?

Holy moly!

You could buy a brand new car for that and still have money left over for something else.

Which leads me to a question. How much are things really worth?

Let’s see what you can get for £13,500, starting with that car. You can get a new Corsa for around £8,000. That leaves a whopping £5,500 for you to do with as you wish.

Now, cars are essential of course, but you only ever use them for a relatively short amount of time per day. To get to and from work for instance. So even that brand new car for £8,000 starts to look like quite a lot.

What about a new computer? You can get a decent one for one tenth the cost of that car. £800 invested in a good computer will last a few years, plus if you use it daily for work, then you will see a lot of value for money. Time for some quick sums.

Say you work 9 to 5, five days a week, with 6 weeks off a year. That’s 230 days of use per year, at £3.48 a day (rounded up). Assuming you have an hour for lunch a day, that’s about 50p an hour. That’s just for the first year! If you change your computer every two years, that drops down to 25p an hour.

The car doesn’t fare as well. Assuming you drive for an hour a day, it works out at £17.39 per hour if you use it for two years, not including fuel, insurance, maintenance and road tax of course.

Wow. Shouldn’t we be spending more on our computers and less on our cars?

Anyway, £8,000 on a new car and £800 on a new computer. That still leaves a lot of money left over from the £13,500 you could have spent on the top of the range Apple Watch. £4,700 in fact. You could buy 5 £800 computers for that and still have £700 leftover. You could splash out on a tablet, or smartphone or… oh yes. A reasonably priced smartwatch.

Alan Stainer

https://www.alansitsolutions.com