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Is Our Car-Owning Strategy Kaput?
Jan. 24th, 2026 10:28 amI'm still fuming about the $4,000 maintenance repair we had to make on our car this past week— a car that at 60,xxx miles is way too low-mileage for crushing upkeep costs. It's German, so yes, maintenance is expensive, but it's not British— so it shouldn't be falling apart! If this is the new reality for owning a late-model BMW, and far from an expensive BMW, I wonder if our strategy for car ownership is now broken.
Our strategy for many of our car purchases has been:
We did this with a Mazda Hawk bought many years ago, driving it from 30k miles to over 130k before trading it in. At that point it wasn't even having maintenance problems; we just wanted a nicer car. Our previous BMW convertible, "Hawkgirl", we bought at 30k miles and traded in at almost 150k because she had become too costly to maintain.
I mentioned this strategy to the service advisors at the shop this week. Their reaction was, "No, no, no, you'll be better off just leasing. That way you'll always have a new car and no repair bills. Trade it in before stuff starts breaking."
Oookay, but this is the 2020s, not the 1960s. 60k is not "high mileage" anymore! People expect cars to last well over 100k when taken care of— and routinely they do! Or did.
The notion of leasing cars and trading from one lease to the next is attractive in the sense of always having a new car and never having maintenance bills. But it also means stepping onto the treadmill of always having car payments. With average car payments running toward $1,000/month now— and 2x that if we're leasing 2 cars for 2 independent adults— that's a costly treadmill I do not care to run on!
Our strategy for many of our car purchases has been:
- Buy a good-condition used car, typically a 3-year lease return with below-average miles
- This lets someone else take the big hit on initial depreciation. At 3 years many cars have lost 30% or their market value.
- At 3 years old and in good condition with low miles, the car feels basically new
- And with low-ish miles, there's still some original warranty left, in case we discover problems in the first year or two of our ownership
- Then we drive it "until the wheels fall off"— expecting to get 10 years/100,000 miles of our own use out of it, until either it starts to become too expensive to maintain (vs. the costs of buying a newer car) or we'd really enjoy a newer/nicer/better car.
We did this with a Mazda Hawk bought many years ago, driving it from 30k miles to over 130k before trading it in. At that point it wasn't even having maintenance problems; we just wanted a nicer car. Our previous BMW convertible, "Hawkgirl", we bought at 30k miles and traded in at almost 150k because she had become too costly to maintain.
I mentioned this strategy to the service advisors at the shop this week. Their reaction was, "No, no, no, you'll be better off just leasing. That way you'll always have a new car and no repair bills. Trade it in before stuff starts breaking."
Oookay, but this is the 2020s, not the 1960s. 60k is not "high mileage" anymore! People expect cars to last well over 100k when taken care of— and routinely they do! Or did.
The notion of leasing cars and trading from one lease to the next is attractive in the sense of always having a new car and never having maintenance bills. But it also means stepping onto the treadmill of always having car payments. With average car payments running toward $1,000/month now— and 2x that if we're leasing 2 cars for 2 independent adults— that's a costly treadmill I do not care to run on!
