For the last six months I’ve had the pleasure of driving around a mate’s Audi S5. It’s a seriously nice car, and is frighteningly fast. It’s also a very impressive car to be driving around – it turns heads. But then Chami (who owns the car) realised that his six-month stint overseas was going to be more like a couple of years.

So we had a choice, buy the S5 second-hand off Chami, or buy a VW that Trish had her eye on. How do you make a choice like that?

Here’s how we did it. The first was to add up how much of my life energy would go into the car – in other words how many hours would I have to work to pay for it (and the real number there comes after tax, expenses, etc … you have to base it on how much money is left after everything else comes out). In this case it would take about 500 hours of my life, or around two and a half months.

We then asked two questions:

Would we feel better having made that trade (ie. 500 hours for an Audi S5)?
Does it contribute to our vision, purpose and goals?

The answer in both cases was no. Our vision is to be financially independent, and spending the deposit for an investment property on a car definitely doesn’t do that. And probably because of that, I wouldn’t feel great knowing that’s what the car cost. So the VW Up! won this time around. But who knows, post-financial independence, it might be another story.
Love to hear your thoughts – how do you make big purchasing decisions? You can leave them below.