this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Anon takes the horsepill (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.

Now it's horses.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Cars are still the most significant expense in most people's lives after shelter and certainly the most significant in terms of cost per actual time used.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I'd say food is a bigger expense for many, depending on how much they drive and whether they're paying the car off.

If you include all groceries, so pet food, toiletries etc, I'd spend more on groceries than my car most years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Exactly.

I bought my current used car w/ cash, and it cost $10k. Gas in the first year would be something like $800 (45mpg, 10k miles, $3.50/gal for gas), and insurance would add another $500 or so. Let's add $1-2k for sales tax, registration, and maybe some random things that need fixing, and round up, so we're at $14k or so, or $1166/month.

I'm married w/ kids, and the USDA says I should be spending a little over $1k/month on food. So even in the first year of owning a car, I'd still probably spend more on food than the car. If I was single, divide that by about 3, so the car would be cheaper than food after 3-4 years.

There's no way a car is more expensive than food for the average person, assuming a reasonable car and reasonable food consumption.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Logically, any intelligent person who has money problems would have bought a cheaper, used car for probably under $5,000 (though how much under depends on area). The monthly payments for that would be minimal or non-existent. You'd still have to pay for gas and insurance, but those would be relatively small costs comparatively.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I doubt that owning horses has ever been cheap either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren't that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.

  • Feeding them probably wasn't too expensive if you had a place they could just graze. Even if you didn't own a farm, there were probably still wild / common areas where animals could graze.
  • Shoeing / vet care probably wasn't as expensive when horses were the main means of transportation, so vets and smiths were everywhere
  • In a rural area, you probably already had a barn / stable / shack that you could use to provide the horse with shelter, so it didn't need its own additional building. If you did need to build a structure, land was cheap and so it was only the cost of labor you had to worry about.
  • Cleaning out the horse poop was a chore, but it could be used as fertilizer, so it wasn't just something you had to dispose of
  • You'd still need saddles, stirrups, reins, etc. But, that was made from leather and metal and would probably last decades with some basic maintenance
  • Since horses were, ahem, workhorses, not race horses or display horses, they were probably bred to be sturdier and not as prone to requiring medicine or frequent vet trips

It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.

I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Eh, it probably wasn't bad back when everyone had them. If you were a farmer, you already had pasture for your horses to graze on, and you could trade some food w/ the local vet for medical bills. Also, since you probably needed multiple, you probably bred them with your neighbors, making replacement cost really low.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

That sounds like a huge cost, though less money is used to abstract it.