That seems 100% fine to me. If you’re looking for an excuse, by all means upgrade but those numbers seem acceptable.

Wow, that’s expensive. I’m a cheap ass. I’ve always had cheap, old Toyotas.

I can see how it’s nice to have a more modern car but I just can’t justify all the expenses. I’d rather retire sooner.

Oh, I just checked and I was wrong. I pay $61/month to Progressive for liability on a >20 year old small pickup truck in California. $100k per person, $300k per accident, in case I crash into a pile of Ferraris or something.

The liability is $50/month but uninsured motorist insurance is most of that additional $11.

I’m paying for insurance in case I get hit by someone who doesn’t have insurance? Ridiculous.

That’s wild. I pay less than $500 a year for like $100k in liability insurance. Maybe I’m just old and have a good record.

Do you have tickets?

Even about 25 years ago, $1000 would get you a car without major cosmetic damage but it’d have a couple hundred thousand miles on it. You can still get that for around $3k today. I see them on craigslist right now. Where I live, minimum wage has increased 2.5x since then.

There’s your beater for roughly the same number of minimum wage hours worked.

I can currently find a bunch of used, decent Toyota corollas in the 7-10k price range. Liability insurance should be like $50/month.

Your estimates seem quite high to me.

I don’t know anything about Mac hardware, but if it’s possible to put another 2gb of RAM in there and an SSD, it should be fine for web browsing.

I did something similar for a friend. I spent about $25 on hardware to put equivalent upgrades in an old laptop that had a single core celeron processor. I installed linux mint xfce. It ran firefox fine but couldn’t quite play smooth video on YouTube. It was otherwise usable. A dual core should be workable.