When taking out a car loan, it’s easy to dread the possibility of failing to make full repayment in time. Life is riddled with unforeseen circumstances and your financial capability can easily take a wrong turn as soon as you procure the loan. While you can get up to five years to settle between £1,000 and £25,000 of debt in most cases, the costs of running and maintaining the car can eat deep into your means to repayment.
But there are ways you can finance your car without having to worry much about repaying a loan or claiming back the lump sum you relinquished to procure the car. The one currently trending in the UK is car sharing.
Why Would Someone Share Your Car?
- Because they can save nearly £3,000 yearly by using car sharing instead of an own car.
- Because for every shared car, about seventeen privately owned ones are removed from the road and there is a growing need to minimise congestion and emission in many cities.
Why Should You Share Your Car?
The answer to this is also simple.
- You can save on the expenses of running your car and also make money by letting other drivers use the car. You can then put the money into repaying your car loan.
- If car sharing is not a viable market, why then are manufacturers like Ford and BMW joining the race?
Here are the two ways you can share your car:
- You Offer Paid Lifts
During each rush hour, there are around 38 million empty seats on roads in the UK. To repay your car loan, why not make the most of the opportunity the empty seats offer?
You can join car sharing clubs like Liftshare and Blablacar, where car owners driving to work or travelling can be connected with passengers going their direction. With this type of car sharing, the driver and the passenger share the cost of the journey. This isn’t really based on profit, but on the expenses that you can claim on the journey. The claimed expenses can then count towards repaying your car loan.
For instance, with Blablacar, you can claim around £30 from your passenger on a trip from London to Edinburgh and £8 from Bristol to London. For the sake of avoiding exaggeration, if you make £10 per day giving people lifts on your various daily drives, you would claim around £300 in a month and £3,600 in a year. In five years, it could mount up to over £18,000.
- Let Other Drivers Drive Your Car
Study shows that an average car is parked for 95% of its service life. For you, this means that your car is (or will be) idle most of the time. You can make money with your car during those idle periods by sharing it with another driver. This can sound scary for most car owners, but the truth is that if you join car sharing clubs like EasyCar Club and GetAround, your car benefits from their insurances against theft and physical damages.
By sharing your car with other drivers, you can make around £3,500 per year. That’s £17,500 in five years. With that, repaying your car loan becomes easier.
If repaying your car loan isn’t a good enough reason to share your car, then do it because you are environment conscious and would love to see less congestion and emission in the world.