aiight so to continue from one of my previous posts i am going to opt for third party (fire and theft included), its gonna cost $380 a year, SO MUCH BETTER THAN $5000.
Indeed - now just eliminate yourself as being a possible accident factor, then you only have to worry about others, and cautious driving can minimise that as well. Also, bear in mind that in the long run (i.e. your entire life), insurance will always be a loss for you (unless you're an outlying statistic, which you assure us you no longer are
).
If it was a fair game, there would be no insurance companies, because they'd make no profit. So on average, the insurance companies must recieve more money than they pay, which in turn means that the average person purchasing insurance will pay more money than they receive.
So I guess you could say it's not even an option of risk - the average person will always be better off not having insurance, at any arbitrary point in time. The only real factor is your temporal location in this 'average' - your situation is a good example, Ammerty - you've taken a loan for your car, so presumably you don't have the money to replace it right now, hence the desire for insurance. But unless you're a total bum, I think we can safely say that you will be able to afford another car at some point in your life.
The joys of owning old, cheap cars
This is a really good point, and is something that I find myself increasingly interested in as an economics student growing up in this era of global warming, human impact on the planet etc.
So many of us are willing to trade our time for money which we spend on intangible benefits (like the prestige of owning a new car) which impart an ambiguous level of utility. But though our time is essentially free, and we are all endowed with roughly the same amount of it, the things we trade for it are not free - resources are consumed/embodied the things we get.
A question I find myself constantly asking is - do we have a responsibility to
not constantly seek to better our standard of living, as measured by what we consume? A core assumption of classical economics is non-satiation - the notion that more is always better than less. But is this a valid assumption?
Given the finite nature of resources, but the infinite time available to mankind as a species (i.e. so long as we can keep breeding, we keep producing people who are automatically, freely endowed with time they can trade by labouring etc), should we be saying "Hey, you know, I'm comfortable with this life, and I don't need anything else" more than we do now?