Freedom of movement costs $11,577 per year in the US.

An essay about cars.

Left: Living my values by selling my car (2020). Right: Abandoning my values because I am a sheep (2023).

I’ve been thinking a lot about cars lately, but not for financially or environmentally righteous reasons. Boxy new Lexus GX 550s are slowly propagating through the Denver streets as a legion of upper-class moms upgrade their three-year-old GX 460s, right on schedule. Every time one cruises by, I crane my neck around, situational awareness be damned, to admire it.

The other day, out of curiosity, I looked up the MSRP—starts at $68,335, the Lexus site coolly informed me—and fantasized about its many features for which I have no discernible use. 9,096 pounds of towing capacity? A twin-turbo V6? Now I just need to find something to tow! Look, I’m not proud, especially because I know better—the second-most-visited article on my site is called “Why Leasing a Car Is Like Setting Money on Fire,” published five years ago in April 2021, a follow-up to the almost-as-popular 2020 post “Why You Need to Sell Your Car.” Consider this a third addendum, “Why I Can’t Stop Desiring SUVs With a Third Row, Despite Myself.”

But the passing novelty of and interest in this particular vehicle is really no different than the object of last summer’s misguided attention, when I’d conspicuously circle any parked Land Rover Defender I encountered in the wild, mouth agape. The inexplicable magnetism of objects that look like what you’d get if Chanel designed tanks strikes me as a uniquely American pathology. Cars of this phylum feature prominently in a recent piece of satire¹ called “I’m Bringing the Class War to Nantucket,” in which the narrator muses about whether G-Wagons can be proletarianized:

“Certainly the masses will have the right to claim all the wealth on Nantucket that’s been stolen from them, like my Uncle’s Ford Bronco (he has one of the tasteless new ones unfortunately, a 2023). But is the wealth on Nantucket, concentrated as it is in such vulgar forms, molded to bourgeois interests, not a hindrance to the further development of the class consciousness of the proletariat? [...] Perhaps we can commandeer some of the hundreds of G-Wagons and Land Cruisers these pigs have shipped out here for the summer. The bourgeois taste for military vehicles on this island indexes their unstated awareness of the class war.”

I’m tempted to disown my bourgeois taste in this anecdote by saying something about how we’re all products of our environment—maybe I could even find an exonerating quote from a sociologist about how free will isn’t real—but instead I’ll speak for myself and admit that I’ve been susceptible to a hunky car for as long² as I can remember, a fact of my character that’s always felt a little base. Like driving a Gucci belt.

It’d be easy to interpret this as a straightforward expression of organic consumer preferences; my begrudging attraction to popular luxury SUVs proof that for all my Good Little Comrade talk of investing in public transit and the scourge of cars in American infrastructure planning, The Masses actually yearn for privately owned four-wheel drive sport utility vehicles. In that respect, my beliefs about the importance of rejecting this value system are largely normative and aspirational, an exercise in disavowing the superficial status quo and imagining a world—and self—that might be less titillated by caramel-colored leather captain’s chairs.

In April, the CFP^® and financial writer Hanna Horvath wrote a post called “The best financial advice I can give you is to sell your car.” She cites AAA’s 2025 report, which calculated the average cost of vehicle ownership and operation in America at $11,577 per year—nearly $1,000 per month—a total that absorbs a dizzying list of car-related expenses, like “depreciation, finance charges, insurance, gas, maintenance, registration, and repairs.” When you consider that most households have two cars, Hanna adds, that means freedom of movement costs the average American family more than $20,000 per year. (Freedom isn’t free, etc.) The car’s centrality to shaping quality of life in the US is hard to overstate. One of the best predictors of presidential approval ratings? Gas prices.

To construct an entire nation—the lives of hundreds of millions of people—around near-complete dependence on this costly and inefficient mode of transport is, logically speaking, indefensible. And yet despite my thorough understanding of its nonsensical premise and costs, my capacity for dreaming bigger than 9,096 pounds of towing capacity has been annexed by Big Car, which is either a testament to the power of our built environment or evidence of my weak will.

Only one in 10 Americans report using public transit daily or weekly, a quarter of whom are located in the Northeast, where our oldest cities managed to squeak out transit projects before General Motors and Firestone started poking around. Roughly half of Americans have no access to public transportation at all. Single-family zoning laws, originally devised to box out non-whites using a few surgical pencil strokes on a map, ensured that dense, mixed-use towns³ conducive to walking, biking, buses, and trains would become expensive aberrations in a sea of sprawl. A consumer desire for the best bad option, then, must be understood as a response to the primary fact that, in many parts of this country, personal vehicle ownership is a legitimate precondition for full participation in life.

Essay continued after this message from our partner…

---

Thinking about working with a fee-only CFP^® professional? If you’ve been considering working with the Rich Girl Nation-dedicated team of CFP^® professionals at Domain Money—Alicija, Sara, Chelsea, or David—I wanted to let you know about a special offer that ends next week (July 31).

Domain Money limits how many clients each of their pros works with to ensure each client receives dedicated attention that can actually move the needle, but they’re opening a handful of spots for Money with Katie readers who are ready to begin now.

If you join before July 31, you’ll earn an investment bonus:

• Becoming a member and opening your qualifying account will earn $1,000.

• Investing at least $25,000 increases the bonus to $1,500.

• Investing at least $50,000 increases the bonus to $2,500.

Your Domain Money CFP^® professional will build your personalized plan around your goals, like:

1. How much you can safely spend while still hitting your retirement target

2. Making recommendations around equity compensation and tax strategy

3. They’ll even manage your investments for you (including executing Backdoor Roth IRAs) if you’d prefer to be totally hands-off, always for a flat fee, not a percentage of your assets.

📅 Schedule your free strategy session and earn an investment bonus. Those who become members before July 31 can earn an account bonus of up to $2,500.

---

And now, back to the essay:

This summer, my Diabolical Lies cohost Caro and I decided to send our listeners money. While we typically allocate one-third of our subscriber revenue to 501(c)(3) organizations or formal mutual aid funds, we wanted to experiment with this style of redistribution in part because we hoped it would normalize seeking and receiving support even when there’s nothing catastrophic to blame, no compelling story to share on GoFundMe.

As a former-personal-finance-blogger-turned-whatever-I am-now, I noticed patterns as I read through the submissions. There were, of course, your requisite egregious medical bills and job-loss costs, dispatches sent from the desperate, populous paperwork trenches of insurance appeals and unemployment applications, plenty of cases where our flimsy safety nets had clearly failed (and more than a few requests from Australia and the UK, countries in a similar location on the Late Capitalism Spectrum of advanced financialization).

But more common—and striking—was the mundanity of the need, the requests that evinced the ordinary economic strain downstream of how the average American life is organized. Of the 271 requests, a full 10% were related to the routine money stress inflicted by owning and maintaining a personal transportation device. Sometimes our financial turmoil is in fact acute and cataclysmic; more often, it’s banal, erosive, a predictable result of servicing both the debt and physical structures of expensive, privately owned assets.

Our desires are shaped and our lives are limited, in large part, by decisions that were made for us. As Hanna points out, car ownership involves a series of consumer decisions (brand, model, trim level, financing) that create a simulacrum of genuine personal choice, like my predilection for Suburban Safari Vehicles. But statistically speaking, if you live in the US, car ownership was going to be a fact of your life whether you “chose” it or not, guaranteed “decades ago, by policymakers, developers, car manufacturers, and oil companies.” That we tend to perceive these matters primarily as questions of individual preference or personal challenge with similarly personal financial answers (“Why Leasing a Car is Like Setting Money on Fire”) obscures the fact that the most decisive factor—whether you’d need to own one at all—was never really in question.

---

• Ross Douthat, conservative Times opinion columnist whose nonthreatening aura I once compared to that of a roly-poly bug, interviewed the founding editor of Jacobin on his show Interesting Times. His questions were, at times, a little facile (do we really think we’re going to plumb new depths by asking why Luigi Mangione became a meme folk hero to the Youths?), but I got a lot out of Bhaskar’s answers. (The New York Times)

• How have I never seen The Keepers (2017) until now? The way this documentary series—about the web of abuse and secrecy that unravels in the aftermath of a Baltimore nun’s murder—builds in such a satisfying way. (Netflix)

• Cannot stop listening to this “hate that i made you love me x …Baby One More Time” mashup. Those opening piano notes could wake me from a coma. (YouTube)

Until next time!

---

💰 New members of Domain Money can earn an investment bonus of up to $2,500 when you join before July 31. Schedule your free strategy session and see if working with Domain Money’s team of Rich Girl Nation-dedicated CFP^® professionals is the right next step for you.

---

Advertiser Disclosure: Money with Katie is a promoter of Domain, a real client, and receives compensation in connection with sponsorship of the podcast and newsletter. This compensation creates a conflict of interest because it may influence the content presented, including the featuring of Domain Money or its advisors. The views expressed by the promoter are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Domain Money. This communication is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation, offer, or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. All financial planning and investment strategies should be tailored to the unique circumstances and objectives of each client. See full terms of our Investment Bonus offer here, terms and conditions are subject to change at the discretion of Domain Money.

1. Shout-out to Haley Nahman of Maybe Baby for finding this obscure little delight. Feeling personally implicated by the absurdity. Can’t stop beginning every sentence with “once me and The Masses start struggling...”

2. When I was in third grade I taped a printed-out picture of a Cadillac Escalade to my scooter.

3. I’ve spent the last two weeks preparing for our upcoming episode about Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, so my thoughts on the weight we give zoning in this analysis are mixed.