I just read this article about a guy who has bought a brand new Cadillac every year since 1955. Yeah, he has bought a brand new car every single year for over 50 years. Gulp! That’s insane. Why would anyone do such a thing? Such an enormous waste of money.

I thought, I need to write a post about this. I could talk about how you should always buy a used car and then drive the wheels off. Maybe I could even run some numbers and show how much money this guy has wasted by doing this. So I started, and it turns out it’s not quite the money pit I had originally thought. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s expensive. It’s not the most frugal thing in the world here, but it’s not the eye popping extravagance I was thinking at first.

I found a website that shows the depreciation of the Cadillac DTS that he buys. It says that the 2007 model depreciates $8,000 the first year and $5,000 the second. So it’s only an extra $3,000 in the first year verses the next few years on average. Plus the cost of whatever the increase in price from last year’s model to this year’s model was. Which from what I can find is about $1,000. So we are only talking $4,000 a year. Which while that is a lot, it isn’t so bad if it’s your thing. If this is what you want to spend your money on, which apparently it is for him. His wife says he saves up all year to be able to afford the new model. So that shows he willing to cut corners in other places in order to be able to have this one thing.

It brings me back to what I was talking about with the healthy budget. Even though this guy does what is unthinkable to most frugal people, it’s still within the framework for a healthy budget. The new car is this guy’s chocolate cake. He is frugal all year so he can have this one big splurge.