No matter where you live, spending money on taxis, grocery delivery or a car sharing service can seem extravagant. The real extravagance however may be spending €10,386 a year on a vehicle you use a few times a week.
Need to do a big shop? For a subscription of €15 a month for three months, Tesco delivers the next day, provided your grocery spend is at least €50. Impatient southsiders in Dublin living within 10km of Dunnes’ flagship store in Cornelscourt can have €50 or more of groceries delivered within four hours for free.
Taking a day trip to the beach? You don’t need to own a car to do it. Using a car sharing service such as GoCar, you can do a round trip from Dublin 4 to Brittas Bay in a Hyundai i30 on the first day of the school holidays for €76, including fuel. That’s picking up the car from any of multiple parking spots at 10am and dropping it back at 7pm. That should give you enough time to squeeze in a visit to the cousins and do your weekly shop on the return leg.
You might think you need to keep two cars with main driver insurance policies going in order to maintain your no claims bonus – you don’t. You can be a named driver only and keep your no-claims bonus, provided you swap main driver status with your partner or spouse every two years.