Transport Mental Accounting

Buying a car never makes sense in Singapore (at least almost never). Cars are expensive, there is high tax, and then there's some COE that you have to pay. It just is expensive. If you take taxis to and from work and everything else, it usually comes out to cheaper than buying a car. We try to walk and take the MRT/bus as much as we can, but we definitely take a lot of taxis as well (though fewer now that we live downtownish).

How does transport fit its way into my mental accounting, though? I suppose this is where a sunk cost comes in. If you own a car, and you have to go to, book club, say, as I do tonight, you wouldn't think twice about driving there. You might think about ERP (where they charge you for going on certain roads at certain times) or parking, but other than that, you think it's a free ride. The car is a sunk cost. Paid for. Done.

I, on the other hand, think that book club costs me about $8 there and about $6 back (peak hour on the way there) = $14. That doesn't make sense, though, right? We don't own a car, because it's cheaper not to...so I need to lump my transport into another mental category for "not-car" or "transport total" or something, not the category for that day's activities. I'm working on it, and having MUCH shorter taxi rides by living where we live now, as opposed to on the east coast where we lived for the first two years, has definitely made my decision-making based on the cost of the night much more in favor of going out. That was a long sentence.