750 a year? Wtf is this removed smoking. Cost for land, hay storage, water, vet, and farrier. Human time cost to feed them twice a day, get rid of or spread the shit. Blanket, saddle, bridle. You’re looking at a few thousand a year minus the time sink.
Interesting, I recall a colleague in UK mention that it was costing her up to 20k a year. That was her max but not always/everywhere - would have been almost 30k USD at the time, so it sounds considerably cheaper in US but obviously a lot more land available and affordable
That link about car cost is from 2021, pretty sure inflation had a significant impact on that in the last few years too, not to mention car companies getting rid of lower end options for a while now.
Maybe if you drive a fancy new car, but an older, reliable car can be much cheaper. For example, I drive a Toyota Prius that I’ve had for 10 years, and I paid $10k for it (approximately, and cash, so no financing). I’ve driven about 100k miles, spent about $3k on repairs, and have spent about $500/year on insurance. So an estimate for total costs is:
gas - $7.8k (~45mpg @ $3.5/gallon)
insurance - $5k
repairs - $3k
depreciation - $7k (assuming $3k value if I sold)
taxes and fees - $2k (~$100/year registration + emissions cost)
regular maintenance - $500? (I change my own oil, so $20/oil change every 5k miles, plus spark plugs, headlights, etc)
tires - $1200 (changed them twice for ~$500-600 each time)
Total cost over 10 years is $27000, or about $2.7k/year.
So that $3k/year low end figure is actually a little high for me, and I ended up rounding most of these things up. I’m guessing a cheap EV could come out even cheaper.
So if you’re cheap like me when it comes to cars, owning a horse could be about 10x the cost of a car.
Cars are still the most significant expense in most people’s lives after shelter and certainly the most significant in terms of cost per actual time used.
I bought my current used car w/ cash, and it cost $10k. Gas in the first year would be something like $800 (45mpg, 10k miles, $3.50/gal for gas), and insurance would add another $500 or so. Let’s add $1-2k for sales tax, registration, and maybe some random things that need fixing, and round up, so we’re at $14k or so, or $1166/month.
I’m married w/ kids, and the USDA says I should be spending a little over $1k/month on food. So even in the first year of owning a car, I’d still probably spend more on food than the car. If I was single, divide that by about 3, so the car would be cheaper than food after 3-4 years.
There’s no way a car is more expensive than food for the average person, assuming a reasonable car and reasonable food consumption.
Logically, any intelligent person who has money problems would have bought a cheaper, used car for probably under $5,000 (though how much under depends on area). The monthly payments for that would be minimal or non-existent. You’d still have to pay for gas and insurance, but those would be relatively small costs comparatively.
Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren’t that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.
Feeding them probably wasn’t too expensive if you had a place they could just graze. Even if you didn’t own a farm, there were probably still wild / common areas where animals could graze.
Shoeing / vet care probably wasn’t as expensive when horses were the main means of transportation, so vets and smiths were everywhere
In a rural area, you probably already had a barn / stable / shack that you could use to provide the horse with shelter, so it didn’t need its own additional building. If you did need to build a structure, land was cheap and so it was only the cost of labor you had to worry about.
Cleaning out the horse poop was a chore, but it could be used as fertilizer, so it wasn’t just something you had to dispose of
You’d still need saddles, stirrups, reins, etc. But, that was made from leather and metal and would probably last decades with some basic maintenance
Since horses were, ahem, workhorses, not race horses or display horses, they were probably bred to be sturdier and not as prone to requiring medicine or frequent vet trips
It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.
I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.
Eh, it probably wasn’t bad back when everyone had them. If you were a farmer, you already had pasture for your horses to graze on, and you could trade some food w/ the local vet for medical bills. Also, since you probably needed multiple, you probably bred them with your neighbors, making replacement cost really low.
Indeed. This was obviously written by an anon who knows nothing about horses.
And that’s an optimistic estimate you’re giving. It assumes that your horse doesn’t have any issues that need tending to if you’re not a complete asshole or animal abuser.
750 a year? Wtf is this removed smoking. Cost for land, hay storage, water, vet, and farrier. Human time cost to feed them twice a day, get rid of or spread the shit. Blanket, saddle, bridle. You’re looking at a few thousand a year minus the time sink.
This article says 8 to 11k yearly. https://horserookie.com/average-horse-cost-by-state/
While cost of owning a car is between 3k and 9k yearly according to https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/.
I would have thought that a horse would be much more expensive, like 10 times a car cost.
Interesting, I recall a colleague in UK mention that it was costing her up to 20k a year. That was her max but not always/everywhere - would have been almost 30k USD at the time, so it sounds considerably cheaper in US but obviously a lot more land available and affordable
I also had a colleague in the UK casually talking in the break room if she should buy a house or a horse because they were comparatively expensive.
Had em in a poverty state 20 years ago 🤷
That link about car cost is from 2021, pretty sure inflation had a significant impact on that in the last few years too, not to mention car companies getting rid of lower end options for a while now.
Maybe if you drive a fancy new car, but an older, reliable car can be much cheaper. For example, I drive a Toyota Prius that I’ve had for 10 years, and I paid $10k for it (approximately, and cash, so no financing). I’ve driven about 100k miles, spent about $3k on repairs, and have spent about $500/year on insurance. So an estimate for total costs is:
Total cost over 10 years is $27000, or about $2.7k/year.
So that $3k/year low end figure is actually a little high for me, and I ended up rounding most of these things up. I’m guessing a cheap EV could come out even cheaper.
So if you’re cheap like me when it comes to cars, owning a horse could be about 10x the cost of a car.
Almost all of those problems are solved by your local park.
Vet costs can be reduced by the skillfull application of healing stones.
horse sick? get a new one
Yep. Once upon a time, you had to be very wealthy to own a car.
Now it’s horses.
Cars are still the most significant expense in most people’s lives after shelter and certainly the most significant in terms of cost per actual time used.
I’d say food is a bigger expense for many, depending on how much they drive and whether they’re paying the car off.
If you include all groceries, so pet food, toiletries etc, I’d spend more on groceries than my car most years.
Exactly.
I bought my current used car w/ cash, and it cost $10k. Gas in the first year would be something like $800 (45mpg, 10k miles, $3.50/gal for gas), and insurance would add another $500 or so. Let’s add $1-2k for sales tax, registration, and maybe some random things that need fixing, and round up, so we’re at $14k or so, or $1166/month.
I’m married w/ kids, and the USDA says I should be spending a little over $1k/month on food. So even in the first year of owning a car, I’d still probably spend more on food than the car. If I was single, divide that by about 3, so the car would be cheaper than food after 3-4 years.
There’s no way a car is more expensive than food for the average person, assuming a reasonable car and reasonable food consumption.
Logically, any intelligent person who has money problems would have bought a cheaper, used car for probably under $5,000 (though how much under depends on area). The monthly payments for that would be minimal or non-existent. You’d still have to pay for gas and insurance, but those would be relatively small costs comparatively.
I doubt that owning horses has ever been cheap either.
Playing Red Dead Redemption makes me think that at one point they weren’t that expensive if you lived in a very rural area.
It was probably similar to cars today, where some people had expensive, fancy horses that they spent lots of money on, and other people had old clunkers that they got cheap and then rode until they died.
I get the impression that when people today talk about hoses being expensive, a lot of that expense is due to them living in a city. My guess is that if you already live on a working farm, adding one horse is not going to massively increase your expenses.
Eh, it probably wasn’t bad back when everyone had them. If you were a farmer, you already had pasture for your horses to graze on, and you could trade some food w/ the local vet for medical bills. Also, since you probably needed multiple, you probably bred them with your neighbors, making replacement cost really low.
That sounds like a huge cost, though less money is used to abstract it.
Indeed. This was obviously written by an anon who knows nothing about horses.
And that’s an optimistic estimate you’re giving. It assumes that your horse doesn’t have any issues that need tending to if you’re not a complete asshole or animal abuser.
Yeah but horse
Important argument many fail to consider
He said to keep it alive, nit to actually care for it in any meaningful way.
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