mileage allowance should be upped!? - discuss

[BoredBloke]

Get a car like mine with a wildly innaccurate fuel guage. Then a tank of fuel costs a lot less (because you fill up with a third left ).

To be fair, 40/25p per mile is pretty generous and I've consistently made money on mileage expenses. It is intended to cover general running costs, yes, but that varies enormously according to the car you buy and how you maintain it (i.e. Audi dealer servicing costs a lot more than me changing the oil, filter and plugs myself with parts from ebay).

I tend to do about 15,000 to 18,000 miles per year. For that I can claim £4000 for my first 10,000 miles and £1250 for the next 5,000. I seem to fill up once a week and it is now costing £60 a week for this. Assuming I work 48 weeks of the year, then I spend £2880 on diesel alone. That leaves £2370 (or £3120 if I do 18,000 miles) per year to cover the rest of my costs. This 'profit' sounds good, but when you consider the depreciation on a car covering these distances, the servicing costs and the parts replaced due to general wear and tear, this drops to about break even if not below.

With the figures the way they are, I think there is tendancy to buy older cars and run them into the ground and skimp on the servicing as much as possible. So while the lack of an increase in these milage rates could be an argument for discouraging car useage, on environmental grounds, what it can actually do is encourage people to drive older less efficient cars which might be more inefficient due to the lack of proper servicing.

[Sockpuppet]

Just wondering though - Has anyone specified expenses in a contract before? i.e. overnight rates or mileage allowances?

Yes. Did some work for a consultancy and I specified £1/mile.

They asked me to work on a site 100 miles from home for 2 days running. Kerching.

[beeker]

bows down to sockpuppet.

Makes note for next contract...!

[VectraMan]

With the figures the way they are, I think there is tendancy to buy older cars and run them into the ground and skimp on the servicing as much as possible. So while the lack of an increase in these milage rates could be an argument for discouraging car useage, on environmental grounds, what it can actually do is encourage people to drive older less efficient cars which might be more inefficient due to the lack of proper servicing.

Though it's often reported that the majority of energy usage in a car's life is in the manufacture, so keeping older cars going is doing the environment a favour (if you believe in that sort of thing).

Of course when I said "profit" I didn't really mean that, but even at 34mpg and about 700 miles per week, 25p per mile is probably around 30% more than it actually costs me.

[malvolio]

Study the AA's figures from here

http://www.theaa.com/allaboutcars/ad...trol_table.jsp

They are saying a £20k petrol on 15k miles a year costs 46ppm to own and operate...

[Hiram King Of Tyre]

Don't forget also that with myco, you are only really paying the rate of the tax saved (say 40% of these figures). I bought a pickup truck!