People work out whether they can afford the instalment and forget the four other things. Here is the whole arithmetic, and the reason this site has no calculator on it.
Somebody asks us most days whether they can afford a bike, and almost everybody means one thing by it: can they afford the monthly instalment. That is the wrong question by about four hundred rufiyaa a month, so let me set out the whole sum.
Start with the part everybody does. Take the price, take off your deposit, divide the rest by the number of months. A bike at 42,000 with a third down is 14,000 paid and 28,000 spread. Over eighteen months that is about 1,556. Over twenty four it is about 1,167. Do this on the back of a receipt in front of the machine, before anybody has a chance to be persuasive.
Now understand what that figure is. It is the floor, and only the floor. A financier lending you 28,000 over eighteen months adds a charge for doing so, and that charge is theirs to set and theirs to explain. I am not going to print a rate on this page, and you should be wary of any showroom that does, for two reasons. The first is that we do not decide it. The second is that a number typed onto a website in one month is a misleading promise in the next, and the people it misleads are the ones who budgeted on it.
This is also why there is no calculator on our site. I was asked for one twice and said no both times. To build it I would have to invent a charge, a term and an approval, and the result would be a number that happens to make our machines look affordable. Send us the machine, your deposit and the months instead, and you get the real breakdown in writing from a person the same working day, with the parts that depend on somebody else clearly marked as such.
Then the four things people forget.
Petrol. On ordinary use around Malé and Hulhumalé, somewhere between 150 and 250 rufiyaa a week. Call it 800 a month and you will not be far out.
Servicing. Every four months or three thousand kilometres, from 450 rufiyaa for a routine one. Spread across the year that is under 200 a month, and skipping it costs several times more than doing it.
Wear. A chain and sprocket set every eighteen months or so, a rear tyre about as often, brake pads more often than that if you ride in traffic. Put 150 a month aside and you will cover it.
The annual costs. Keeping a vehicle registered and roadworthy has a yearly cost that depends on the machine, and insurance is a real number you arrange yourself. Ask before you buy, not after, and divide whatever the answer is by twelve.
Add it up. That 1,556 instalment is really something closer to 2,700 a month of actual outgoing. Which, for what a bike does for a family on this island, is still a good deal. But it is a very different number from the one on the poster, and the difference is exactly the amount that makes people fall behind in month five.
Work out the real figure first. If it fits, buy the bike with a clear head. If it does not, wait two months, put more down, and buy it anyway with a smaller instalment. Almost nobody regrets the second choice.
