Of course! Just don't ask me to trade...

Funny but true, unfortunately. Every time I arrive somewhere without it breaking, I'm like "Phew!".

Hopefully the continued repair costs won't eat up all the initial savings you achieved when purchased!

'Fixed' is certainly a short term state of affairs with the X5 4.8.

Valve stem seals? If you've done them, you ought to mention it in the ad....

Nope, valve stem seals haven't failed yet. Yet.

SOLD
 

So the Grand Adventure begins....

SOLD - for $16k - with indications of valve guide issues the last few days. Major WTF BMW?

Looking forward to the challenge of a carless life for - no clue how long.

As a fun little exercise (OK, maybe not so fun), I figured a total cost of ownership for my X5 from May 2015 to March 2018. I factored in everything I could think of: Payments, down payment, gasoline, repairs, registration, city stickers and insurance. I also included the positive equity from the sale of the car.

Total cost for 33 months of ownership: $34,107 (Including ~$9k in gas).

Cost / Month: $1033.55
Cost / Day: $34.45
Cost / Mile: $1.04

Makes for a pretty good argument to try life without a car for a spell when I don't really even need one.

I kind of miss the car-free lifestyle. While living in Ann Arbor I took waaaayyy too long to do a suspension refresh on my E36...to the tune of 8 months. I used to ride my bike to a commuter lot where we car pooled to work. It was nice, enjoyed the exercise, and no stress about what would break next.

If I was in a proper city, particularly without space to DIY repairs, I highly doubt I'd have a car. Just rent one when I'd need to get out of the city.

I just did a quick analysis on mine after 90 months of ownership:

Cost / Month: $775.00

Quite similar. Seems the X5 likes to ramp up the repair costs just as the payments start to taper off, so it's pretty consistent.

Did you include your garage cost?

Good point, I didn't include garage but that's only like 7 months (when I was in Dallas there was no garage cost). So, maybe adds on like $20/month over the entire 90 months. I wonder if need to also include all the big repairs under CPO. That wouldn't matter as far as value to someone buying (to some extent) but for me it's "value".

Since I now only put on like 100 miles a month, my plan is to keep it another 2 years. With that mileage at that point, I won't even have 100K miles on it at 12 years old. Even if I figure $3K in repairs (which I doubt since it's just parked) over that time plus garage/insurance/gas, it brings it down quite a bit more as far as monthly cost.