Road-trip car ownership

We're planning a multi-month road trip for when we retire, and it raised a very specific question: we don't normally keep a car, so which one is worth buying just for the trip - and how much will we really lose when we sell it afterward? The sticker price barely matters next to that; what a car actually costs is the gap between what you pay and what you get back, plus depreciation, financing, insurance, registration, tires, and fuel in between.

This tool models the whole arc for a specific plan: buy the car, drive it (including that one big bucket-list road trip), and sell it later. It projects a month-by-month cost curve for every possible sale date, in both nominal dollars and today's purchasing power, so you can see the true cost of the experience and pick the ownership window where the trade-off works for you.