My sister and brother in law tend to do that - but she has a 90 minute each way commute on the M1. They buy second hand high mileage “status” cars (because of where they live) which then tend to fail catastrophically on a regular basis. I understand the desire to pay cash for a vehicle, but it seems to me the wiser choice would be to buy a new, reliable, inexpensive car and keep it for ten years or more. If you can pay cash, great, but interest rates are extremely low right now, so borrowing sensibly is not a terrible decision. The alternative seems to be buying cheaper, old, knackered cars that then strand you on the motorway at night, in the rain, every six months or so.
I had enough of that shit in my early twenties to never want to deal with it again.
