Classic cars make financial sense. Honest

THIS week, I'm contemplating starting my midlife crisis at least a decade early. How young - or old - do you have to be to own a flash convertible?

Ironically, I've been pondering this dilemma, pint in hand, because the cost of driving a family hatchback around is soaring. Petrol, the last time I looked, was a scary £1.36 a litre, but the real rise is the one which doesn't get reported very often. The cost of car insurance, whisper it quietly, has rocketed over the past two years.

There is method in the madness, and I know this because I already own one old sports car. A year's fully comp in my everyday runaround, an elderly Rover 200, is £700, which is twice what I paid for the car. Logically, you'd reason the cost of me running around in my MGB, which is faster, more valuable and infinitely more treacherous on a wet roundabout, would be in the thousands for a dangerous twentysomething like me. But it isn't. It's £150 a year.

Why? Because the MG's covered by a specialist classic car policy, which limits me to 6,000 miles a year (what I'd usually drive anyway) and classic car owners are considered by the insurance industry not to be throttle-happy hedonists, but careful drivers who lock their toys away in garages and trailer them to shows. The upshot is that the cost of normal car insurance has shot up and classic insurance hasn't.

Because I've made the mistake of being young, insurance is the single biggest car expense I have, so the idea of saving money to keep an old classic on the road rather than the Go Compare tenor on the telly is wickedly tempting. I would love, for instance, the idea of an original Mazda MX-5 in the garage, which is both old enough to be considered a classic and reliable enough to actually get you to work.

It's not even as if you need it to be a two-seater sports car either, because there's no reason you couldn't get the likes of a Golf GTi or an original BMW M5, which you can just about pretend are practical family cars, if you've got dogs or kids to haul around. Even the very first Renault Espaces, which are now well over 25 years old, can get classic cover if you ask the insurers nicely enough. Sure, they might cost you more than a knackered old banger to buy, but in most cases a carefully-chosen classic will go up - not down - in value.

All you need now is some cheap petrol to run them around on. Oh wait...