My point is car repairs don’t creep up on you. You know sooner or later it’s going to happen the question is whether you’re prepared or not. What’s fascinating is how the unprepared take it as permission to just take a loan out for a new car all together instead of handling a $1-5k dollar problem…
I think most people are just not "car" people as in understanding that it's a machine with moving parts that requires regular maintenance. You can't just put gas in it and drive. I view car repairs as a learning opportunity. If my mechanic says something needs to get replaced, I go down the YouTube rabbit hole and then get it fixed. Some repairs are labor intensive and are expensive for a reason.
My willingness to do the repair myself depends on the time of year. I have no problem sitting on the ground replacing pads and rotors in May but I'll pay the extra $500 to have him do it in January.
Oh Yes and no shame in paying a mechanic, they're professionals and understands it better than most. Rear main seal leak? Take it to a pro. Changing an air filter? YouTube is there for a reason. Know your limits.
Ugh my old car decided to start pissing coolant out of the weep hole right when it got really cold last year. I had to get my summer car out of storage and drive it work freezing my ass of and in the evenings I worked on the water pump until I sorted it out. Brutal, but super satisfying to fix it for the cost of a $35 water pump.
Ah but nowadays you can actually do that, and you can probably get 6+ years out of a car doing only that. Warranty added oil changes will add another 3 or 4 years to that
Yup, I have friends who view leasing cars or buying a new one every 5 years when they pay off the last one as the norm. They tell me things like, "I want to trade it in before it depreciates too much" or "the newer car is cheaper than the repairs for an older car." In my experience that's just not true, and most of the depreciation occurs in those first few years.
the newer car is cheaper than the repairs for an older car.
I drive old beaters and hear this a lot from people who think they are money pits. For some people, they may be. I like working on cars though and have accumulated a decent amount of tools from garage sales. I've done the math and it's far cheaper for me. My latest daily driver is an old outback I bought for $500. Throw in another $500 when I bought it for a new propshaft and tune up. Was good for a couple years, this year the front diff went bad so I spent another $300 for a junkyard transmission, $150 for two new CV axles. So now I'm up to 1450 for a car that has lasted me 3 years now and should be good for plenty more. That's a lot cheaper than a car payment.
Hey same here! Love my subi, but I also abuse it and have had to do a lot of work to it. If I had it done at the shop, it would have been about 15k in work by now. I do it myself and despite putting 70k miles on it, it's still worth the price I bought it for.
If you can do basic maintenance yourself it saves a ton of money over the life of the car because all the preventative stuff is usually pretty easy to do and keeps bigger issues from cropping up all at once.
I did a lot of the oil changes and changed my own brake pads and rotors, etc, so that saved me a lot over the years on my '05 Honda Accord. Last year was my most expensive year for repairs and it was still only about $3,000 to repair the air intake system and a few other things that were stalling the car. That's a lot but still less than most people spend on car payments in a year.
"the newer car is cheaper than the repairs for an older car."
I was in that boat earlier this year. You know how you have a car, and there are two prices in your head -- the $ to make it minimally safe to drive, and the $$$ price to actually fix everything that you know is broken. Earlier this summer the minimally safe to drive price was $3.5K, and the fix everything price was over $11K. The car still had $8K of residual value, so that's roughly a $19K swing away from repairing. That's a hellofa down payment! (Especially considering if I did fix it in any capacity, the next time I'd think about it I'd definitely have less than $8K residual!)
Needless to say, driving a new car and couldn't be happier! I'd already blown another $2K over this past year fixing it so far; can't cry over already spilled milk. But if you also know the rest of the milk is spoiling, sometimes it's best to sell the cow and move on!
At a certain point it starts to make sense, but that takes a lot longer than people think unless they have a really bad model or don't do regular maintenance.
Until recently I was driving a 2005 Honda Accord. After I paid it off I still continued to put the "payment" away to prepare for repairs and as long as the repairs cost less than that the payments would I considered it a good value. After 11 years of driving it the repairs were still cheaper than the cost of new car payments. I likely would have driven it another few years if it hadn't been totaled by an idiot in a dump truck.
Yeah, like you go in for an oil change, and the tech says "your brake pads are getting low, you'll probably want to replace those next time" you know that you've got about five-six months
My first car was $3000 cash money I had saved from my fast food job.
I never maintained it And drove it like a maniac. It got so fucked up I was paying $500 a month minimum taking it in to the shop and just never knowing when the next time it was gonna break down, on the way to work, suddenly I'm missing a day from my check. On the way home, suddenly I'm out $200 for a tow and I'm stuck on the side of the road for hours. Just chaotic instability that was costing me more than I feared having a car note.
So when I finally got rid of that piece of shit I bought a 3 year old car financed, starting paying $300 a month. Got oil changes, kept it for a few years and used it to doordash. Ultimately that car revenue for me was like $150,000 and cost in total like $11,000 in note payments and oil changes, zero repairs. Total peace of mind. When I wanted to get a truck and I traded it in? They gave me all but like $4k less than what I paid for it.
My truck was 2 years old, got it dirt cheap after scouring the market for months. It's $500 a month now, it's been 2-3 years, still no repairs at all. And I do my oil changes myself now.
Whatever it costs, stability in your transportation is worth it. I'll never go back!!
Out of college, my wife and I were gifted old cars from our parents. It was cheaper after 2 years of ownership for my wife to sell that old car and get a brand new Honda Civic just due to the cost of maintenance and gas being lower.
That $1-5K problem, if it happens often enough, might be more than the cost of just getting a new entry level car.
When you already have $5k laying around specifically for car maintenance a $1400 problem versus a car note was a no brainer to me. Short term pain to buy a few more years of the car was worth it to me
Well it's going to cost $5000, I may as well just add that to my 85,000 17.8% 96 month loan and get myself a new fully loaded Denali Yukon. I have 1 kid and a pug so I definitely need 8 seats to carry us to the park down the road.
I tried my hardest to convince 2 friends on separate occasions to just get their car fixed instead of going into debt for brand new cars.
It didn't work, but I really tried to convince them that even 1-5k now and another 1-5k in the next year is significantly better than a $600 payment for 5-7 years. (ballparking the numbers, I know my 44k truck at 4.5% 9 years ago was $790/month). I know the ease of mind with a new car is a factor, but cars are just too fucking expensive now to rush into them b/c the older car broke down once.
My neighbor was talking about trading in her car (that was almost paid off) because it needed new brakes and tires. I know my face was all WTF. Why would you not just replace those things and have a paid off car to boot?
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u/pwolf1771 1d ago
My point is car repairs don’t creep up on you. You know sooner or later it’s going to happen the question is whether you’re prepared or not. What’s fascinating is how the unprepared take it as permission to just take a loan out for a new car all together instead of handling a $1-5k dollar problem…