We have recently found ourselves back at the mechanics. We didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on repairing it, because we want to save our money instead to purchase a new vehicle or use that money on current everyday expenses. So we wondered if we really had to get everything fixed.

After discussing it with our mechanic here’s what we found we could do:

  • our brakes were just starting to squeak and the emergency brake light was coming on and staying on when we hadn’t even touched it
    • he reported back that we need to replace our front brakes and rotors, but only needed to clean and adjust our back brakes. The squeaking was gone and after confirming there was a proper connection with the wires for the emergency brake light, that was fixed too.
  • our air conditioning wasn’t working anymore, but we decided that the summer weather is almost done for us and we don’t plan on going on any long trips so we could live without it for one more month. We knew it would be expensive to just check it out to see what’s wrong so we would avoid that cost.
  • our muffler was making a low, grumbly type sound (we said it sounded like a smokers cough) and didn’t want to have to do a larger repair later on plus we didn’t want to cause any further damage to the environment.
    • our mechanic assured us it was just a little noisy and wasn’t going to let any fumes into the vehicle or add any extra exhaust to the environment so we chose to leave that repair until later and saved almost $300 by delaying that fix
  • we had a flat tire that couldn’t get any flatter. They checked it out and luckily was able to repair it at a cost of $15. We were happy about that. But the next day the tire was just as flat again. My neighbor had a compressor to fill the air up again and it was a very slow leak so was able to go back to the mechanic that day and he looked at it and repaired it again. But then we found it flat again the next day so the day after that we brought it back in and he gave us a small discount on a new tire to replace the tire instead.
  • our heater doesn’t turn on when you set the dial to anything low, but will kick in at 4 or 5 and we chose that it was something else we were willing to live with since it had no effect on the rest of the vehicle
  • we try to stay current on our oil changes so I believe we avoided some other fixes that could have come up

So as horrible as it can be to bring your vehicle into the mechanic, with constant care and a good, honest mechanic, you can avoid unnecessary fixes/expenses associated with vehicles.

What do you do to avoid the unnecessary expenses associated with vehicles?