When it Rains... It Really Pours

We have three working cars (and one project car).

One of our cars is 15 years old, but still runs pretty well, and more importantly is, paid off. We have not done any work on this cars since 2011 (what?!?) and so we brought it in to have several small, and a couple big, problems taken care of. The total came to $1900. Of that, we had $1700 in our car repair fund, so we only had to come up with an extra $200 to pay the bill.

Since then, it’s started pouring.

That was our “extra” car, and has been for about 3 years, ever since my husband got a new car.

Because we have really liked the flexibility that having an extra car has given us, we felt it was worth the money. In retrospect, I wish we would have waited.

Read on.

Last weekend, in preparation for our upcoming trip to Las Vegas for The Daughter’s dance competition, The Husband went to replace the brake pads on my daily driver car, where he discovered that in addition to the new brake pads, my car needed new rotors and new struts (whatever those are).

He called around and the lowest quote he found for having the work done was $1000.

He decided to do the work himself. We were able to order the parts for about $375 and then we had to pay $180 to have it aligned afterward because the new struts pulled it so far out of alignment. That still worked out to a savings of $450.

Then we had even more rain.

The alignment shop let him know that our power steering fluid is leaking and that the repair will be $1500.

As our car repair is literally tapped out right now, we decided to forgo that repair for now and instead stocked up on power steering fluid so we can fill the reservoir as needed.

I’m bummed, but The Husband is really bummed about it.

It’s really messing with our (meager as it is) debt repayment!

Currently, we have $0 in our car repair fund. We will continue to fund it at $100 a month and any left over gas money each budgeting period will go towards car repair too. Hopefully before too long we can get some money in there so we will have a little cushion.

It’s very disheartening to go from $1700 to negative thousands of dollars in just a short couple weeks. I understand The Husband’s “depression”. I guess for me the hardest part is that we elected to have the work done on our old car when if we had just waited awhile, we would have had enough money to pay for the needed repairs on my car.

Having said that, the reality is that I’m glad we have 3 functional, relatively reliable, cars between the two of us. Hopefully we will be done with car repairs for a little while and we can build our envelope back up!

*Since writing this, we have driven my car to and from Vegas without any issues, so that makes me happy. I was afraid we would have some problems on the road that would cost even more!