I’ve been on vacation for the last week and so what better way to kick things off than to put my wife’s car in for a service. We are pretty good with keeping our cars serviced, so the mechanic we use always gives us their honest opinion on just how far we can stretch things before really needing to tackle them before the car has a meltdown.

So when we picked up the car last week and they told us that there was quite a number of things wrong with the car that needed to be sorted in the next few weeks/months. That didn’t really surprise me, but expected cost did ($1,200 in total) – ouch! Considering my wife’s car is only worth at most $6,000, we had some soul searching to do in regards to what our next steps were going to be. We could pay the money and keep the car running until it has another issue, or we could look at getting a new car.

The main things we considered was that the work was going to cost about 20% of what the value of the car is, the car is 9 years old and it has had a couple of other fairly major problems in the past. The other side of the thinking involved having to shop for a new car, dealing with car sales people and  spending more than $1,200 for a different car.

In the end we decided that it was time to say goodbye to the old beige bandit and look to greener pastures. In the end we decided to go for a larger car that was on sale so that we didn’t have to fork out too much money on an unplanned expense. The plus side of getting the new car is that we now have more room, we have warranty on the car and we have far less chance of having it break down on us over the next few years when compared to the old car.