Find a Mechanic You Can Trust

While I’m hiking I am posting some of my posts from two years ago when most of you weren’t reading this blog. This post originally appeared in May 2007.

This is probably the best way to save money on car repair. I needed to get my car repaired last week because it was running poorly and getting terrible gas mileage. That is never good but it is especially bad with the current gas prices. The first shop I took the car to told me the problem couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was and they would need to run diagnostics to determine the problem. I didn’t want to do that so I took the car to a second shop. They thought the problem could be as I thought but wanted to run diagnostics to see if there were any other problems. After running the diagnostics they told me it would take $430 to do the basic repairs and there was a total of $1200 of repairs that needed to be made. My car is worth $1000 tops so there was no way I was going to put that kind of money into it.

I ended up driving three hours to the mechanic in the small town where my mother lives. He had done repairs for me in the past and I was always pleased with his results and the cost of his services. He fixed the car for $140 and it now runs fine. I’ve had a dramatic improvement in gas mileage as well. Since I do delivery as my main job the gas savings will soon cover the cost of the repair. Even when I figure in the cost of driving three hours each way I saved a significant amount of money over what it would have cost me to have it repaired here. And I don’t think the total cost of driving there should be added to the repair since I also got to visit with my family and take care of some other business while there.

In conclusion when you find a reliable and honest mechanic stick with him. You could easily save hundreds and perhaps thousands in repair costs over the life of your vechicle.