So on January 1 – I’m rehashing my favorite articles for the year and I bring up the post from early last year where I bought myself a new car. I suffixed the article with the comment and I quote “still as pimp as the day I bought it. I’ve also had zero issues with the car since I bought it (setting myself up with that statement)”

So the following morning I’m driving my car to work when I start hearing some clunking coming from my front right tire, my car is pulling right, and my brake lights are coming on. I keep driving to work but the clunking, pulling, etc keeps coming back. The car was overdue for an oil change so I figured I’d suck it up and take it to the shop and see what was wrong. Well long story short – turns out I need two new drive shafts, a bunch of exhaust leaks fixed, something about a resonator pipe, clutch, air filter, you name it. Grand total would be about twice what I paid for the car (I paid $700)

In theory I think I would only *need* to fix the two drive shafts which would come to $387, but when you only pay $700 for a car you never really plan on doing much maintenance work on the car (at least that’s my opinion). SO right now I’m in the market for a new car (in the frugal sense of new car). If I can’t find anything in the short term I may end up biting the bullet on the drive shafts, but unfortunately it looks like I’m probably better off rolling the dice with a new beater.

So was this car a total failure and proves that you can’t consistently spend less than $1000 on a reliable car? To be honest I think my off the top of the head goal is to have the car last more than a year. If I can spend less than $1000 a year in car costs I think I’m doing ok. This is by far the shortest I have owned a car before something major happened, but I still owned the car for almost a year, only paid $700 for it and will get at least $100 back when I take it to the scrap yard. So $600 for 10 months of reliable service still isn’t the worst problem to have. The best part is I am in no way tied to my cars if something bad happens. I am in no way obligated to have to fix them and if something bad like this happens I can just laugh it off – although I really did enjoy this car and am upset that we will be parting ways so quickly.

What do you think? Am I an idiot? Should I be spending more on my cars? I only use my car to drive to work and run errands, my wife has a relatively newer/nicer car (99 Accord).