Budgeting for Auto Maintenance

Car Maintenance at Dick Adams Automotive Salinas

Budgeting for Auto Maintenance

Car Maintenance Everyone does their best to budget for scheduled vehicle maintenance. What’s hard is planning for unexpected car repairs.

The truth is that our vehicles can stay on our roads longer than ever before with proper maintenance. That’s because of improved vehicle design and manufacturing quality. But some of those same improvements also lead to higher repairs costs for every family car or vehicle.

There’s a tool that can be found on Edmunds.com that you can use to prepare for your service and repair budget.

Let’s suppose you have a used Toyota Camry – a very popular car in the Salinas area…

It’s now paid for and you’d like to keep it running for the next three years. You can go to Edmunds’ True Cost to Own calculator and enter your vehicle’s data. The calculator will provide estimates of what it’ll cost to service and repair your vehicle in Salinas over the next five years. The estimate’s based on where you live in CA, manufacturers’ recommendations and repair experience for your particular model.

Of course these are just estimates – there’s no way to predict what’ll actually happen to the car in your driveway, but it’s a good starting point. The calculator also has estimates for depreciation, financing, insurance, CA taxes and fuel costs.

Let’s focus on maintenance and repair in the CA area: This table at Edmunds.com shows that the average monthly cost of maintenance and repairs for our example in CA is about eighty-three dollars. That may sound like a lot, but compare it to a new car payment.

So if you set aside eighty-three dollars a month, you’d go a long ways towards taking care of routine maintenance and being prepared for the unexpected repairs that arise.

Some folks in the 93901 zip code area are afraid of what can go wrong with their older car so they buy a new one. That’s fine if you really want a new car, but if you properly maintain your older vehicle, you’ll save a lot of money on new car payments and insurance. It just makes good economic sense when times are tight.

At Dick Adams Automotive in Salinas CA (93901) we install quality NAPA replacement parts. Give us a call at 831.758.8277. To learn more about NAPA AutoCare, visit www.NAPAAutoCare.com.

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