I’m a big believer in preventative maintenance on cars. I rarely do it, but I believe in it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We paid off my 2006 Chevy Avalanche in 2009, so I’ve been driving a payment-free truck for six years. My Avalanche currently has 130,000 miles (which is amazing considering how many states it has visited) and I plan on driving a payment-free truck for many more years. Of course payment-free doesn’t mean cost-free. I drove right past the 100,000 mile tune up and scheduled both the 100,000 and 120,000 mile checkups at the same time. Back when I had one my truck payment was $500 a month, so my theory is that if I pay less than $500 in maintenance on any particular month, I’ve come out ahead. <\/p>\n

Over the past week, Susan and I scheduled the following work to be performed on my truck: two routine maintenance checkups, an alignment, a windshield replacement, and a stereo upgrade. The maintenance and alignment were $900 combined. The windshield was $300. Coincidentally, immediately after those two things were performed, my rear window stopped rolling up or down (and would not stay closed). That was another $300. The icing on the cake was the stereo I purchased from Best Buy. Cost of the stereo in the store? $149. Total amount spent after having it installed? Roughly $450.<\/p>\n

In the long run I came out ahead — we’re talking four months of car payments after not having made one for six years — but man does it hurt to spend that kind of money to (except for the stereo) just keep things running properly. I’m now driving the truck to Norman twice a week for school so hopefully this maintenance will keep things running. And now I can listen to podcasts on my Bluetooth-capable stereo during the commute. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a big believer in preventative maintenance on cars. I rarely do it, but I believe in it. We paid off my 2006 Chevy Avalanche in 2009, so I’ve been driving a payment-free truck for six years. My Avalanche currently has 130,000 miles (which is amazing considering how many states it has visited) and I plan on driving a payment-free truck for many more years. Of course payment-free doesn’t mean cost-free. I drove right past the 100,000 mile tune up and scheduled both the 100,000 and 120,000 mile checkups at the same time. Back when I had one my truck… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}