WWYD: Repair, Upgrade, or Buy New?
The last two days have offered me several opportunities to meditate upon the question – when something isn’t working as it should do you sink the money into repair or upgrading
it? Or, do you just scrap it and bite the bullet and buy something new? It isn’t always as cut and dry and I might like.
First scenario involves the lovely necessary money pit known as a vehicle. Kim’s 2000 Honda Civic is on the cusp of some real pricy repairs. While it has been a “good” car she has never been a big fan of it. It just never measured up to the comfort and fun to drive factor of her old Toyota Camry (this was a Camry before the Camry became a mid-size car and the Corolla became their compact car model). My opinion of it is that it has been one of the most uncomfortable cars I’ve ever ridden long distances in. Other than a Subaru which I can’t even drive because the seat and wheel can’t be adjusted in such a way that it fits my leg length and body angle. The Civic falls in the list of cars I’d never drive again if I didn’t have to.
That being said, it has been a reliable car with good gas mileage and low repair costs other than the usual preventative maintenance. Earlier this year Kim started entertaining the idea of getting a new car sometime soon. With all her job hunting and my recent layoff, the idea of taking on a car payment seemed more painful than just driving the car a little longer. Yesterday, however, she learned that there are some big preventative maintenance activities coming up at 100,000 miles that will be very expensive. Tune ups, timing belts, and similar things that will bring the damage to around $1,200-$1,500 dollars. So, now we’re resting with the question – do we sink that much money into a car we don’t like and want to get rid of as soon as possible? Or do we bite the bullet and shop for a new car? If we choose to look for something new, will it be better to buy used or new? Do we take a step up to a mid-size car that is at least comfortable or do we stick to the little matchboxes she has owned in the past (and I fold myself up into) because they are clearly less expensive? Given the fact that we tend to drive our cars until they have at least 100,000 miles on them we need to pick something that we will at least like and that will serve us well for a number of years.
The second scenario involves my PC. I have a desktop I purchased in March 2004 which I use for my business activities and personal stuff. It is slower than I like, but overall it serves my needs. As I embark on full time self-employment, I will be using it even more. I’ve been beefing up my web design and development work and decided it is well overdue that I update some of my development software. While I can do just about anything the hard way, I decided it doesn’t make sense to me or my clients to continue to do so especially as I get more and more interesting internet marketing work to do. That’s where the ‘what do do?’ question came about this week.
The software packages I need (a huge pretty penny in and of themselves) require that I have more RAM on my PC than I currently have. While I have a brand new laptop, it is not the right tool for the design work I do because of the screen layout. That leads me to the question – do I upgrade the memory on my PC and hope it serves me well for another year or do I take yet another monetary cliff dive and buy a new one?
After much thinking and pondering, when it comes to the PC I decided to suck it up and buy the additional RAM for $105 and install it next week. I feel fairly confident that it will allow me to get another year out of this machine. And, it is not just the money to consider but also the painful migration and re-configuration issues that happen every time I get a new machine. Last year when I did a clean install of Windows to solve irreparable performance problems I thought I’d lose my mind getting everything back up and running. In this time of transition for me, it is just not the right time to be re-tooling my technology. Only time will tell once I get the memory in and the new software installed.
These little (and sometimes not so little) decisions crop up all the time in life. There is always a choice – Do I repair? Do I upgrade? Do I limp along a little longer? Or, do I bite the bullet and buy new (maybe even buy used)? It is not only the hard dollars and cents that go into the decision but also the environmental impact of the whole “throw away” thing and the personal time needed to research, purchase, and set up new stuff in our lives.
So, I’d love to hear — What do you do? What is your thought process for making these decisions? Let us know in the comments…
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Paula Gregorowicz is the Comfortable in Your Own Skin(tm) Coach and you can learn more at her website www.thepaulagcompany.com and blog www.coaching4lesbians.com .
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Have you considered buying a keyboard and monitor for your laptop? A docking station is nice but not strictly necessary.
I have this problem with a $400 TV that stopped working shortly after it went out of warranty. The repair shop wanted $100 to look at it, plus the cost of parts and labor if there was anything they could do about it. I dithered for a long time and wound up buying a used TV for $25 off of a local community mailing list.
In general, IMHO new cars only make financial sense if you are going to keep them for their full usable lifetime (as I have done with my 1997 Outback). Some people say there is a sweet spot at the 2 year old mark, as many leased cars become available at that time. I’ve only purchased one factory fresh car (which I still have) – the others were all used models and were perfectly acceptable. I didn’t have any of them for 10 years though until the Outback.
A Honda Civic is a compact car! I’d have put that at mid-sized myself. Things are different on the other side of the Atlantic.
Actually it’s not just a choice between repairing and replacing. There’s also doing without, finding a replacement, borrowing or renting when needed, and probably more I’m not thinking about.
Interestingly, I also have an old Civic I’m not fond of (1991: automatic seat belts, you need two hands to lock the driver’s side door when you leave, and other annoyances). Normally I would just suck it up and hang onto it until it’s dead (many, many more years, I’m afraid), but the AC cannot be fixed to work in 99-degree weather, which we have for two months every year. This means my boyfriend won’t ride in it, which means we ride in his gas-guzzling truck instead; that’s no good. Replacing the AC with a modern one is very complicated and thus expensive and thus financially stupid. So I’m looking into getting another car, though I really hate car shopping.
(A 2000 Civic with less than 100,000 miles on it sound good to me, even if it is maintenance time!)
Normally when something is no longer working the way I like, first I spend way too long dealing with it in its annoying state. Then I often re-evaluate whether I even need such a thing at all. (With the car, I’ve gone without a car for years, but I much, much, much prefer having one if I can do it affordably.) I try to think what the item helps me achieve and try to think of whether I still want to do those things. I try to brainstorm all the ways I can achieve those goals and then evaluate the pros and cons of each choice.
I kind of do this with little things, too. Like I keep wearing holes in my socks. I do still want to have socks, but do I keep buying them from the same place? Is it because I like my shoes loose? Because my favorite store is getting worse socks and I should buy more expensive ones? Finally I think it’s because I started getting all cotton or mostly cotton–now I’m going to make sure there’s something stronger in there, too.
I had a Toyota Echo that I bought in 2000 – it had about $140K miles on it, and I had paid it off in 2005. I did routine maintenance on it: oil changes every 3-4K miles, paid attention to tires, etc. I had a couple of minor things to fix/replace over the years, but certainly I spent no more than $600 or so total on non-maintenance activities. Then in April I had an accident and had to get a new car. I ended up getting the new Honda Civic (which is OK) – but I loved my Echo. The head and leg room was amazing, it got 35 mpg if you drove 70-80 mph, and you could stretch it to 40 mpg if you drove 65 mph or so. They stopped making the car in 2004, and replaced it with the Yaris. I would say look into a 2003 or 2004 Echo if you end up going with a used car. As long as they’ve been well-maintained, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be in great shape. I intended to keep mine at least another 5-10 years (or as long as it ran).