When you own a car (or, in my case, a truck) you have to accept that you will have to spend money on the thing at some time. And I don’t mean basic stuff, like gas, oil changes and new windshield wiper blades. I’m talking about things like brake jobs, one of which I recently paid $450 for in order to stop the shimmying that my truck had been doing for a couple of weeks every time I stepped on the brake pedal.

I didn’t like shelling over that 450 bucks to my mechanic, but it had to be done. But, it wouldn’t have been such a hit to my wallet if it hadn’t come on the heels of approximately $3,600 that I had already spent over the summer on replacing the differential, putting in some new “sensors”, fixing the bearings in one of the wheels and paying for a new radiator.

I can remember being a kid when $4,000 could buy you a new car. Granted, it wasn’t anything fancy; we’re talking something like a 1978 two-door Honda Civic with a top speed of probably 62 mph here. Now? The average new car price is something like $35,000, or about what it cost me for four years of college, and most of my 18-month grad school program, combined. When you’re paying that much for your ride (and what now can equal one year of college for your kid) you want the thing to last for a while. 

Which is why I have continued to put money into keeping my 2007 Dodge Ram 1500 Quad Cab with a V-8, 5.7-liter hemi engine under the hood running as long as it can. My wife and I got “The Beast” in 2008, about a month before our first daughter was born, and it had about 17,000 miles on it at that point. That didn’t bother me; it was a year-old truck with about a year’s-worth of regular miles on it, and it was in great shape when we got it. Besides, my previous truck, a 1992 Ford F-150, had just bitten the dust after its transmission began grinding and sounding like Godzilla ripping through Tokyo. And to top it off, we got a great trade-in value for that 16-year-old single-bench seater: $100 cash.

In addition to needing the extra room for our daughter, one of the final straws that sealed the Ford’s fate was the $2,500 price tag that would have come with getting a new transmission. No one likes taking on a monthly auto payment, but we decided that 2,500 bucks was too much to put into a truck that came out when George H.W. Bush was still President.

For that truck, we had met our limit for what we were willing to spend keeping it running. But, that was more than 15 years ago. A different time, and with many different circumstances in contrast to where we are with our vehicular situation today. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about how you get to that point when you finally say enough is enough with anything in life. It could be something as simple as throwing out an old t-shirt. A white undershirt you got from Costco and which you haven’t worn in three years that is unnecessarily taking up room in one of your dresser drawers can be a no-brainer to throw out. 

But…That shirt you got from the catamaran trip you and your wife took on your honeymoon 17 years ago? You probably haven’t worn that in a decade, or since the last time it fit over your belly. But there is a sentimentality factor that keeps you from giving it to the Goodwill, and keeps it in the back of that dresser drawer of yours. And in your mind, it’s not taking up too much room at all.

There’s also the case of my kids and all the stuff they have collected over the years. We recently cleaned out our 13-year-old daughter’s room so that we can paint it. The kid, and her 15-year-old sister, had shared the bedroom until we moved our older daughter into what had been our guest room. As part of this process, we have had to go through dozens of stuffed animals and, bins of clothes, and all kind of other, well, crap, that had taken up residence under the girls’ bunkbed. Now, we have at least eight kitchen-sized trash bags full of stuff that hasn’t been touched by human hands in years, and which need to be gone through and donated somewhere before I lose what’s left of my sanity over the ever-expanding number of such bags that have turned most of our home into a Marine Corps-style boot camp obstacle course. Our daughter has said she doesn’t want any of this stuff, and that’s good enough for me to load it all into my truck and take it somewhere, anywhere, and out of my sight and mind.

But, my wife? That’s another story. I won’t say she’s a “hoarder” but…Let’s just say that if you need a bridesmaid’s dress from 1994, or want to know what Martha Stewart was up to in her May 2001 “Living’ magazine, we can help you out. If we get rid of these bags of clothing by Memorial Day, I will call it a success.

However, none of those old things cost us anything more than space they took up. The truck, however, is another matter.

About a month ago, the dreaded Check Engine light came on. In my truck, that light is in the form of orange outline of the engine that is almost dead-red center in the dashboard. 

The next day, I drove my truck to my new best friend, my mechanic, all the while dreading how much it was going to cost to fix this latest wrong. My mechanic hooked up some sort of gizmo to the truck and told me it was the catalytic converter that was on its way out. Luckily for me, he said it wasn’t critical, and I could still drive the truck without incident, even if the check engine light came back on. Best of all, he didn’t charge me anything for his mechanical wizardry, which “reset” the thing, for now.

But…He did say that the thing could possibly cause my truck to fail its next smog check, which will come up in about six months. And if you know anything about catalytic converters, it’s that crooks love to steal them, and they cost about $2,000 for a new one. 

The way things have gone with my truck this year, another $2K in auto repairs would be just up my alley. But, I decided to let things ride as they were for the time being. Sure enough after about a week, the check engine light came back on, reminding me that what’s happening under the hood isn’t going away. The time frame between big expenses is getting narrower and narrower. At some point, I’m going to have to decide if, as my truck’s odometer closes in on 200,000 miles, it will be worth dumping $2,000 more into it.

Well…The check engine light just went off, again, and the truck seems to be running fine. It looks like that next fix-it bill can wait for another day.