Dinner at home last night was sweet. Gotta love Mid-Autumn . . .
. . . anyway, depressing money story ahead . . .
Brought my Subaru into the shop today to get its 120,000km servicing. Now I went in knowing fully well that this was gonna be an expensive service; apparently 120,000 is important like that. But then, naturally, while the car's in there, they find all the other problems with it. This is going to hurt my bank very badly in the next little while . . .
Alright, so from the top . . . the "big service": $336.69
And then apparently I agreed to a full power steering fluid flush: $109.98
I also had another thing I wanted to get checked out involving my starter or something. They diagnosed that: $83.30
Diagnosis is that my OEM neutral switch assembly is getting bonked. Part is fairly cheap but needs to be shipped in from Toronto and will take about a week. If I want it, I need to pay for that now. That said, that wasn't quite the problem I was worried about, but I think they picked up on that one later. Meantime, cost of the neutral switch: $38.63
And then of course, as you all remember, I had an incident last spring. To wipe away the final vestiges of my memories of smacking the hell out of my fender, they can also order in a front-right side marker for me: $48.50
So total cost of today's services and orders (including labour): $738.40
So that's essentially one paycheck. Gross. And it's still not done yet . . . I've got a bigger problem . . .
My head gasket is cracked. It has been leaking oil and coolant. This is the kind of thing that will kill a car if not fixed. On top of that, it's going to be about ten hours of labour to fix it.
Oh yeah, and my starter is pretty stuffed right now too. I'll probably need to replace that too.
Their quote also mentions costs for replacing my holed fog lights. I think that is a $489.73 I can afford to hold off on for now (I inherited those fog lights, actually). So yeah, screw the fog lights. For now, anyway.
Add to that the cost of labour (including for all those fun bits I still have to install that areflying in from Toronto) . . .
. . . to fix this other stuff, we're looking at an estimated total of about $2500-$3000. Unless that includes the fog lights, in which case it's $2000-$2500.
Either way you slice it, that's essentially half of all my liquid assets to my name, if not a little more. I think I'll be poking my parents for a little bit of help on this one this week. It's actually a little funny because there have been a few times I've kinda chewed them out for always wanting to cover my costs since I live alone. I want to pay my own way, take care of myself, y'know? Well, they always say to ask if I ever need anything, and I always say "if I have anything, I will."
I think I have something about which to ask for help now. Maybe they'll be happy in that sense.
Probably not.
FML.
