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A while back I wrote about how I budget for auto maintenance and why that is a part of our budget that I think is really smart.  Anyway, I finally took my car in to get the transmission flushed, fuel injection service done, and an oil change.  My father-in-law is the manager of an auto parts store, so we got a discount on all of the parts ($85 for synthetic oil, filter, transmission fluid, fuel filter, etc) and he has a friend who has his own shop so we took it to him for labor.  He only charged us $60 to do all of the work, so even though I had to sit there for 3 hours waiting for the car to be worked on, I was completely fine with that.

When you take into consideration that most mechanics charge $65 per hour for labor alone, this was a great deal.  Just a fuel injection service costs around $90 (plus labor!).  So we saved a lot by buying through my father-in-law and giving a family friend some extra business (since he just took over the business recently).

That’s the good news.

There’s also a catch.  While he had our car up on the hoist, our friend noticed that the brake pads were worn through and our tires were bald on the inside. Now, I knew we would be needing new tires before winter, but it didn’t occur to me that our brakes may need to be changed soon.

So after some phone calls, we will be getting all four tires replaced for $509.16 (this is really cheap considering if I had gone through a commercial tire place, each tire is $160, so a total of $640).  We’re saving $130.84 by going through our family friend! (If you’re wondering why our tires are so expensive, we drive a Pontiac G6 GTP which has 18 inch tires.  Not cheap.)

Our brake job (to replace all four rotors and all brake pads) is going to cost us about $180 (that’s $130 for parts and another $50 for labor).  This is a savings of about $320 since I heard him quote another customer on the phone today just under $500 for a brake job.

Now.  That’s the bad news…that we needed more work done than we originally had planned on.  Which obviously meant more money.  So when I went to go transfer money from our online high yield savings with HSBC to our brick and mortar so I could pay for everything, I had originally planned on using the $245 I had left in our auto savings account and then taking the rest out of our emergency fund.

I happened to check my email right beforehand and just received an email from my college that I was getting a refund of $450. So with the refund and the $245 I had already saved for car maintenance…we don’t have to touch our emergency fund!  This makes me incredibly happy!

So even though we had an additional $700 in auto maintenance thrown at us just since this morning, I didn’t freak out or anything because everything fell into place.  And yes, I would’ve taken the money from our emergency fund if I had to because riding around on bald tires and bad brakes is obviously just NOT smart.  Obviously.

And we’re saving at least $450 on our brakes and tires by using our resources and knowing the right people! (That doesn’t count whatever we ended up saving this morning on our oil change, transmission flush, and fuel injection service…which was at least another few hundred by my count.