Quote:
Originally Posted by anghrist
Simple math at that point.
1) Calculate total cost of repair.
2) Calculate time it would take for the cost of 1/3 reduction in fuel mileage to equate to cost of repair.
3) answer the question, "Will she keep the car for that amount of time or longer?"
4) If yes, then cost of repair is worthwhile,
5) If no, then the relatively lesser cost of 'extra' fuel due to mileage reduction does not justify the repair.
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If you're really OCD, you should also apply a discount to the future cash flow provided by performing the repair. Based on the time value of money, a string of future payments is worth less then the equivalent cash in hand today. So if the repair costs $5K today, you need to save comfortably more than that number over the coming years to economically justify the repair. Lots of calculators on the web make it easy to compute the value of a string of payments.