I'm just getting a wee more grumpy because of lack of xxx,
Masterbation will not kill you.
#justsayingThe car repair sucks the most.
There surely can be a tough decisions on a personal level in terms of balancing expenses and investments, and likely the decisions are more difficult before you start to get close to fuck you status.
Risking OPsec, I will say that once I bought a new Motorcycle that happened to be a three years old model that apparently did not move much.. and surely that was a depreciating asset, even though the price of it was heavily discounted, too. I did not buy a new car until around 25 years after leaving home.. I frequently would buy cars that were 3-5 years old and then drive them until they were 10-15 years old.
When I finally lapsed into buying a new car, I had done some repairs on my car and I probably even made some mistakes in the repairs, but I still considered it to be a pretty decent car that was having "emergency issues", yet since I was pretty damned busy at work, I decided to look at new cars, and even luxury cars.. and my first new car ended up being a luxury car, and I kept thinking holy shit.. I should have done this years ago.
But anyhow, at that time, I had not really considered myself to be very close to fuck you status, and I had not even known what fuck you status was, but I was getting to the point of having a networth that was starting to grown quit steadily and I started to notice that I had quite a bit of extra money that way exceeded the amount that I was investing too... So even though it was a decently large expense (depreciating at that), I felt that it was quite worth it.. and I did end up reaching entry-level fuck you status a few years later.. so even though I can proclaim that I have made some of these kinds of disclosures.. I had entered into fuck you status quite a while back.. and I will suggest, as well, that there is a quite a bit of additional comfort that comes to continuing to gain in networth after having had entered fuck you status.. as well as having extra cushions that car repairs are not likely to come up as often or to be bothersome - even though I will say that around 3 years ago, I was a wee bit irritated when my car did get hit (hit and run) in the parking lot, and I did have to spend around $1,500 to get the damned thing repaired in a kind of way that was NO WAY my fault, but it looked kind of bad to have that pretty big dent in it.
TLDR: Probably what I am trying to say is: 1) sometimes you can spend money in relatively extravagant ways before you even reach fuck you status in order to bring peace of mind and it might not slow you down very much in getting to fuck you status, 2) even getting to fuck you status does not necessarily stop guys from necessarily feeling some needs to go through some difficult considerations regarding various ways to spend money whether to buy something new or repair something and to be frustrated by some of the trade-offs, 3) surely getting higher up in the fuck you status levels would probably both cause the expense to be less of any kind of actual concern and probably if there is any kind of level of frustration towards the concerns that are being created by the repair of a used car might cause inclinations towards buying cars that are newer, under warranty and less likely to be needing to be repaired and 4) we probably can never remove ourselves completely from some of the frustrations in life when we might sometimes feel that we have to spend some of our times in ways in which we would prefer not to spend our time, and probably we should not be getting too frustrated by the money aspect - even though sometimes we still might feel some frustration if we feel that someone might be charging way more than the deserve for a good or a service.. even though it is not really much skin off of our back, economically speaking.
(even my TLDR is coming out kind of long.. fuck).[edited out]
Wait, car repair was a brake issue right? I mean, you got pads ($50) Caliper ($150) worst case scenario rotors ($220) otherwise it's just a total of 4 bolts (once the wheel is off) and a bit of well placed grease. 45 minutes work,, tops.. How does this get to be over $500? (Me thinks your mechanic might be trying to pay for their kids braces... Jest sayin') You got a jack and a set of box wrenches? I can talk ya through it...
That's another angle too.. sometimes there might be too much gouging going on, even in regards to some seemingly relatively simple and straight-forward repairs.
The other day, I asked one of my in-laws about his work, and he said that his main work truck needed an engine replacement that was going to set him back anywhere between $4k and $6.5k depending on whose services he employed and depending on if he got a new one or a rebuilt, and there were varying warranty differences in terms of some of the possible prices, too. So then I asked him what kind of problem the engine was having, and when he began to describe his "problem," I figured out that he hardly had any clue regarding what he was talking about, so of course, in those kinds of circumstances, guys are going to have troubles in both understanding what are the repairs and what are the options, and they are going to have troubles in terms of negotiating what are the various trade offs because they are not even really sure about what is the problem exactly and whether the representations of reasonable solutions are accurate either. I did not really feel like pursuing the questions about what was wrong with the engine exactly because he hardly seemed to have many clues regarding how engines work, except that he was a bit skeptical about whether it needed to be replaced, even though he was not sure about what was wrong with it or how to put into words what he was told was wrong with it, except that he was told that it was needing to be replaced. Seems that at least knowing the basics would probably be somewhat helpful.