Monday, June 16, 2008

The Tires Cost How Much ?!?

Sometimes I feel like a Whack-a-Mole. Every time I think I have everything figured out and we are on the right path, a big rubber mallet hits me in the head and knocks me back down. This time the rubber mallet was the tires for our car. Let me explain...

A few months ago, we bought a used Camry. It only had 22,000 miles on it, and it didn't even occur to us to check the tires. I hate to admit it, but we got swept up in the excitement of car-buying. Anyway, the tires were pretty well shot and we knew we were going to need new ones in the near future.

Leaving that part of the story and moving to another simultaneously occurring storyline...

When we bought the Camry, we already had two cars. One SUV that we have had paid off for a while, and another car which will be paid off in the next couple of months. It seemed gluttonous to keep all three, but we use the SUV to transport our dogs who have pretty much destroyed the back of it. So, we kept all three and were paying insurance on them all.

Well, this bothered me. I asked around and found out that it is legal to transport dogs in a trailer (I know how weird that sounds, but desperate times call for desperate measures). So, I decided to sell the SUV and use the money to pay for a small trailer and new tires for the Camry. This way, we save money on insurance every month and get a couple of big expenses paid for as a trade-off.

So, I put the SUV on craigslist and within the first 24 hours it was sold for $1,300. This couldn't have come at a better time because the day before, one of the tires on the Camry had blown out.

With our $1,300 in hand, we went to Sam's Club to get new tires that very night. The tire department was closed for the day so that was a little deflating (pun intended). We started looking for tires anyway, and could only find one match and it was $180 per tire! Apparently, that year of Camry has some very rare tires. After shopping around, we found someone who had off-name tires for about $600 total. Everyone else was around $800 by the time the tires were mounted and so on. It bugs me that we are going to have to go through this a couple more times when the car gets older, but it is the only way.

Meanwhile, trailers are expensive, especially enclosed ones. I did find a little utility trailer from Home Depot for $500, but it doesn't have any kind of a box for the dogs to be in. I may end up buying it and making a box for them, but my wife thinks that will be pretty ghetto...and she is probably right.


Oh well,

"Sometimes you gotta take what life gives you, cause life is like a mop. And sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and things and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes life sticks to the floor so much that a mop, a mop, it's not good enough. You gotta get down there with like a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub 'cause you gotta get it off! But if that doesn't work, you can't give up! You gotta stand right up! You gotta run to a window and say, "HEY! These floors are dirty as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

Stanley Spadowski (Michael Richards) - UHF

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