Jan 23 2009
My new squidoo site Auto Guide.
I decided that there’s lots of women out there like me. When I think of car repairs, I get knots in my stomach, sweaty hands and my heart beats faster. In this day and age, it’s still possible that when you go to a garage that some smuck will try to rip you off, especially if your a woman. I know, you all think I’m nuts for saying it, but I honestly have experienced this personally within the past year. I decided it wouldn’t do me any harm to start educating myself on the how to fix my car stuff. Now I don’t plan to actually fix the car, but there are ways to find out how much time it “should” take to fix your car for various standard jobs. This will give you a rough idea of what it could cost you when getting an estimate from a garage. I run away from mechanics that tell me it will cost $80/hr with no time limits. I know for a fact that there is a book that divides time into units. Each unit would be the hourly rate and then you would multiply it by the number of units required to complete a job. In short, get an estimate of exactly how much time they expect it to take for them to finish the job. Granted, the odd time they will run into problems and may have to add some units of time, but make it clear that no work is to be started until they have determined how much time it will take for them to fix it. Or like myself you could end up getting a repair bill for $1000 for a measly brake job, when it should have been less than $50. Yes, I got seriously ripped off. They had a rookie mechanic who didn’t know what he was doing and for some reason this chap supposedly spent hours looking over my car to find this problem. I didn’t take the car into get fixed, my elderly mother did at the time. Case in point, never let your mother take your car in to get fixed, unless she knows whats wrong with it. She was trying to help me out. Thanks Mom, bless your heart, now you can help me pay this atrotious bill too!
I developed a website that is great for both men and women and it has many links for car insurance, quotes, financial loans and calculators, how to fix it videos, auto find, auto guide and much more. You can view it at
