The MOT

Before taking my car in for its MOT, I worked out for myself a neat threshold for how much it would be worth spending to get it repaired, should that be necessary. I decided that I'd be happy to pay £200 or so, but that anything over £300 was too much, and at that point I would cut my losses.

Naturally, the estimate for the repairs was £270.

I thought this was rather unfair, and yet shockingly inevitable. A bit less, and the decision would have been easy. A bit more, and the decision would have been easy. But instead, it sat right in the middle.

In the end, I decided to go ahead and get the car fixed. It's a risk, since at this point there's no real guarantee that it will last the full year. However, it's probably a bit less of a risk than the alternative, since that would leave me completely without Emergency Fund at a time when the economy remains uncertain. (Sure, it seems to be gradually improving, but I still don't trust it.)

As a result of this, I should get my car back tomorrow, all ready to go for another year. In the next year, I expect to take the car all the way up to 150,000 miles, which is quite a distance. And it removes the difficulty of making a decision next year: I knew going in that this would be the last MOT for this particular car.

As a consequence of this, some of the money I had saved for the car can now be freed up for other uses. Which means I can once again contemplate the possibility of going away on holiday to some exotic land. I even have four days of vacation allowance freed up from last week, so it all seems to fit together nicely...