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REGULARLY CHANGING the oil is the most important step you can take to extend your car’s engine life. Oil is the engine’s life blood and changing it is one of the least costly maintenance steps. It’s also one of the dirtiest, crummiest, least pleasant jobs you can do.
Before I got married, I lived in a six-story apartment building in Brooklyn, with a parking garage in the basement. A friend of mine lived in the same building. One day, he was complaining about the cost of keeping his car running, especially the amount he was spending on auto mechanics. I offered to help him change his oil. He thought that would be wonderful.
We bought the oil and oil filter at a local auto parts store. I brought down a lifting jack and support to the garage, so we could lift the car up to gain access to the drain plug. But I didn’t crawl under the car to get to the drain plug. I let my friend do that, along with everything else, but with my supervision.
After we’d drained the oil, replaced the oil filter and filled up the engine with fresh oil, my friend looked at me and said, “What a dirty job that turned out to be.”
“Now you know why you pay a mechanic to change your oil,” I replied.
“It doesn’t seem like such an expensive job, after all,” he concurred.
I look carefully at what items cost, what someone is charging me to perform a service and how much I’m tipping a waitress. I’m cheap. There, I said it. I hate spending money.
But the cost is always relative to the alternative. That alternative could include cuts and scrapes on your hands from doing the job yourself. Buying a cheaper item can result in it quickly wearing out or breaking, requiring you to buy another one. Waiting at a fast-food counter, instead of sitting in a quiet white-tablecloth restaurant and enjoying a nice meal, also has its costs.
Everything has a cost and a reward. The reward should exceed the cost. Otherwise, it isn’t a good purchase. The cost is usually known. The reward is subjective, based on the purchaser’s needs and wants.
The reward for doing a job yourself is the satisfaction of knowing you can do it on your own, along with the cost savings from not paying others. But if the quality of the work is inferior to what a professional could do, the reward is diminished. On the other hand, if you’ve been ripped off by professionals in the past, the quality may not be as important as the satisfaction of knowing that, this time around, no one took advantage of you.
Hiring a financial advisor may be a good use of your money if you panic every time the stock market nosedives, or if you can’t seem to put away enough money to afford the finer things in life. But there’s also the cost, including the risk of being sold something you don’t need.
As with most things in my life, I take the DIY—do it yourself—approach to managing money. I feel better finding out I made a mistake with my money, rather than learning someone else made a mistake for me. So, I go it alone. That’s required me to spend a great deal of time and money studying investing and deciding what’s a good approach to managing my wealth. To me, it’s worth it.
I might have had a larger pot of gold if I’d used a financial advisor. But I’m happy following the immortal words of Frank Sinatra, when he sang, “I did it my way.”
David Gartland was born and raised on Long Island, New York, and has lived in central New Jersey since 1987. He earned a bachelor’s degree in math from the State University of New York at Cortland and holds various professional insurance designations. Dave’s property and casualty insurance career with different companies lasted 42 years. He’s been married 36 years, and has a son with special needs. Dave has identified three areas of interest that he focuses on to enjoy retirement: exploring, learning and accomplishing. Pursuing any one of these leads to contentment. Check out Dave’s earlier articles.
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Thank you again! I was raised in a very frugal small farming family so I’ve learned to do it myself and save the dollar. That was the old person through my work life.
I remember my brother trying to find the least expensive supplements for his health condition and thinking, would I want the cheapest parachute?
I’ve changed over the decades and now that I’m set in retirement, I have no qualms about just paying someone. After all, what would I save money for when I’m in the last 1/3 or 1/4 of life? My time to enjoy the good things.
But I still do my own oil….
Excellent article and I fully agree. The small pain with a drawdown in my trading is worth the big gain from lessons learned.
Another factor for me is how my time should be spent. For example, for most of my career, I’ve hired regular housecleaners. Even when our kids were really little and money was much tighter, that was in the budget. Could we have cleaned the house ourselves? Sure, but we were already juggling two careers and two small children. Some tasks needed to be outsourced so that we could devote time to our kids and to our growing careers. I always felt a bit sheepish about the decision to hire this work out—same with a gardener back when we had a yard—but it was a decision based on priorities, and there are still only 24 hours in a day.
DIY investing offers no legal recourse, however. Besides, investors notoriously overestimate their expertise, even those formally trained. Despite all this, I generally agree mainly because keeping expenses low is important to maximizing total long-term return.
These are good reasons for investing in broad market index funds. You won’t require legal recourse and you won’t overestimate your investing prowess because you’re not picking stocks or over-weighting some sector of the economy.
I would argue that DIY investing is more likely to be successful when a portfolio is built on a foundation of total market index funds. You may deviate from there as your knowledge and expertise increase over time.
I have a simple philosophy when it comes to paying for things. I refuse to pay for things that I can do myself, or potentially do better than the professionals because I care more. Simple examples are I cut my own lawn, do my own landscaping (including building stone walls and walkways), even scraped and painted my previous house. I do however pay for services such as power washing my current vinyl sided 2-3 story house, and for tradespersons’ services. AKA “know thyself”
“Hiring a financial advisor may be a good use of your money if you panic every time the stock market nosedives, or if you can’t seem to put away enough money to afford the finer things in life. But there’s also the cost, including the risk of being sold something you don’t need.” I understand there is a perception of advisors that is well-earned but that isn’t the entire landscape and I think there are signs of improvement. I don’t panic every time the market dives nor did (or my wife) have trouble saving. We do have a flat fee only advisor but he doesn’t sell products. He does however provide holistic planning so we reach our goals. And in our view, the annual retainer cost is well worth it qualitatively, if not quantitatively. Trying to prove it is quantitatively worth i s beside the point of achieving goals, but my belief is the not unreasonable cost for professional services is justified in saving on mistakes, tax efficiency, rebalancing and advice on other aspects of our financial life. I am all for DIYers-in fact I was one my entire working life but retirement finance is more complex and I’d rather not make mistakes or spending time worrying I’ve made them when I can pay for reasonable, trustworthy, experienced professional help. And with all I have learnt as a DIYer and continue to do so through great sites like HD, I am a more informed client, which can only help us.
In the early part of my reading of your article I was expecting commentary on the headache of properly disposing of the used oil and then a comparison with the related tax return headaches of disposing a complex financial investment or decision.
I am still a DIY’er for both oil changes and our annual 1040 and consider the complexities of disposal when doing both.
I believe you would have made an excellent economist – cost/benefit and utility analysis. Of course, these factors probably helped you greatly in your insurance career (and life in general).