After reading this I feel as though I should apologize..... for asking a question in a forum that I thought was for asking questions. Sorry to waste your time looking for statistics and experiences in a place meant for looking for statistics and experiences. Can I send you a Starbucks card or something for putting up with me?
I don't understand your snarky responses when you're wandering into a resource thread and saying "I didn't read it - can you tell me what it says?" My response to my kids has been "There are no shortcuts - go do at least the basic work and then we can talk about what questions you have."Again, thank you all for this thread and what you've put into it. I don't mean my snarky responses above to come off as ungrateful... I'm just trying to gather data.
Oof - Let me guess, you're also not going to proactively disclose to the next guy that the vehicle is beyond the service interval on a component that essentially guarantees engine failure? (or enjoy the anonymity of passing the car into the unknow via trading it in)Not too concerned what the next guy that owns my van goes through.... at least not anymore concerned than I am about anyone else I don't know who's driving around in a used vehicle
I'm an idiot. I won't play chicken with the interval on something like this (which is why I'm in this thread - to understand the time vs. mileage dimension) because I can just pass the pin-pulled grenade down the line. I'm going to make the car as solid as I can make it, and if I'm passing it along I'm not going to be silent on something like an overdue timing belt.
But to answer your original question from my perspective:
The value of the vehicle is not all that relevant to me. As someone else said, it's the replacement value and what comes with it: A payment, uncertain history (for a used car) or both. The reason we have older, high-mileage cars is because we maintain them and the avoidance of car payments has kept a massive amount of money in our pockets to be used for retirement, vacations and a wide variety of other things. We can definitely afford new cars, but now that I'm used to not having a car payment (we even bought the Odyssey that brings me to this thread new with cash - it's been well over a decade since we had a car payment, maybe two) that I now see car payments as incredibly wasteful and something to avoid if at all possible. But that's me. I've bought used cars from friends on a couple of occasions when I knew the long history of the cars and because I knew they were people who took care of their cars. If that kind of known-history didn't exist, I'm not likely buying a $5000 used car, because the likelihood of it being a solid car isn't great.The way I'm looking at this is my 15 year old van is worth +/- $5000 so sinking $1,000+ into the timing belt preventatively is quite a % of the value. I love my van and 5K is a lot of money but it wouldn't financially ruin me by any stretch so I'm thinking of rolling the dice. I'm at 115K miles with no rattling or signs of a problem. Am I crazy?
Net: IMHO, avoidance of payments and potentially negative history is a value beyond what the vehicle would sell for