Apologies if this is not the right place!
I have just had my car in for service and MOT, it cost nearly £700 to get it through the MOT and now has a long list of advisories - amounting to around £1200. It has also in the last month cost me nearly £400. It has come as a bit of a shock - which is surprising I know with so much wrong. Apart from replacing the battery a couple of weeks ago it’s never let me down and has been running fine, it has 60,000 miles on the clock and is 8 years old.
For the next 18 months we are really tight financially - living practically paycheck to paycheck with only around £300 disposable income a month (me, partner and toddler, most of it goes on stuff for the toddler!) and now have absolutely no savings to fall back on. Here are the options I can think of...
A) keep the car, scrape together the money to repair it gradually and hope that despite its age nothing else goes wrong and nothing breaks completely before I can repair it.
B) take out a loan or extend credit card limit (currently nearly maxed) to pay costs and again - hope nothing else goes wrong.
C) take out a loan big enough to get a decent newer car, pay of credit card and use what the current car is worth (not much!) to pay the first year of the loan until we’re in a position to be able to pay it. We will be, as once dc gets 30hours funding in Jan 2022 our childcare costs will go from about £900 to around £100.
My issues with A) are that it might break before I can afford to repair it, and it’s going to be a real struggle to afford it - without Christmas and dc’s birthday coming up.
B) if something else goes wrong with it then I’m back to square one, I feel it’s at the age now where it’s fairly likely to happen.
C) feels like the best option but I’m hesitant to take on more debt. We’ve not long started to make a dent in the credit card - however I think I’d be better at paying back a loan because it’s fixed, none of that minimum payment. We would have to take out around 12-15k over 7 years, it feels like an awfully long time but we couldn’t afford the repayments for any less. However as I said I would aim to pay it off early, but I know very well that life can get in the way.
I’m also really hoping to improve my income, which will obviously massively help but I’m not taking that into account as it’s uncertain.
So all opinions welcome, any other ideas on what I should do or which of those options sounds the best?