Thanks to steemit, we can afford the mechanic again!

Firstly it is important to know I have the worst luck with cars, in the past five years I have been through a Lancer, a Lexcen, a Sportage and two Magnas. They were all cheap but working cars when I got them, then random things started to break snowballing to the point that it was time to get a new car.

Well finally last year my brother tried to help me out, selling me one of his cars after he bought a new one. All seemed fine, he was going to let me pay it off over the year and he had owned the car for years himself, and had never had any real problems with it - plus he's a mechanic - I was certain this time I had a good car that would last.

Well I couldn't have been more wrong.. On the way home from picking up the car, on the middle of the motorway travelling 110kms per hour the car sounded an alarm. I had never driven a car this new and wasn't sure what was going on, I noticed a message on the dash which said air bag malfunction alert, I started to move over the three lane highway to find somewhere to stop. When another alarm sounded this time saying ABS brakes failure, I got the car off the road very fast and the brakes worked fine.

I called my brother to ask if he knew what was going on, he had no idea and I was stuck on the highway for an hour. We later found out that it was the alternator so my brother replaced it for me and things seemed fine again. The next thing to go was the ignition barrel which I had to get replaced immediately, with two special needs kids we need access to a car at all times.

The next issue was constant overheating, we couldn't afford to get the car looked at so I always had to carry a large amount of water and when it started to overheat I would stop let it cool and top it back up. This continued for several months, until finally the radiator blew and we could no longer avoid fixing it - luckily my mum loaned us the money for the parts and my brother drove 2 hours each way to come and install it for us.

Things seemed to finally be going well when, the brakes and discs needed to be replaced so we got a small loan to pay for this new issue that couldn't be ignored. Again for a short time things seemed to be going fine I finally finished paying off the car to my brother so I now owned the car, but my smooth sailing came to a sudden end about a three months ago.

Again the car was overheating, and in a random stroke of luck I broke down out the front of a mechanic's house. He was amazing, found the problem and rigged me up a solution and charged me nothing. Things again were going alright for a couple of months, but just two weeks ago the car started overheating again.

I took it to the mechanic on Friday last week and the latest issue had been a blown fuse for the fan, it was a cheap solution. So I got a much needed service and some odds and ends like a new headlight that sort of thing and I felt amazing it still cost us over $500 but the mechanic said there's nothing else wrong with it.

We just spent what is for our family a massive amount of money and thought we had secured the family car, back to being a reliable vehicle for us. Until this afternoon on the way home from picking up my kids from school we got stuck in roadworks for a while and the fricken car started overheating AGAIN!

I am livid at the reality I find myself in, I treat my cars as well as I can and even when I pour money into them they just fall apart repeatedly - it's truly crushing.

However because of steemit, my partner @ausbitbank just received a payout from a post he did, which means we can now take the car back to the mechanic and hopefully get this issue fixed once and for all. If he had not received this money, I don't know what we would do.

We just spent what little savings we had, on getting it fixed under a week ago. IT would have been nice to get to use the money for something nice, for the family but the car must come first. I will never forget how steemit made this possible for our family, we just can't function without a car and we are more grateful than you could ever imagine.

---

Learn about the author - Read my introduction post!

Subscribe here.