Wednesday, June 22, 2005

unplanned expenses

The Volvo died with a potential up to $2000 repair bill. It has been 100% dependable until Thursday when it did something ugly. I made it home and successfully drove it to the repair shop but things were dire. Sadly the repair logic is as follows:

If cost of repair + predicted future repairs is [less than] value of car [minus] value of car in broken state [then] one logically must do the repair.

I.e $2000 + 0 < $4500 - ~$1000

The broken state value is calculated in to introduce the option of simply walking away from the car selling it to the shop for parts. The difficulty in predicting future repairs is also an uncomfortable guess. The one extremely frustrating fact that this calculation applies to TODAY and has nothing to do with yesterday. For example, I get car back this week. Transmission explodes the following Monday for $2500. I need to calculate based upon that repair only. The history may feel relevant but it is not. It might make sense to plug in a default $500 into the future repair field, thus:

$2000 + $500 < $4500 - ~$1000

Still evaluates true.

An independent question is whether the car gets sold after the repair because of the $500 placeholder's variability or the general trust of the machine. Simply put, I trust the 240 volvo to run dependably for a loooong time despite this unfortunate incident.

No comments: