WSJ Your Money Briefing - As Car-Repair Costs Rise, More Drivers Are Taking the DIY Route

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

The cost of car repairs and maintenance has risen 28% in the past three years, according to the Labor Department. Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Joe Pinsker joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss which types of fixes car owners are taking on themselves to save money.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exchanges, the Goldman Sachs podcast featuring exchanges on the forces driving the markets and the economy, exchanges between the leading minds at Goldman Sachs. New episodes every week. Listen now. Here's your money briefing for Tuesday, December 3rd. I'm JR Whalen for the Wall Street Journal. The cost of car maintenance and repairs has risen 28 percent over the past three years according to the Labor Department. That's caused more drivers to pump the brakes and try to make the fixes themselves. There are some jobs that a dealership might charge you $500, $800, $1,000 that you could do with a part yourself that you know you can buy for 50 to 100 dollars. So there are real

savings and people are capable of more than they think they are. We'll talk to Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Joe Pinsker after the break. Amazon Q Business is the new generative AI assistant from AWS because many tasks can make business slow, as if wading through mud. Luckily, there's a faster, easier, less messy choice. Amazon Q can securely understand your business data and use that knowledge to streamline tasks. Now you can summarize quarterly results or do complex analysis in no time.

Q got this. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. ["Dreams of a New World"] More car owners are taking the DIY approach to making repairs to reduce costs. But what kinds of work should be left to the professionals? Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Joe Pinsker joins me. Joe, what kinds of car fixes are people trying to do themselves?

Some people are looking at the kind of classic DIY things like changing your own oil, but some people are getting a bit more brave in what they're willing to do out in their own driveways. If they smash their side view mirror, they might try to order a part online and replace it themselves. Maybe they have a few scratches on their car and want to maybe even try spraying some paint on themselves. Maybe they have a few scratches on their car and wanna maybe even try spraying some paint on themselves. Sorts of things that we usually think of as stuff that you might wanna leave to the professionals. How much more expensive is it

to get these fixes done by the professionals? The gap can be huge. I talked with somebody who got quoted $1,000 to fix his side view mirror, and he ended up ordering the part online for $50. He says you can barely tell that he did the job himself. There's just like a little bit of a paint mismatch, and the new mirror doesn't have a turn signal built into it like the old one, but it's small stuff.

He said to him it's not $900 worth of difference. What do the DIYers learn to do these projects? Well, there are sort of official channels that you could try to learn through. You can buy specific repair guides that are for your cars, make, model, and gear. But a lot of people actually end up finding good quality stuff on YouTube.

There's a good deal of variance on the information out there, but there are some people putting out really good step good quality stuff on YouTube. There's a good deal of variance on the information out there, but there's some people putting out really good step-by-step instructional videos on all sorts of different cars and all sorts of different parts. One auto repair expert who I talked to said that sometimes even in a repair shop, will fire up YouTube when they are working with a car that they're unfamiliar with. It seems to be something that's on more people's minds. There's this automotive market research firm called IMR

that has survey data showing that in 2020, about 26% of drivers said they would likely try doing a repair themselves if their vehicle needed fixing immediately and in the first half of this year that percentage is now 30% so it seems to be ticking up. Are there particular repairs the professionals said that's not a good idea for you to do at home? You should definitely have this done by somebody with experience? Paint was one area that some of the experts I interviewed had some hesitations about, but that was also an interesting one because I did talk to a guy who found a kind of low budget workaround that seemed to do really well for him.

He went to, and I didn't even know this sort of shop existed, but there's a shop that will sell paint to auto body shops. So they're a business selling to another business and he asked them if they could give him a little spray can of black paint to match the color on his Toyota and they did. He just sprayed it on and it worked. So paint was one area where it might end up looking bad but maybe it works well. But that said, I think there are some real areas where DIY people should be really cautious. One mechanic said, anything involving an airbag, leave it to the pros.

That's probably a good blanket piece of advice that anything that really gets into the safety parts of the car, you'd probably wanna be sure that somebody knows what they're doing. There's a quiz at the bottom of your story where readers can guess how much a repair on a car might cost. Our producer took it and on average guessed about $3,000 less than the actual cost, but

she did guess the cost of repair of a door on a Subaru. She was on the nose with that. But do people typically underestimate the cost? It's a pretty common experience these days. underestimate the cost? cost. and drivers, I talked to a repair shop owner for a previous story who was saying that he's been doing this for 25 years. He'll ballpark in his head, here's how much I think this thing should cost. And then when he sits down to actually write the estimate, just because of how much the price of labor and parts and all this technology I've been talking about has gone up, he sits down and it's twice as much or something as what he thought.

So this has caught everybody a bit off guard, and that's why we see people reacting and trying to do it on their own sometimes. Some of this is just knowing yourself and how comfortable you are with a wrench and a screwdriver. ownership might charge you $500, $800, $1,000 that you could do with a part yourself that, you know, you can buy for $50 to $100. So there are real savings and he thinks that people are capable of more than they think they are. That's WSJ reporter Joe Pinsker and that's it for your Money Briefing.

This episode was produced by Ariana Osborne with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.