How I’m going to save about $600 this year for my cars

Lets face it, gas isn’t getting cheaper. Tolls are going up. Its time to start cutting back somewhere.
This weekend, I did something I haven’t done since high school - I changed my own oil.

It was actually my local fast-lube place that inspired me to start doing this. While getting the car serviced, the guy has my hood up, and he can see that there is a lot of work done to this motor, and its obvious that this is a well cared for car. The guy then walks into the waiting room, and shows me my (clean) cabin air filter, and tells me I need to replace it. I just did these about 5K miles ago, and tell him to put it back. He then tries to convince me I need a transmission flush and new wipers. Yeah, I’m not going back there. I also skipped the “tips” bin on the way out.

Why go back to changing my own oil? Well, here’s what I figure: I started using synthetic in my car, and my wife’s uses regular. It’s not that I don’t care about my wife’s car, its that she drives a Honda four-banger and the thing could run on bacon grease if need be. My oil changes are about $60, and hers are about $35. Multiply this by a few times a year, and it starts to add up really fast. I change oil every 5000 miles, because I don’t buy into the every 3000 mile hype that lube places try to make you believe. So at a few times a year, that’s $400 for my car, and about $175 for my wife’s car. Why have I been spending this money?

So this weekend, I went down to Autozone, and picked up $80 worth of supplies, including jackstands, funnel, a Fram filter (the grip is nice), a 15 quart drain pan and a five liter jug of synthetic oil. Previously, the only thing stopping me from doing this myself is that I had no where to put the used oil. Used automotive oil is a huge threat to the environment, highly toxic, and there are heavy fines for disposing of it improperly. AutoZone now takes oil free of charge for recycling. I figure I’ll drop it off when I go in to get some wiper fluid or blades or something. So all things considered, now I’m negative 20 bucks, but the next time I do this, I’ll be ahead $40. And the savings grow every time after that.

The process is so much easier than I remember, just raise the car, drain, seal and put on new filter and refill. Took me about 40 minutes, most of which was just jacking the car up and waiting for the oil to drain. Seeing as how time spent driving and waiting at a lube place is about 30 minutes, this only cost me about 10 minutes in time.

What are the other benefits? Well for one, I know I am getting good parts, and not some recycled oil crap or inferior filters. The other thing is that I realize I’m doing a better job - after seeing how long it took the oil to drain, I don’t think its possible for the pan to completely drain out in the two minutes they have the plug off. That means this sludge has been sitting in my motor.

Now my car is happy and purring like a 300HP kitten.