The Dividend Pirate

My old car (ironically which I have nicknamed Old Faithful) finally bailed out on me. I left my car at the mechanic over the weekend and he said that

- my rear brakes need replacement(~200 bucks)

- so do my front ones(~200 bucks)

- my radiator needs to be replaced(~400 bucks)

- my oil gasket is leaking(~150 bucks)

- my oxygen sensors need to be replaced(~250 bucks)

- my door handle needs to be fixed(~350 bucks)

Grrrr… and this just after I replaced my tires with 4 new ones a couple months back(cost me 400 bucks). How ironic that the tires come with a lifetime warranty . Not to mention that I replaced my car’s starter last week for 250 bucks. How could my car do this to me? Oh and why did this have to happen at this time? I am leaving for India next week and wont have much time to fix the problem or shop.

We are just going through a “bad car phase” in life. My wifes car’s radiator started leaking 2 weeks back and we had to do a bunch of things that cost us 450 dollars.

In a way I am not surprised that my car gave up. It is 1995 made Toyota Avalon XLS with 170K miles on it and very poorly maintained by me. I had purchased it 4 years back for 5500 when it had 137 miles and at that time the car looked new. The previous owner had cared for the car very well. The car looked like it was 2000 built when I purchased it.

Anyhow I am confused about what to do at this point,

Spent Sunday afternoon cleaning the junk mail that we have received since a month. I am so freaking sick of it. I want to STOP receiving credit card offers, coupons, free magazines, charity request emails, insurance quotes, etc…. Cant these companies send me stuff online so I can delegate filtering the spam to Google. I hate wasting time and energy in doing useless s%$#% like this.

To give you an idea about the amount of junk that I received, I am including an image from Sunday afternoon. What gets difficult is out of the 100 junk mails there is one important letter in it. The challenge is to avoid tearing it off. For example while going through the treasure hunt session today afternoon I discovered a check of 490 dollars from my escrow company!!! I was about to tear it off because it came from Wells Fargo and I get a LOT of JUNK from Wells Fargo. I dont know how many such checks I have unknowingly trashed.

If you know of an agency, a number or any other way to stop receiving such junk please please I BEG you to tell me. Alright I think I should chill out a bit now. Time to read “The Anger Management joke”

Update:

Thanks for all the comments. Readers please read the comments for some very helpful tips.

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