About

Hi, I'm Brian. My wife Tina and I live in St. Joseph, Missouri, about an hour north of Kansas City on I-29, in a 1962 ranch house with a detached two-car garage that is cold in January and hot in July. We have two kids: Garrett, who got his learner's permit in 2025 and his license in early 2026, and Lainey, who is in middle school and already has opinions about which car will be hers. Rusty, our old black Lab mix, supervises from a blanket by the garage door.

I work as a dispatcher for a regional freight company, which means I spend my days figuring out where trucks are, why they're late and what it will cost to get them moving. Tina manages a flower shop downtown. Neither of us grew up with money to throw at cars, and we still don't.

Our vehicles are a 2011 Toyota Sienna that crossed 200,000 miles in 2026 and a 2014 Chevy Silverado I drive to work. In December 2025 we added a 2012 Honda Civic for Garrett. I started this blog in March 2025 to keep a real record of what it costs to keep older vehicles on the road: the jobs I do myself in the garage, the bills from the shop, our car insurance renewals, adding a teenager to the policy and the gas for every mile.

I'm not a mechanic, an insurance agent or a financial advisor. I learned the basics from my dad and from a lot of trial and error, and I pay a professional when a job is past what I can do safely. I share what we did and what it cost so you can ask better questions about your own cars.

Thanks for reading. If you'd like to say hello, my contact page is always open.