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The tires and mechanic shortage wasn't a problem until COVID. There are no dedicated tire shops in town anymore. 3 shops out of 11 closed leaving us with 8, if you include one place that only does oil changes. Otherwise there were 10 and now only 7. 2 others changed hands (one used to do just tires, now they do everything except tires) and have done some pretty poor work, not at all like the previous crews that worked there. 2 of the 5 original shops were never good shops to begin with, for which reason I'll never go back. That leaves 3, two that are always swamped and a thrid that charges about double what everyone else charges.
So if I go with one of the places that didn't bolt my struts back on and I drove off and nearly lost control of the car, then yes, I have to wait sometimes up to three weeks to get a bad tire fixed.
I do have money for emergencies, a few thousand right now. And that is very good advice, so thank you. For some reason our health insurance went up to $500/month this year. It's not bad, but it was only $100 last year, so I wasn't expecting it to climb so much. I'm going to get a second job to pay for that and put some more money away as I'm looking into opening a ROTH account. The death of one family member at the begining of COVID ended up costing us personally some $30,000 to date to take care of all the ones affected as best as we could, so I'm still recuperating from that. That was supposed to be a downpayment on a house, but oh well.
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