I don't know what I should do and this website is basically what goes for my social support system these days, so I'd like some advice please.
So I drive a very old car that until recently I didn't use much. It's from 2003 and it has less than 150k miles on it. It has a check engine light that I learned today comes from a tiny crack in the (a?) cylinder head gasket that's causing me to lose coolant. They quoted me 3-4k USD to replace it.
If they said 2k I might have been able to melt my debit and credit cards at the same time MAYBE. But 4k I need a loan for.
It's possible that this place is just a ripoff. I'm partially just talking this out right now so I should really get on the phone and find out if I can find something that won't break me.
Part of why it seems like it might be a ripoff is that I can find the parts (according to my completely uneducated and untrained figuring) on autozone.com for like 250 bucks. Maybe I can just do it myself? Maybe my landlord has tools? Or I can rent some maybe?
The guy at the car doctor said that if I wasn't going to do the repair I should probably trade it in sooner than later while it still holds value. Down this path I might really start crying about needing an adult though. A whole branching tree of decisions to make afterwards.
And to bring up an added complication: part of why I don't have a solid chuck of the downpayment of a house on hand to deal with this is that I was semi-homeless up until three months ago (friday is the anniversary). A downstream complication to that is that I never received my auto registration renewal from the state of CA. And by the time I realized it was a thing I should have had to deal with already, my shit expired. I'm pretty sure they're going to make me do a smog check which requires that I don't have an engine light on. So it's extra fucked to be driving with it right now. Oh and my insurance dropped me over a dispute over late charges I refuse to pay because they didn't tell me I owed them money and sent shit to the wrong address over and over.
So I guess an informal poll:
A: I shop around for a mechanic that's willing to fix my cars for the clothes off my back + fill up my credit card again ( T_T ) IF I CAN FIND ONE (and if not I guess take out a loan)
B: I buy the parts/find the tools and see if it's possible to do it myself, on like, a weekend.
C: I throw in the towel on my car and try to find a replacement somehow despite being broke enough to be here
D: Something I'm not thinking of.
I fucking hate this. I hate cars. I wish I could bike. I wish I could take transit. I hate having this single point of failure in my life that can completely sweep my still shaky legs out from under me, which I just now finally got up onto. I need advice because this decision could literally be the fucking end of the world for me. Yay.
edit: the specific car is a 2003 Suzuki Areio
B: Some head gaskets are hard, some are easy. Depends on the car. For instance here's a guy doing a head gasket in a parking lot. But some cars really have the engine crammed in there. If you have some general mechanical aptitude, ability to follow instructions, and you are able to find a service manual for your car - it is worth spending actual money for this if you can't find one for free, it'll give you the step by step of how to do this repair - it might be worth scoping this out. You are operating at a disadvantage because it looks like you have like a "normal" car that doesn't have enthusiast forums that can help you through it. I would expect this job to take a noob at least two full workdays, but you might realize that you need parts or something midway through and have to wait for shipping. The bigger the job, the more likely you realize you need to buy a part or tool midway through. Budget to have the car out of commission for a week.
Additional note - sometimes head gaskets just fail on their own, but sometimes they fail because, e.g., the engine overheats and warps the block. Once it's open, a mechanic will hopefully do some investigation to figure out why it failed to make sure it doesn't happen again.
C: It could be fun to do this yourself but you should strongly consider selling the car and buying another one. I know that's tough in CA with the smog regulations; here in Chicago sometimes flippers will buy a car and not register it so you might find a buyer like that who doesn't care if it can pass smog right away. If you sell the car and buy another one, I strongly suggest doing both via private sale, Facebook marketplace or craigslist. Better prices than dealer trade-ins because there's no middleman. The downside is it takes more of your time to do the sales. Around here you can get a beater car for like $1500 and you'd probably get like $800 for the Suzuki. That would be a lot cheaper than paying for the repair.
D: Figure out if this is actually going to break the car or if you can ignore it. Head gaskets can fail in several different places. If it's leaking coolant or oil to the outside, who cares just top up the coolant or oil and go about your day. If it's leaking coolant into the oil, the contaminated oil will not lubricate effectively and you'll fuck up the engine by driving on it. Etc etc.