Someone explained this to me long ago. You have money, labor and materials in any project. This applies to your budgeting too. If you have the disposable money you could use that to solve a problem or need. If not your going to need to rely on labor and existing materials to make up for it. You always have a certain finite number of each at any given time.

One repair on a newer expensive to repair car can be a whole years worth of repairs on a slightly older or cheaper to repair car. Since our local VW & Audi Dealer pretends they cater to an affluent select group of people their prices for repairs are outragous. They are about 4x the cost of the same repair on our slightly older dodge truck. So we learned to do some of the basic work ourselves by researching online and connecting with groups that work on their VW's for a hobby. If it is beyond our skill and time availability we have a couple of standard repair shops that will work on imports. We use the dealer as the last resort. But parts and general repairs for that car are still fairly expensive.

I still get jealous at people that own old Hondas or Toyotas with over 200,000 an no major repairs.