A Sad Day in the World of Kathy

My car is dying.

Last week, it started making noises. Whenever I turned the wheel it wailed like a dying manatee. Whooooooooeuuuuuuuuuuuu. Whoooooooooeuuuuuuuuuuu. I brought it in to a mechanic who checked the power steering fluid, looked at it briefly, and said, "Ford power steering pumps have a tendancy to get noisy when they get older. That's all it is. Nothing to worry about," and sent me home.

A few days later, the power steering stopped working entirely. I mean, you can sort of steer the car. When it is moving. If you use all your strength, and are content with the worst turning radius ever.

If you want to get into or out of parallel parking... well, it's an adventure.

There was no place to bring the car the last several days, being a holdiday weekend and all, but I dropped the car off at the shop this morning. (A different shop, a different mechanic. This one highly rated by the folks at car talk.)

I don't have an estimate yet, but the mechanic thinks it will be expensive.

The blue book says the trade in value for my car is somewhere between $2300 and $2900. Retail value is around $6000, but I assume it would be much more difficult to sell it for retail value?

So here are the big questions weighing on my mind: at what point, in the case of expensive repairs, is it no longer worth it to shell out for the repairs? How expensive is too expensive? What do you all do when your cars get old and start dying?