Question about the "Emergency Repairs/Wear and Tear" rule

Okay so, I know that normally any work you pay for on the car is counted in the budget. But, I've been daily driving the challenge car all winter and recently the car broke down and I had to have it towed to a shop because I had no idea what to do. They replaced the distributor, bing bang boom the car is fine now. I can technically absorb this budget hit, but it would push me up against the edge. I wanted to know if I could:

A. Exempt the total cost of repairs under the "wear and tear" clause, because I had no advance warning of this problem and hadn't had any distributor problems on this car before.

or

B. Okay, so if work done by the shop can't be exempted even for this reason, can I at least exempt the cost of the part, and only take a hit for the labor? That would only set me back $150, which is a lot better than the $450 total that it cost. (Yeah, $300 for a distributor. Bit of a markup, but even on RockAuto they're like $200-250)

Well you originally had a working distributor in budget. 

A brand new distributor may be a slight performance improvement over an old one. So if you run it as is you probably need to include the cost of the distributor in budget.

BUT if you got a junkyard takeout and installed it yourself before the challenge and ran the challenge with ths junkyard dizzy, then I think you're fine taking the whole 450 out of your budget. Because the labor you just paid for is no longer on the car (and isn't really a performance advantage), and the part you have is roughly equal to the part that was in budget at the time you bought it.

In reply to Robbie :

That's my backup plan, I guess.

In reply to Robbie :

It's late and I'm drinking, but I think your analysis ignores the new wear and tear rule. I'll look this over for in the morning and give you a real answer. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

Thanks Tom. 

The part is free, but the labor must be included in your budget. The emergency wear and tear rule only exempts the part's cost. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

Thanks! That seems fair to me.

Tom Suddard said:

In reply to Robbie :

It's late and I'm drinking, 

That's never stopped the rest of us here.  

Stampie said:

Tom Suddard said:

In reply to Robbie :

It's late and I'm drinking, 

That's never stopped the rest of us here.  

+1

slowbird said:

Tom Suddard said:

The part is free, but the labor must be included in your budget. The emergency wear and tear rule only exempts the part's cost. 

Thanks! That seems fair to me.

here's me considering the budget impact of removing this dizzy and immediately reinstalling it.   now it's my labor, not shop labor, that allows the engine to run.  

also, here's me thinking that i'm inviting heightened scrutiny for MONZORA.  hopefully you forget this post by 2023.

In reply to AngryCorvair :

Will you actually  have the car up and running by 2023?

In reply to Indy-Guy :

Everyone needs a dream.