7 tips to make your car last (and increase its resale value)

A new car begins to lose value the minute you drive it off the lot. But with these seven tips, you can limit trips to the mechanic and increase your vehicle's resale value.

6. Take care of tires

Mic Smith/NASCAR Southern 500/AP/File
Chris Sherwood, a crew member for Clint Bowyer's car, checks on tires for a NASCAR Sprint Cup auto race in May. Tires are important every aspect of a car's performance, so keeping them in optimal condition is essential.

Tires are expensive and extremely important to every aspect of your car’s performance, including fuel economy. Keeping them in optimal condition is a must. Check their inflation often (remember: pressure fluctuates with ambient temperature), and rotate them as per the manufacturer’s recommendation.  This will ensure not only that your car will perform as effectively and efficiently as possible, but also that your tires will last as long as the brochure claims. Now all you have to worry about is running over nails and screws!

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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