Roughly $30 spent on a portable tire inflator can save you a $150 tow call. That math alone should convince you to spend a Saturday morning on basic car maintenance you can handle yourself, no appointment needed.

Start Under the Hood: Check Your Fluids

Park on level ground and let the engine cool before you touch anything. Pop the hood and you’ll find dipsticks for your oil and, if you’re driving an automatic, your transmission fluid. They’re labeled. Pull the dipstick out, wipe it on a clean rag, push it all the way back in, then pull it again. That second read is what you actually trust.

Here’s what good looks like: fluid sitting between the two notch marks, color that doesn’t alarm you. Dark, gritty oil means trouble. Weirdly pale transmission fluid means trouble. Either one is a signal worth acting on, whether that’s a fluid change you handle yourself or a conversation with someone who has a lift. This whole check takes maybe five minutes. Worth every one of them.

Change the Oil Yourself

Long-time mechanic Steve Haney doesn’t sugarcoat it, but he doesn’t oversell the difficulty either. “Changing your own oil sounds intimidating,” Haney told me. “But it’s really just a few tools and an hour of your time. Using good oil and a quality filter, you can skip the shop’s labor charge and keep your engine healthy for less.”

He’s right. The part that throws people is getting under the car to reach the drain plug. On older vehicles, the oil filter lives down there too. Newer models typically position the filter up in the engine compartment where you don’t need to crawl anywhere. If your car sits low, you’ll need ramps. Haney recommends drive-on ramps rated for your vehicle’s actual weight, a quality jack from a reputable manufacturer, and a chock block behind the rear wheels once you’re up. That’s 3 points of contact between your car and something solid before you put any part of your body underneath it.

One rule that doesn’t bend: never change the oil without swapping the filter too. A filter wrench makes that fast. Collect the drained oil in a container and drop it at a used oil disposal station rather than pouring it anywhere near a drain. Most auto parts stores take used oil for free. That’s not optional etiquette. It’s just how you handle it.

If you want a deeper checklist of what else you can knock out at home, Family Handyman keeps a solid running list of DIY auto maintenance tasks.

Tires: Pressure and Tread

Haney’s consistent on this one: properly inflated tires improve fuel economy, they extend the life of your rubber, and they make the car handle the way it was designed to handle. The pressure number you want isn’t on the sidewall of the tire. It’s on a label on the inside edge of the driver’s side door. That label is specific to your car. Use it.

Every glove box should have a pressure gauge in it. If yours doesn’t, the air dispenser at any gas station has one built in. Better move: spend $30 to $50 at an auto parts store on a portable inflator that plugs into your lighter socket. When you’re 15 miles outside the city on a country road and one tire is going soft, that little inflator earns every dollar.

Tread depth matters as much as pressure. The penny test is still the fastest check: drop Lincoln’s head into the tread groove, facing down. If you can see the top of his head, you’re at or below 2/32 of an inch. That’s the legal minimum in most states and the point where the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says wet-road stopping distance gets genuinely dangerous. At that point, you’re not maintaining tires. You’re gambling with them.

A Saturday morning, 32 dollars on supplies, and a few hours is honestly all it takes to knock out the basics. Haney’s been saying that for years. He’s not wrong.