If you don’t know a good and honest mechanic, getting your car fixed can be more time-consuming, costly, and painful than going to the dentist. Here are some tips for you to make sure that you don’t pay too much and get quality work the next time your car needs fixing.

Take a car to an auto-repair shop that does free estimates. Take your vehicle into one of them and ask what’s wrong with the vehicle. After they give you a listing of what’s wrong, call two or three of their competitors and ask them how much they would charge to perform those same repairs. If one of the prices that the competitor offers you is substantially lower, you know you’re being charged too much.

When you take a car to a mechanic, be sure to control what’s written on the work ticket. Make sure that the symptoms are written down, not just the recommended solution. This way if the car comes back with the same problem, they’ll have some responsibility for not taking care of the problem in the first place. On the work ticket, there’s usually an estimate, make sure to write down “I authorize repairs up to $X” where X is set to whatever dollar amount they told you ahead of time. That way they won’t make a bunch of repairs that you didn’t authorize and try to charge you a higher price for them.

If your car has to be towed, don’t let the tow truck drive choose whatever repair shop he or she would like. Quite often they are paid to take your vehicle to one specific shop which you probably don’t want to take it to. You should be going to an auto-shop because of their quality reputation, not because they paid the tow-truck driver to take your vehicle there! If your car is towed and you’re unhappy with the estimate or service of the auto-repair shop, have it towed to another one.

Watch out for specialty repair shops which only take care of one or two things, such as breaks and mufflers. There’s usually a reason that they only do one or two things for vehicles. Make sure you take your car to a mechanic that you trust. If you don’t know anyone good in the area, ask several people at work where they go, if there’s some sort of positive recommendation from two or three of your coworkers, that’s probably a good place to start.