Yes, I know, had I held faith etc etc.
Just to be clear,
this is not at all the point I was making, nor one I ever would make. My wife's default position about a car that's starting to need repairs is to immediately assume it's a money pit. But that doesn't mean my default position is to assume it's all fine and dandy, or have "faith" in it just needing this one part and then everything will be perfect.
Rather, I think your examples clearly demonstrate that neither thing can be logically concluded early on when the car is just starting to need repairs. But if it's just the one thing, for now, and the car has otherwise been reliable, even a few $500 repairs need not be cause for alarm. Instead, you just keep an eye on it, and watch out for red flags. In the case of your Saab, the repeated belt failures were a huge red flag (barring you or your mechanic being able to identify a root cause such as a bad pulley or some such thing).
Bottom line, there's a risk associated with either course of action. If you rush to the conclusion that the car is junk and immediately sell it, the risk is that you're potentially giving up a perfectly good car that just needs a few repairs. On the other hand, if you assume the car is good (like homeowners who insist their dump of a house has "good bones") and keep throwing money at it for expensive repairs, and it might actually end up being a money pit. The only sensible thing to do is keep your wits about you and take it one repair at a time. Reason it out, weigh the evidence, do the math, consider the best and worst case scenarios and try to arrive at an educated guess as to where your car falls in between those lines. And then the next time something breaks, do it all over again.
In my most recent case, I had a Ford Explorer with about 140k miles on it that had been amazingly reliable. I never had to do anything to it other than the regular service intervals, and the occasional expensive brake job. The engine was remarkably strong given how many miles it had on it, and how hard I drove it. Then the fuel pump went out and started intermittently leaving me stranded. I did some basic electrical troubleshooting to rule out things like a short or open wire, or a bad ground point, and everything pointed back to the fuel pump itself. It would have cost me around $400 to do the job myself, or $800 to have the mechanic fix it. I have all the tools necessary to do the job, the only thing that I was a little wary about was dealing with proper and safe removal of the fuel tank. But I always err on the side of being overly cautious, and I was confident I could get it off safely. By my wife wasn't having it. To her, as I said, a bad fuel pump meant the engine was going bad, and she was convinced that this was just the beginning of a cascade of failures. To me, it was a fuel pump with 140k miles on it that was probably only engineered to last 100k miles, and in fact I had found numerous threads on various forums about Ford Explorer fuel pumps going out, with nearly identical symptoms. There were even step by step repair guides, videos on YouTube, etc specifically dealing with replacing the fuel pump on Ford Explorers.
As an aside, evidently a lot of people just cut a hole from inside the passenger compartment in order to get access to the fuel pump without having to drop the tank. Way too scary for me to attempt. I'm sure I'd be that one guy who blew himself up by accidentally cutting into the fuel tank with an angle grinder.
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