I'm going to impart some old-man wisdom on you, even though your generation doesn't listen to anyone for shit.

Find another line of work. Working on cars for a living is a shit job. Take it from someone who topped out in the field at a young age. I am a Toyota T-Ten graduate, I was an ASE Master by 21, and got Toyota Master a few years after that.

First off, its all comission. Sometimes flat-rate system works good. Flat-rate means a job pays a certain amount of hours. If you finish it in less, you get ahead pretty quick. For example, if a brake job pays 2 hrs and you complete it in an hour, you're way ahead. Do this all week and you can pull 60+ paid hours in 40 hours actual time pretty easy.

The catch is.. the better you get at it -- yes you make a high hourly rate, but you get much worse jobs. I spent all my time doing Electrical and NVH diagnostics. With that kind of work, you break even. Its not possible to do 2 hrs paid diagnostic in 1 hr. Guys with less ability/experience would easily make more hours than me because they got to do simple maintenance jobs and stuff all day. Did I make more money overall than them? Sure, but it wasn't a big enough difference to justify all the headache I always dealt with.

The other thing is its VERY hard on your body, even when you're young. Constantly standing, getting cut, burned, laying in wierd positions under dash and being hunched over a grill all day takes its toll on anyone. Trust me, you do NOT want to be doing this into your older years.

I got out of the automotive service field a little over 5 yrs ago. By far the best decision I've made in my life.