Recently my wife and
I went on vacation. We had a blast and
my year and a half old daughter had a blast too. It was a great break from work and the “real”
world. But when we got back, we picked
up my wife’s car from the airport and suddenly the AC had stopped working. In the middle of July.
Now, some of you
may think “well just roll the windows down a hyuk hyuk” but you don’t seem to
understand. My wife and I are AC
junkies. We’re addicted to the AC in our
cars. Without the AC in our cars we
start to feel the humidity slowly sapping away our sanity and selling it off to
the highest bidder. We feel the heat
pierce through our very souls and no one wants a pierced soul. My wife has associated the heat and humidity
of tidewater Virginia with a plague of epic proportions.
I don’t know if
you live in the tidewater area of Virginia, but humidity is the bane of our existence. It can be 70 degrees out, which in any other
area would be fantastic, but the Virginia humidity makes it feel like 100. There are times when the humidity is actually
visible. You can actually SEE the water
hanging in the air, waiting for you to come out and play. Then it attacks. It sticks to your skin and never lets go,
making you feel disgusting. If you wake
up in the morning like me, you feel a little bleh and need a shower. I shower and then walk outside and feel like
I just woke up again. The moisture just
clings to you in an awful way that leaves you feeling like you need another
shower.
I say all that so
I can say this: My wife and I are heat-and-humidity-aphobics. So when her AC died, we needed to have it
fixed ASAP. The next day my wife took
her car up to the dealer who said “I can fix it, but it’s gonna cost $1200.” Turns out my wife’s evaporator coil had a
hole in it leaking freon. Yeah, that
sucks. And to get to the evaporator coil
(don’t know if you knew this) you have to completely
disassemble the car. It’s one of
those weird pieces that is buried so deep in the car that you have to pack a
lunch to get there. Trust me, we
searched for alternative ways and methods of fixing the car, but this was the
only way we could have a guaranteed service.
And we trust our mechanic, mostly because he knows if he crossed us my
father-in-law would go all retired Navy on him.
Which would be awesome.
We needed it
fixed, so we took the money out of our emergency fund and fixed it. Yeah…that’s the end of the story. You may have been expecting me to lament in
agony over how hard it was to save that money quickly or how we were forced to
borrow money of some kind to pay it off.
Even after seeing how much it was and that we used saved up money, you
may be expecting me to say “man it’s hard now because that wiped our savings
out.” But I told you that’s the end of
the story. The beginning of the story
was over two years ago when we decided that one of the wisest things we could
ever possibly do was start saving money for emergencies. To start paying ourselves first.
Over a two year
period of time, we had built up enough savings in our emergency fund that paying
for that AC fix was not only easy, but almost painless. I don’t need to put the actual amount on
here, but after we paid the $1200 fee to fix our car and appease our inner AC
dependency, my wife and I still have several thousands of dollars saved
up. This isn’t to brag that somehow we’re
better than you or that somehow we make more than you. My wife and I make just barely above the
national average for a two income home.
The kicker is that we intentionally decided to start saving money for
emergencies long before an emergency
occurred. Granted, it was much
smaller at the start, but we decided to aggressively save for the rainy days of
life.
I’ll go into more
detail in later posts, but the point of this whole story was to get you to
think. How many times have you had car
trouble that brought money trouble along with it? How many times did you break your glasses and
have to borrow or work your butt off (or both) to replace them? Cars break.
Glasses get lost. Trees fall on
your porch. Little Johnny goes to the
doctor and needs crazy expensive medicine.
Someone loses a job. Someone
dies. Life happens.
Emergencies can
pressure you to make poor financial decisions if you aren’t prepared for them. Emergencies will happen because we’re all
human and none of us are impervious to life.
But when you have $10 or $15 or $20 thousand sitting there for the
express purpose of taking care of those moments, emergencies become little more
than inconveniences. That’s the power of
a plan. Not rocket science, just Common
Cents.
-Heath
PS: Thanks again to all my readers. I have a quick announcement, the drawing for Jon Acuff's book Quitter will take place on Aug. 1st. Thanks to everyone who entered, and there are still a few days left to get in. Share my blog on facebook or twitter and email me at commoncentsnn@gmail.com to enter.
Also, take note because starting August 5th Common Cents will make the move to Wordpress. Wordpress has a much easier system to use and has many more customization options, so we're making the move Aug. 5th. I'll be posting here and there until the move if final, but if you RSS'd my blog, please be sure to follow us on Wordpress. Thanks!
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