Having extra cash keeps worries away
Just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have had the money to pay for a refrigerator repair of $389.24. Tuesday night, I had to fork over the cash to have the repair done, or I would have been short one refrigerator come Thanksgiving. Not that I’ll be doing a lot of cooking, but I certainly want somewhere to keep the leftovers I’ll be bringing home.
I don’t actually have the money to pay for the repair set aside in cash. I haven’t got that far in my emergency fund. However, I did have money set aside for the taxes and insurance on my home and since they’re not due until January and February, I was able to borrow from myself instead of a credit card company.
I can’t explain how much stress I didn’t have to deal with for that simple fact. I’ll have to spread my repayment to myself out over the next two months, but at least I had the money and I didn’t have to worry about a lack of funds on top of worrying when the repairman was finally going to arrive.
Even though I don’t have everything I needed stashed away, just having some of it stashed away has given me options I wouldn’t have had in this situation otherwise. An emergency fund is about having cash available to tap when you need it.
Sure, it would be ideal to have tons of money put back for every conceivable cash crunch me and my family could ever have to face, but for most of us, that isn’t always feasible.
Just having enough is enough to take away the worries.
I could say I’m changing my ways and will start to save more for my emergency fund before I continue working to pay down my debt, but I won’t lie to you. At the moment, even after having a totally unexpected expense crop up**, I don’t plan to change my ways.
Right now, debt payoff is more important to me.
I think about it like this: every dollar I save in interest is a dollar I can put into my emergency fund later. If I wait to pay off my debt after I’ve saved some more money, I’ll end up spending more on interest and that’s money out of my pocket. I’m willing to take the risk that I’ll have an unexpected expense larger than I can cover with what I’m saving for other expenses.
Increasing my emergency fund is important to me, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve paid off a few more debts first.
**My refrigerator is less than two years old, and I certainly wasn’t expecting it to die on me quite this soon—but I should have known. It’s GE. Bad, bad, decision and I knew better, but the price and features tempted me against my better judgment. GE has never been a reliable brand for me. In the past, I’ve had a dishwasher kill over just after the warranty expired, followed by trouble with a GE range. Now my refrigerator’s main control board went out after only 20 months of use. See the track record there?
I asked the repairman for advice on which brands had the fewest repair calls and his answer was simple, if a bit of a sidestep of the original question. Buy the model with the fewest electronic add-ons. They’ll get you every time, he said. If you do buy an appliance with a lot of special features, either be prepared for expensive repairs or buy the extended warranty or service contract.
Good advice, but it came a little too late for me.
Leave a Comment