If you have followed Dave Ramsey at all, you know that he talks about not buying a house when you are broke because Murphy will inevitably invite himself over and bring his cousins Broke, Desperate and Stupid to stay in your guest bedrooms. Sometimes, though, Murphy comes when you don't own and are just renting - he just comes in different forms.
As soon as we turned around and decided to get Gazelle Intense on our debt, we did our October budget and for the first time ever, Southern California Edison began the Public Safety Power Shutoff program. I won't get into it here, because there are many levels at which their logic and practices make me angry, but to give you a short story, we lost power in 3 spurts for 139 hours during the month of October. It was a great opportunity to purge our fridges and freezers, however, it also led to an increased grocery bill of over $200. There was no way to get around that. We still had to pay our other bills and eat.
We do budget monthly for repairs and maintenance on our vehicles, however, before October, the monies were really just theory and we haven't actually been setting aside that money throughout the year. Well, since we were not diligent up front with the purchase of our van and postponed necessary to-do's, we are stuck with a van that just passed smog, but wouldn't again because of a $1500 catalytic converter replacement. Also, upon the purchase, we were informed that the back tires needed to be replaced (the front we just replaced) and we would require an alignment. The tires needed for our vehicle will run, retail, about $600, and the alignment will cost us about $100. We are looking at a base price of $2,200 to fix our family clunker.
The absolute most we could sell it for, private sale, would be about $2500. If we fix the catalytic converter, we might get about 3K, however, for $1500, we might as well just take the lesson and fix the clunker and move on. I'm grateful that I was able to rearrange the budget to take care of the tires and the mechanic noted that I can get away with the converter for another month, so we made space in the budget next month. First week in December, we will take care of the converter and alignment and hopefully, America's tire will run their Black Friday 10% rebate special on Sunday the 1st.
On another note, Hubby's care needs an oil change as well as a tire rotation. There was a debate as to whether it should affect our budget or if we should just take care of it with the cushion from all of his extra hours - especially since $50/mo has already been earmarked from previous months. Again, these monies have not been pulled and set aside for maintenance, and we weren't really sticking to our budget in the first place, so I'm not sure it counts. There are 5 days left of this month and we need to work through sticking to this budget.
Committing to a budget and working through all of the difficulties is challenging, but I already know that it is worth it. Knowing exactly how much we have gives me so much more freedom to spend on our household needs, as well as on fun. The level of improved communication, alone, is worth working through this budget for.
No comments:
Post a Comment