Your Nest Egg--Is It Working For You, Or Waiting?
Ok, just trying to make the whole major auto breakdown fiasco just a little less painful, but it’s still fresh in my memory. Long story short, we’ve got two five year old cars in our family, each at around 150,000 miles. Yeah, we drive. A lot.
The oldest of the cars had an “incident” which left my husband running the remaining five miles to work—and a tow-truck retrieving the Civic the next morning. (No, not from a bar.)
I hate Murphy. I especially hate Murphy when he/she/it messes with my cars.
Also, there was a plumber involved. Not with the cars… with one of my children, who somewhere along the line decided to see how far down the bathtub drain they could shove an entire bar of soap. The soap wedged the backflow open so we didn’t know there was a problem until sewage started backing up all the drains in the house, and the washing machines. (Oh yes, it was that good…)
Both fiascos hit us in the same week and zapped month-end debt-repayment efforts and nearly drained our emergency fund. The remaining $150 will hopefully get us into next month, but I’m not expecting a strong September as we try to replenish that emergency reserve, back to our “baby step one” $1,000 fund.
Here’s where we’re at now:
Total repaid in August was $1,578.10, substantially shy of my $2,300 a month goal. Total paid off since beginning my writing journey here with DebtKid is $3,973.14. Total so far this year, about $25,000. (Beans and rice, rice and beans baby!)
It feels so good to be so much closer, but at the same time, it feels so very far away now that we’ve got another month of backpedaling and refilling our emergency reserve before we can make forward progress again. We’ll just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other—and get ourselves out the same way we got in—a nickel at a time.
Here’s to kicking Murphy out of the house for good! Cheers!
PS: We’re attending Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University beginning next week. Hoping that will provide us the final dose of intensity we need to push through the last of these bills and be debt free.
