Well, that stinks…

I knew as I typed last week’s blog post, I was asking for trouble. We were truly feeling things had been going very well and we hadn’t been stuck with an unexpected expense we couldn’t handle or that we were unprepared for. And then, I am not exaggerating, we were in the car immediately after submitting our blog post and when backing out of the garage our side mirror got trapped between our van and our too-small garage. We were SO disappointed but were very hopeful that it wouldn’t be crazy expensive since the side mirror was still intact and it was only the glass that had been damaged. We scheduled an appointment with our car dealer and were informed that to repair the glass ALONE, it would be $500 with parts and labor. We were stunned. And sad. And angry. And disappointed (to say the least). But I cannot say enough about having and using a rolling budget. I know I have talked about this before, but it is worth it to talk about it again. Each month, we have been allocating part of our take-home pay to our car maintenance budget. If we don’t use any of the money (no car washes, no service appointments), the money that we didn’t use gets added into next month’s budget. For example, if we set aside $30 in July, $30 in August, but haven’t used the money, when September comes along and we set aside another $30, we are now up to $90 we can put towards our car. Because of this, when we get an oil change or if something does come up during a routine service appointment – or if someone backs up the van and breaks the mirror, we have the money already set aside to cover these expenses.

While this was and still is incredibly disappointing, because of Project Money, we are not worried about how to cover this expense, rather we are sad because money we were planning on putting into savings must now be used for something else. When we sit back and reflect on this, we are very fortunate that we are not where we were last year when we had unexpected expenses come up. Last year, we were so stressed about how we were going to make it work while paying down our debt. This year, we have the money to pay for it immediately and it won’t be at the expense of paying off debt (because we only have our mortgage left!). And this won't make it impossible to pay off our credit card at the end of the month. So, instead of holding onto the disappointment, we are going to sit back and realize how lucky we are and how far we have come in our financial journey.