Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Total Money Makeover—in action!

One of the neat things we’ve found about the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover plan is that it keeps working, even after the ‘plan’ is complete. Here’s our recent events that made me so thankful that we have been careful with our money.

We had to dip into our emergency fund last weekend…On Friday, we took the van in to the shop…We’ve known we’d need new tires for my van soon--they were looking really bad and it probably would not have passed inspection. Since they are run flat tires they are expensive, to the tune of $400 per tire… we had saved up in our car fund about $1200 for this purpose. Which was good, worked just how it was supposed to, we’d saved $125 per month for the last year or so. But then at Honda they mentioned the van was running really rough, so we had them do the 105k mile service (we are at 102k) and that ended up costing another $1300 (replaced timing belt, water pump etc). So that money had to come out of our family emergency fund. I suppose we should have known a service was coming due and could have saved for it, but the tires and the service at once was a real budget killer.

So it was an expensive few days, I am SO thankful that we had this in the emergency fund (and car fund) to cover it all. These are the sorts of things that could totally ruin a budget or force a person to use credit. It hurt that we had to use the emergency fund, but I am so happy it was there. It is a VERY good feeling to be financially prepared.

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