We have had so many unexpected expenses since April of this year. It has been crazy!! Our parents always taught us to save some of our money each month, and we attended Dave Ramsey’s seminar which encouraged us to set up an emergency fund. Thankfully, we had saved enough money to live off of for at least a year by this past April. This has been such a HUGE blessing after our recent expenses. We have been so fortunate to be able to pay cash for all of the events that have happened the past few months. We have always made sure to not incur credit card debt, however, without this emergency fund, there is no way that we could have stayed out of debt.
Our garage and portions of our house flooded a few months back. We had to replace several things from this, install new drains in our driveway, and replace our retaining wall. The next month, our plumbing and our roof failed, and we had to replace both of those. We had kitchen appliances that broke, and needed to be replaced, car repairs, etc. Last week we replaced our air conditioning. I was so thankful for this being 9 months pregnant in August!!!
I could go on and on, but we have actually had to spend at least $20,000 in the past few months. Thank God for our emergency fund!! Without it we would have been in big trouble and gone into major debt! I started having some problems with this pregnancy, and was not able to cook for a couple of months or shop for deals. This really increased our usual monthly budget of food, since we have been eating out quite a bit more.
Throughout this time, we have had to start slowly rebuilding our emergency fund, but I am so thankful that we had it to fall back on! I strongly encourage everyone to start an emergency fund. You can start off slowly, but everyone really should try to save at least $1,000 and then money up to 6 months to live on. Just view it as paying yourself each month! Dave Ramsey has great advice about budgeting and everything else. You can check out his site here.
Us, too! Our van door broke, to the tune of almost $1,500. Then our health insurance deductible went up, so our health savings account is $1,000 short of the amount needed to pay to have this baby! If it weren’t for an emergency fund, I’d have heartburn for reasons other than being 10 months pregnant! Now we just have to get back to work putting that money back in there, huh?
That’s what we are working on now as well. (-: Hopefully it will be a while until we have to use our emergency fund again.