Why Wait?

July turned out to be kind of a rough month for us. That air conditioning repair bill came in the mail (luckily, most of it was covered by the home warranty that was included when we purchased our house), and one of our cats, Milo, ended up needing to go the vet unexpectedly. Adding that in on a month when we were already short on income kind of hurt and I feel like we didn’t make as much progress as we would have liked to. This is one thing our coach, Mike, has talked to us about — saving for these kinds of things so we have a “emergency” fund when the unexpected happens. That way, we can avoid putting them on the credit card.

Reading the other Project Money blogs this month also got us thinking about how we wish we would have taken control of our finances sooner. It doesn’t cost anything to meet with someone at Summit (or even most other credit unions, I’m guessing) and get advice on how you can better manage your money. Why did we wait this long? Why didn’t we consolidate our credit card debt earlier?

We also can’t help but be angry with ourselves about why we didn’t do better at saving before. When we met four years ago, we were making a lot less money, but we did OK. Then I got a new job and a salary increase to go with it. We intended to keep living like we were before my new job and put that extra money in savings for the down payment on our house - or we could have used it to pay off some of that debt. But somehow, the money was always gone at the end of the month. Looking back, I wish I had arranged for that extra income to be automatically transferred to a savings account when my check was deposited, before I ever knew it was there. If we had done that, we could have put a lot more down on our house and not needed the extra down payment assistance loan. We could probably be paying a few hundred dollars less per month on our mortgage, not to mention what we would have saved on interest. It’s amazing that now we pay almost twice what our rent was before we bought the house and still manage to pay all our other bills, yet when we were living in that apartment, it always seemed like we didn’t have enough money. We would have seemed rich back then if we had been able to hang on to the equivalent of an extra rent payment and put it to use!

So hopefully, if you are thinking about buying a house or you are getting a raise, you’ll take my advice and save, save, save so you’re better off later and try to use that extra salary towards something useful. And by all means, go talk to someone at your credit union to get advice about improving your financial situation. Why wait?

Comments

[Kari & Darek]

Hey guys this is a great blog. We hope that people really heed your advice about saving! We doubled our Mortgage when we moved and wonder the same thing...if we can pay the bills now what did we waste our money on before?!