Shasta is the Yellow Lab...

In the last month-and-a-half my husband and I have had to deal with one figurative blow after another. It started with my incident on December 9th, continued with 3-4 weeks of a head cold while I was on short-term disability, and has come to another two points in the last week.

First our oldest dog, Shasta (4 years old), became very lethargic and was not her happy, active self.  Thursday we took her in to the veterinarian for the second time and had x-rays taken. They indicated that she had a blockage between her stomach and small intestine. She required surgery. Let me tell you, surgery for a dog is expensive!!! We had to drain our savings account and make a withdrawal from my husband’s 401k to pay that bill and meet some other challenges as well. There was no other way we could cover everything. Thankfully, Shasta is home and doing well now.

On top of this, Mark’s truck has stopped working. We don’t know why it’s not working because there is no check engine light which means the truck won’t give us a code to tell us what’s wrong. Mark is taking it to a mechanic tomorrow and we have some funds set aside to handle that crisis, but we’re not certain yet if it’s going to be enough.

The lesson we will take from this past month is to plan for contingencies quite a bit better. We were lucky to have some funds in reserve, but I think we need to become more serious about saving for both crises and for things like vacations. There are lots of places that Mark and I would like to travel to, but we have no active plan for saving for those trips.

The frustration we are feeling right now would probably be less if we were saving more – a retirement fund (which we both already have) along with a separate contingency fund account (which we sort of have) and another vacation fund account (which we don’t have at all). Now we just have to figure out how to get ALL that set up and how to afford it along with our other obligations. Time for some long-term thinking… Do you have any suggestions?

Image Credit: The “Budget Pie” image was retrieved on January 25, 2010 from Village Park using Google Images.