August 2, 2019
Dear Everyone:
Thirty-some years ago, when I bought my first ever car, with my first
ever car loan from the employee credit union, our Dad gave me a very
sage piece of advice. He
said, “When you finish paying off the loan, keep making the loan
payments.” In other words,
since I was accustomed to paying a certain amount each month, to go on
paying that amount, only into my savings account.
Way, way back, when we were still living in Oregon, a local
savings-and-loan bank had an advertising slogan:
“Pay yourself first.”
The idea was when you paid all your bills each month, there would only
be a small amount of money left for “non-essential” things.
And there would be precious little money left each month to put
into your savings account.
By “paying yourself first”, you could ensure that at least a small
amount would go into savings.
It was about the time that banks and large employers began using direct
deposit, in which your paycheck would be deposited into your account
instead of being printed on a check that you had to take to the bank.
You could also arrange for a designated amount be automatically
transferred into savings before you had a chance to spend it on
something else.
A few years ago, to see if I could afford to buy a new car, I began
making “car payments” each month into one of several savings accounts.
Now that I have a monthly loan payment automatically deducted
from my account, I’m still making those “car payments”.
What this all boils down to is:
I’ve been shoveling money into my savings accounts with all the
gleeful abandon of a four-year-old swinging away at her first piñata.
So when I decided that I wanted to do some remodeling around my
condominium, it was with the assurance that I had plenty of money to
spend on it. I even set up
an Excel spreadsheet with some of the things I wanted to do, along with
“estimated” costs. Some of
my estimations are simply guess work.
For instance, if I wanted to guess how much replacing the bathtub in one
bathroom with a walk-in tub, I went to one of the Big Wholesale Hardware
Store websites to scope out what one would cost.
Of course, there’s more to it than just the cost of the tub.
I would also need to pay someone to tear out the old tub and
install the new one. Plus
replace the water heater, which is overdue for it.
I generally took the initial cost and multiplied by a factor of
three-to-five.
When I replaced all the windows, plus the patio door, on my last place,
it cost less than $2000. But
this time, I decided to go with a nationally-known manufacturer, with
the full understanding that getting much higher quality materials would
come at a significantly higher price.
So when the salesman, “Chester”, informed me that the total cost was
around $21,000, I didn’t keel over completely.
All I needed was a few deep breaths.
Needless to say, this put a substantial hole in my project budget.
It reminds me of the old joke about a man who asked his wife what she
wanted for her birthday.
“I want a divorce,” she told him.
To which he replied:
“Frankly, my dear, I wasn’t planning on spending that much.”
Nevertheless, the windows, etc., have been ordered and are currently
waiting for the next HOA board meeting to go through the routine
approval process, slightly complicated by the fact that said HOA board
decided last month to change property management companies (again!)
In the meantime, I arranged to have the local Hunter Douglas dealer come
out and place a bid on covering all the soon-to-be-new windows, etc.,
with beautiful new shutters.
Imagine my delight when her total came in well under my anticipated
$5000!
Win a few, lose a few, It
all comes out in the wash.
Love, as always,
Pete
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