JUST THE CREDIT CARDS, PLEASE

At the beginning of march, we had $30,428 in credit card debt.

In April:

we paid a sad, pitiful, lonely $228 on our credit card debt,
$0 was charged in finance charges
for a total of $228 debt paydown.

Our new credit card debt total is $26,635.

(Sad mopey face.)

THE ENTIRE PICTURE

We lowered our debt by $1,038 for a total of $91.7K.

It wasn’t a fun month. Shall we go into it? I usually like to keep the “monthly totals” posts to just the numbers, but sure, let’s get into it.

We aim to put $1400 towards credit card debt each month. However, in April, we had some issues with the heat pump unit for the upper level of our home. We looked into getting it repaired, even had them repair it, to find that the replacement compressor was bad, put in ANOTHER new compressor, to find that the reversing valve was bad. Our HVAC company graciously offered to suck up what charges they had incurred at that point (labor to install and RE-install the compressors, refridgerant) and suggested we replace the entire unit.

We did. It cost $2500.

So April went kind of like this:
Pay minimums on the cards (and since we had just transferred balances, this wasn’t a lot).
Put what would have gone toward credit card debt toward a new heat pump.
Take the remaining needed for the heat pump from our emergency fund.

It also means that May will be spent replacing our emergency funds until it is back up to $2000 before we get back on the get-out-of-debt train.

On the bright side - I’m totally excited to see what our power bill is going to be at the end of this month! Sure, it’ll be apples to oranges, since it’s heating costs vs. cooling costs, but still! I can’t wait!

Luckily for us, May is a month where my husband gets paid 3 times instead of just two (he is paid every 2 weeks), so we should be able to build the emergency fund back up AND put some money toward debt, not to mention a couple of events going on (a birthday, family visiting, anniversary, memorial day) that need to be budgeted for.

We also have a couple of changes in how we do our finances, which I’ll detail a bit more later, but the short version is we’re switching to a high yield checking account, we’ve opened an american express blue cash to start getting better credit card rewards, and we’re going to pile up money to earn interest while paying only the minimums on our 0% cards. I’ve tweaked and tworqued my spreadsheet to include our “debt savings” so that we will be sure to stay on track and keep that money safe. We’ve already received our new amex cards and have started using them, but we’re still waiting for our new checking account to process, so more on all that later!

-99k

I feel like I’ve been through the wringer, people.

So we had our new HVAC company come out to replace the compressor last Friday. After it was in, they could not get the unit to start up. They returned yesterday, tinkered around with it some more and discovered that the new compressor was bad from the factory. They went and got new compressor #2 and installed that, finally got it running, and discovered that the reversing valve is bad. The reversing valve is the thingee that makes it cool instead of heat and vice versa.

When they called me this morning, they apologized (for what? for us having a piece of crap heatpump?) and said that they would NOT charge us for any work done thus far. They offered us a new Carrier heatpump with some compatibility widgets that will make it work with our indoor air blower.

So we’re going to go with that. It will cost us $2500. This whole back and forth of will we? won’t we? (have to replace everything) has left me very irritable and crabby.

Yay.

Mr. 99k is lucky that nothing came flying at his head in the midst of my crabbiness, like say, a shoe, or perhaps the cat.

It could be worse.

We could have been out for the compressor replacement labor and cost of freeon AND $2500. Still, I’m not going to breathe easy until the darn thing is actually INSTALLED AND WORKING.

Working for a week straight.

Ah well.

Our kids have both started with their chosen spring sport, T-ball, and soccer. This means that once, sometimes twice a week we’re picking up kids from school, eating on the go, and dashing off to a practice/game. Every Saturday has a game for each kid.

After a long lazy winter of hunkering down inside where it’s nice and warm, it’s nice to get out in some nice weather, but at the same time it feels very hectic and madcap, always on the go! Last weekend I didn’t even plan out an official menu for this current week’s dinners, as with 2 evenings taken up with sports and another night where my husband had a class and therefore wouldn’t be home, there was really only 2 weeknights to plan for.

Our kids get up about 7am and we’re usually out the door at around 8ish to drop them at school (we take turns dropping off and picking up). Pick up from school/daycare is usually around 5-5:30. It’s about 15min from their school to our home, and soccer practice starts at 6:30, and weekday t-ball games start at 6. Not a lot of time in there to get from school to home to eat to get on shinguards/cleats/etc back out and to the field. And then after the practice/game, there’s not a lot of time to play, as bedtime is 8pm. We usually start their bedtime at about 7:15 and we aim for kids to be bathed, jammied up, read to and tucked in/lights off by 8pm. You can see how this doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for … well, anything!

As a result, we’ve been eating way too much fast food and the kids have been getting to bed a bit later on some days. The crunched down schedule has been taking it’s toll, not the least of which is in the form of a parent trying to hurry up a kid and being crabby about it. It’s not all bad though, last night was a class night for Mr. 99k, so I was on kid duty by myself for the evening. I left work late and thus picked the kids up late, which means there’s even less time for a real sit down dinner (even if it’s usually just chicken nuggets and tater tots, which I usually let them have on a class night). So instead of trying to hurry home and fix dinner and having no play time for the kids, I stopped at McDonalds and tried to get them to hold still long enough to get some nuggets into their tummies, then cried out, “RELEASE THE HOUNDS!” (ala the simpsons) and let them run rampant on the play equipment for a half hour. They are even learning the concepts of time budgeting, as I had to explain to them, “If we spend our time playing in the play area, that means there’s not much time to play when we get home.”

It’s definitely hard to spend quality time with your kids when there’s not enough time in the evenings to get everything in. We’ve been toying with the idea of a slightly later bedtime for the kids which *would* give us some more time. I think our older one (soon to be 6) would be fine with that, but the 4 year old could probably still use the full 11 hours of sleep. Neither one naps anymore (alas!) and when we come into their room at 7am, they’re both still usually asleep (Ms. 4 year old) or just waking up (Mr. 6yo) - a good sign that it’s not TOO much sleep.

We are going to try to do better about the fast food for the rest of the month, and have solemnly sworn that any more eating out would come out of our personal blow money categories rather than keep overspending the family eating out category.

It’s interesting to look at how time constraints and time budgeting can actually affect the fiscal budget.

Well, there’s no need to get an energy audit, for we now know the reason for the huge power bill.

We had a few very warm days last week, and even though I was already looking around for an HVAC service company, the “looking around” became more urgent as we realized our upstairs heatpump was not pumping the heat out.

I found a local company and the new HVAC guy came out Sunday and after poking around, gave us the bad news. The compressor is shot. Not only is it shot, but the entire unit is pretty cheap and crappy. He suggested that instead of sinking $1500-2000 bucks into it, we look into getting a new unit.

Unfortunately this was not news. We had someone come out in the fall* because of some problems with the heating upstairs, and I now remember (hindsight - ain’t it grand?) something being said about the compressor. I also remember they said roughly the same thing. That our unit was the cheapest piece of crap that our builder could get away with using and we’d spend our dollars better by matching them with some friends and springing for a whole new unit.

(*We didn’t call that same company again becuase a) I couldn’t remember what company it was and b) they had double charged us in the past which kind of pissed me off and finally c) the techs were always really confusing and hard to understand.)

However, after they left, our heat mysteriously started working again, and we dismissed the entire visit from our minds and went on our merry way.

Until this past Sunday.

After the new HVAC guy gave us the bad news, I asked him if anything would work.

“Cooling is a no. Heating?” I asked.
“Emergency heat only,” he replied.

Emergency heat. This is where the little lightbulb went off over my head.

“Emergency heat. That would probably suck a lot of power, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
“Why yes, yes it would,” he answered.

(Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Ed McMahan, tell 99k what she has won! Why, she’s won power bills from over the winter that were way way way too high, just what she’s always wanted!)

New HVAC Guy would not do any warranty work on this brand of unit, because this manufacturer is apparently really crappy to work with for warranties, and he was only a one man operation and didn’t want to spend his time driving down to The Sticks, VA to deal with them.

Long story short, after flirting with the possibility of replacing the unit, getting estimates etc. and learning that it would have to be both the outside AND the inside blower unit, and all that would run about $6-7k, we found a good, local HVAC service company that can fix the compressor under warranty (which will still cost us about $1200 for labor and freon) and we’ll also be doing maintenance agreements for both our upstairs and downstairs units with them, which includes niceties as spring and fall visits. I only feel bad about leaving the very nice New HVAC Guy, who even told us he wouldn’t charge us his diagnostic fee because he wouldn’t do it under warranty.

I’m not sure exactly what the hit will be to our emergency fund, but I’m hopeful it won’t be much. It has not been a stellar month so far, we have gone over budget in a couple categories (and they’re all “fun money” categories, whoopsies, what can I say, it was a birthday month). I also haven’t made the bulk of our credit card snowball payments yet (minimums are all paid), so I have some budget tweaking ahead of me.

Obviously, I can use money that was ear marked for debt for the HVAC issues, as the debt snowball would have to be halted until the emergency fund was replaced anyway, so whether it comes from debt money or emergency money is kind of like pah-tay-toe and puh-tah-toe. We did have some money in a “home maintenance” category as well, but not $1200 worth. I may also relook at our “tuition” category and see if my husband knows if any of the summer or fall classes he will be taking will qualify for tuition reimbursement. I planned for both of them to NOT be eligible, so if a few of them are, then I may be able to pull some of what’s built up in that category. All in all, I’m hoping that we won’t have to pull out more than $500 from our e*trade account. Even so, April is not going to be a stellar month in terms of debt repayment.

But you know what? After looking at numbers ranging from $6,000 to $7,000 for entire new units? $1200 sounds like a dream come true!

And that damn mystery power bill is now SOLVED and soon to be RESOLVED!

-99k