The Boring part of FI

I think it’s every adult’s worst nightmare. You are on a good financial pathway, making headway on your bills and poof – unexpected expense!!!! Historically for me, it has been veterinary bills. This week, it was a car battery.

We have been making remarkable progress on decreasing our credit card debt. For the last few weeks, every little windfall has gone to pay off a credit card…..and then the next……and the next one. We have been penny pinching, avoiding Starbucks like the plague (read: me), and bringing our lunches to work religiously. None of that makes us immune to the needs of our vehicles.

My husband has an app on his phone called Ford Pass. If there is an issue with his truck, it lets him know. As he has a company vehicle that he drives with his job Monday-Friday, he really only drives his truck on the weekends because we are the homiest of homebodies. One night last week he got an alert on his phone that the battery was not holding power, and that he should run the engine. So, he runs the engine for about 15 minutes thinking this should resolve the issue.

The next day, he gets another alert about the same thing. He proceeds to tell me he thinks he is going to have to purchase a new battery for his truck. This is a punch in the gut, as it means the next couple hundred dollars that we can scrape together will NOT be going to pay down debt as we had planned. Even my husband is upset by this news, as he is even more on board with FI than I am at this point! What do you do, though? The car needs a battery, so you get the car a battery.

His internet sleuthing first leads him to Wal-Mart where a new battery can be found for $230. I was budgeting $150 in my head, but Auto Repair isn’t really my forte. Still, we are both kind of upset by this news. Me, because $230 is $230, and him because the quality of the battery really isn’t that good. Per him, it is their house brand and quite cheaply made. Still, he maintains that it is the cheapest that he can find and so he will go with it.

A few days later, he excitedly tells me that he has had an epiphany. He never thinks about Costco when he thinks about car parts, but Costco DOES have car batteries. He checks it out and low and behold, Costco has a name brand, good quality battery for $169. They add a $15 core charge on top of that, but you can easily get that refunded by bringing in the old battery and returning it at the same time.

Other than his frustration at being stuck in line behind somebody who was taking forever, he was super happy with Costco and this experience. Once he got to the check stand, it took him all of 5 minutes to complete the exchange and get out of there. We tend to forget about all of the things that we can use our Costco Membership for, but I feel like this is a case in point. Even if we never used our Membership for anything else this year, (but we totally will) with this transaction alone we earned back our membership cost.

In the end, it was still more than the $150 I had in my mind, but by taking the extra few days we reclaimed the $60 that would have gone to Wal-Mart, and instead was able to go towards Credit Card Debt! Additionally, for the first time in a long time – we were able to pay using Cash instead of Credit to navigate this unexpected expense.

All hail Costco!