All in one Accord!

Since my husband's older car died (RIP) over a week ago we had to do a little adjusting to our normal life and financial routine and buy a different car. We decided on an amount and we weren't going to spend a dollar more. We looked at so many cars, I didn't think we were going to find the one! I realized that this is why people don't by cheap cars...it's hard to find a good one. We had to put in a lot of time and effort to finally arrive at the car we ended up buying. We found an ad on craigslist for a '97 Honda Accord and were really impressed with it's condition and it was mechanically sound. We offered $500 under his asking price and he tried to get more from us, but the beauty of not bringing any more money than what we wanted to spend was that we REALLY couldn't spend anymore! The guy took it and we were set!

We are now putting all our extra cash back into our emergency savings account to build it up to $1000 again. This is the first time in 3 years that we've had to completely drain our emergency savings. We used to have a credit card "for emergencies", but we found ourselves using it for wants most of the time. When we decided to stop using credit cards and put $1000 in the bank it was like walking on a tightrope without a net. I was really afraid something major was going to happen and we were going to wish we still had a credit card. But as things came up (and they did) we used our savings or we had excess in our budget to cover it. Part of the adjustment was that we had to define what a true emergency was. With our credit card, when we were out of money and I was hungry and didn't want to cook- eating out was an emergency! When our favorite band came to town when we were living paycheck to paycheck with no excess- our credit card funded that emergency! Now, we actually have the money but we don't choose to spend it on those things very often.