I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Tell All Tuesday - Rebuilding

The car repair is 78% paid for and 22% is financed, and I am in the rebuilding phase right now. Rebuilding the emergency fund, rebuilding my debt snowball, rebuilding my snowflaking ability… basically, working to get back to where we were before the car repair hit, and then improve upon that. The nice thing about minimum payments is that even while we’re rebuilding, we’ll still be (forced) to make progress on our debt, and we’ll actually be in a slightly better place than we were once the car repair is completely paid for and the emergency fund is restored. Which was a big part of my strategy this week.

I added the $800 remaining of the car repair to our debt totals, and then countered by making three minimum payments due on our two student loans and our credit card. That caused our overall debt total to go up by less than $800 and our percentage of debt paid off to drop by only ~1.5%. Still backwards progress, and not what I want to see, but it did soften the blow a tiny bit.

On to the numbers:

Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71

Current debt total as of 01/15/08: $27,717.23

Principal paid to date $9534.48

Broken down into:

• Auto Repair: $800 (new as of 01/11/08)

• Credit Card: $155.17 (paid $20 minimum 1/13/08)

• Student loan: $11,716.07 (paid $144.50 minimum 1/13/08)

• Spouse student loan: $11,691.64 (paid $237.59 minimum 1/13/08)

• Car loan: $3354.35

Emergency fund stands at $301.00.
% original debt paid according to NCN Network Chart: 23.96% (last week 25.43%)

Ah, the first backwards slide in debt paid percentage. Sigh. No snowflakes this week because everything I had that would be used for snowflaking this past week was directed completely to the car repair bill Friday. I did however receive two checks in the mail last night, one for surveys I had taken and one was referrals to Opinion Outpost last month, together totaling $71. I will be depositing that today, along with $35 my spouse got from his dad who sold a weight bench for him they were keeping in their basement (no way to get it here from there so his dad said he’d sell it and send him a check for the profits) and putting it all in our emergency fund. Because I can only pay the car repair bill every time I get a bill, I will be collecting the snowflakes for it in my savings account and then taking it all out at once and paying the car repair bill when it arrives. I am hoping by the time they bill me to have the entire $800 saved but that will depend on how quickly that happens.

I have about $30 pending from surveys that has not arrived yet, and my tutoring money will also be snowflaked next month, I am up to about $250 (spent the majority of Sunday tutoring) and I am aiming to get to $500-600 by the end of the month. If I can do that, I should have enough to pay the repair bill. Once that is paid off, I will be paying off the remaining $155.17 on the Citicard as well as rebuilding my emergency fund to $1000. And then we’ll see what happens from there.

In other news, I have more ING Direct Savings account referrals - the two I posted last night were used (thank you!!) so I posted 4 more that are available. Depending on how fast they are used, I will keep reposting two or four more links as the ones posted are taken. If you are a new customer and want to open an ING Direct savings account with an initial deposit of $250 or more, use a referral link and you will get a $25 bonus (I get $10 deposited to one of my children’s college savings accounts).

And finally, a good thing to say about Saturn. Surprised? Heh. It is about my local dealer though, not the corporate people. We got the car back Friday afternoon, and Friday night, the “Service Engine Soon” light came on. To say I was not pleased is an understatement. We called the local Saturn on Saturday and they had us bring it in Monday morning. By lunchtime on Monday, the problem was fixed (a faulty sensor) and it was all covered under the engine warranty. They said the sensor must have gotten mixed up somehow when they reconnected the new engine. But it was dealt with promptly and the light has been off since. Other than the dealer taking twice as long to fix the engine than they could have, I really have no complaints about how we were treated there and the quality of their work. The corporate Saturn… well, that’s another story. I did email them again, and I have to thank commenter Mike to my car repair posts who in his comments gave me inspiration to keep trying even though Saturn is not being very helpful. My email basically stated that the fact that they don’t think they have any responsibility in the repair translates into they don’t expect their engines to last past 87,000 miles, and outlining why their stated reasons for not taking any responsibility for the repair were laughable. They responded last night saying they are sorry I am dissatisfied and they are reopening my case. They claim I will hear from them in “a reasonable amount of time”. I’m not holding my breath, and I expect nothing, but I am happy that I am sticking up for myself and trying as hard as I can.

On to the rebuilding phase. My goal is to not let this set me back more than a month. We’ll see what we can accomplish by February.

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