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by Adam Dawson

The final tally for our recent repairs/house issues is in. The well situation is touch and go at this point. There are some very expensive things we can try to improve our existing well that cost thousands of dollars. If those don’t work, we could get a new well drilled, which will be $15-$20k. I do NOT want to do this! Right now, the well is producing and seems to be keeping up with demand as long as we are very careful in our usage. So I’m thinking we should try to wait it out for a few months and see if we can get some rain. You can’t predict when the drought will resolve itself, but I also don’t want to take drastic action based on a problem that will probably fix itself eventually. It’s just a matter of how long we can make do in the drought. It’s hard to get good advice on this problem. The “Well Experts,” strangely enough, all seem to think that the services they provide, such as well drilling, well “rehab”, etc. are the answer to our problem. As they say, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

So here’s what we’ve got so far.

Well repair: $780
Water Delivery: $190 (4000 gallons)
Tenant Washer/Dryer (Austin): $547

When we bought the house, we had the Dave Ramsey $1000 emergency fund in the bank. As soon as we moved in, we had to replace the water softener ($500+). As you’ll remember, we have $300 in the monthly budget for increasing the emergency fund, but these recent issues have wiped it out. We have to start over. In the interest of full disclosure, we do have some other liquid funds in various places in the event of catastrophic disaster. I don’t really consider them “available,” but they do exist in the strictest sense of the word, so there are no surprises here:

1. The Indy rental house bank account has a few thousand dollars in it (as mentioned, this is part of our retirement, so we don’t plan to use it. But if our life falls apart it’s there)
2. Our monthly debt snowball (about $1200/month we are paying above the loan minimums)
3. Emily’s business account usually has a little money in there
4. Lastly, and we would never touch this, but it is there – the Austin tenants’ deposit. In Indiana at least (and probably in Texas too), the law requires this money to remain sequestered, so we won’t view this as available funds. But it is sitting in our savings account, and does protect us if the tenants decide to not pay rent or break their lease. (By the way, they’ve been great so far. They even paid September rent on the 1st of the month in person even though it was a holiday weekend.)

I’m glad for a couple of things. First, that we had at least some money in the bank to take care of these things. Second, that we have a buffer in our debt snowball that we can use if we need to. I’m thankful that so far, we haven’t had to take additional debt to deal with these problems.

Either way, it’s been a Murphy’s Law couple of months and it’s time to begin rebuilding our emergency fund. Now that we have a house, I’d like to get it to $5000 or so, but I anticipate that this will take some time. Some have suggested that we forego the debt snowball long enough to build the fund. I really want to stick to our schedule on debt payoff so I’m trying to balance both. November is coming up. It’s an extra paycheck month. Most of that is going to fund Christmas and holiday travel, but hopefully it will help us dig out a little bit.