Tips on Budgeting – Emergency Fund

Have you ever run into a situation where you needed money and it wasn’t there? Well, you’re not alone. Everybody has to start somewhere, and we usually start to seek personal finance help when the pain of our situation drives us there. In a previous post I wrote about why an emergency fund is important. Today I’m going to tell you a personal story about the risks of not having an emergency fund from before I was a financial consultant. I’m going to take you back to a time where I didn’t have the budgeting spreadsheets, proper tips on budgeting and other financial calculators we provide in our resource links.

You’ve probably noticed I’ve used the example of a flat tire and other car troubles as examples of ‘unexpected expenses.’ That’s because it’s personal. My story starts with Bebe Neuwirth. Not the actress, but the 97 civic my wife calls her car. My father stores her winter tires, which most of us need here in Canada. She borrowed her mother’s car togo to college and her mom was nice enough to take her car to get the tires switched out. At this point, I didn’t know I needed personal finance help because this was an expense which we had expected. My wife left money for her mom to pay for the service to have them changed.

So my wife gets back from school and the car is in the driveway. Yippee, no sliding through stop signs. The only problem was the work order. The results of the routine brake inspection the mechanics performed while switching out the tires. They diagnosed a seized parking brake, badly worn front and rear brake pads and rotors, and to top it off, the front calipers needed a serious servicing or replacing. Guess what the quote was? $500-$1,100 depending on how much of the work we would get done. Ask yourself this question. “If I were getting my brakes fixed, would I want half of them up to snuff, or all of them?” We answered the same way you probably did. “All of them.” This $1,100 bill I couldn’t afford was my first real wake up call that made me look for personal finance help so I’d be prepared next time. I should have looked into tips on budgeting sooner.

I know this is a pretty small expense in the grand scheme of things, but when you’ve never received any personal finance help and you’re just getting started in life, it sure felt big. After that, I vowed to learn as much as possible about how to manage money, budgeting and how to expand my financial knowledge. I’m now, as I mentioned, as financial consultant, doing well not only for myself, but also for my clients. You can get budget tools and such on google, or you can check our resource link for budget spreadsheets, and tips on budgeting as well as other helpful financial calculators that I still use today and recommend to all my clients. Whatever you use, make sure you learn from my mistakes, not the hard way from your own.

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