I read another blog that has an idea I love… I would like to start doing it too, but I don’t actually know how to start.

Every time she does a load of laundry, she adds $1.50 into a fund for a new washer/dryer. I’m not sure if she has a separate savings account for it or if she just keeps it on a spreadsheet, but I think it’s something worth considering.

For myself, I feel like I would need a separate account for it because I feel like it would be too easy to spend the money if I just kept it in my general savings account. Another idea would be to physically put the cash in a jar each month. I would just have to keep track of how many loads were done each month and then pull that amount of money out.

I think this would be a great thing to do, but then I wonder where would I get the money from? We barely have enough money at the end of each month to meet our obligations to pull another $30 - $50 out a month.

We make plenty of money but for many years, we lived above our means, which we are paying for now in credit card debt! It’s no one’s fault but our own, but it makes finding an extra $30 - $50 difficult! Definitely something to mull over though and to try to work into our budget.

To continue on my last depressing post, I have more bad (for my bank account) news.

When we moved into our home almost 5 years ago, the dishwasher was brand new, but it never really worked very well. We have always washed dishes on “high heat” and “pots and pans” and the dishes still didn’t always come out clean.

So, of course, in the middle of our car saga, our dishwasher decided now was the best time to give up the ghost!

The Husband opened the dishwasher the other day and the bottom was filled with water. He assumed that the hose was clogged so he took everything out, pulled the dishwasher out and flushed the pipes and hoses. He ran the dishes again… and the same thing happened. Apparently, the pump went out on our dishwasher. This isn’t a tragedy in that we never really liked this dishwasher anyway. However, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Obviously, we could handwash dishes; but with 5 people living in our home and 2 of them there nearly all day, every day, we go through a lot of dishes! We run the dishwasher daily and sometimes more than once a day. (Sometimes I don’t know how we go through so many dishes, but we manage to! We eat almost all meals at home and pack lunches most every day.)

After a few days, once we had a chance to get to the store, we bought a new dishwasher. HOLY COW! Dishwashers aren’t cheap! The least expensive model they had was $500, on sale! We opted for a $900 dishwasher. It was on sale $100 off from $1000. We also needed to buy the install kit which was about $30. After taxes, we paid $1002… for a dishwasher! It seems absurd to me, and we didn’t even buy a top-of-the-line model. We bought distinctly middle of the road!

We were very glad that the dishwasher we chose was in-stock and we were able to go pick it up at their warehouse only 15 minutes away. We have seen horror stories of products ordered and never delivered or backordered for months. We were very glad to be able to pick it up and start getting it installed right away.

The Husband is very handy and able to tackle most home projects himself! He has installed windows, microwaves, dishwashers, and fans so we thought this would be a piece of cake. It didn’t go smoothly. There were a few bumps in the road, but luckily my brother is a plumber, so The Husband was able to ask him some questions and get it figured out. After a couple days, it was installed and functional!

Of course, all this came on top of our car drama, as if we weren’t stressed enough! However, again we had so much to be thankful for in this process. We are so fortunate to have money in the bank to pay for this “emergency”. We were lucky the store had them in-stock. We are lucky my brother was able to answer any questions we had, and that we had a truck to pick up the dishwasher with.

It’s so easy to get mired in the muck and negative of these cruddy things happening, so I need to try to be grateful for all the blessings in our life.