Early Christmas Presents

We've have two pieces of good news! Whoo-hoo!

First off, Chris and I now have $345 saved up in the Emergency Fund! Praise The Lord! We received a cheque from our health and dental insurance provider for $183 so that has gone towards the growing emergency fund.

Also, we've made a slight change to Dave Ramsey's Baby Step #1. Instead of saving $1,000 for the emergency fund we will only be saving $500. Why, you ask? Honestly I'm going crazy with the idea that we won't be putting money towards our debt for three months if we continue to try and save $1,000 first. I just can't do that... I can't stop our momentum for that long! Furthermore, we don't really need such a big emergency fund. Unlike most people, we don't have a lot of big things that could go wrong in our life. We rent our apartment, all utilities are included in our rent, and if anything goes wrong we make a call and they fix it. (Well... sometimes they fix it... our kitchen sink still makes weird gurgling noises and smells every so often, but oh well...) We don't own a car, so there's no car maintenance to take care of and our health is okay....no perfect but not enough that wouldn't be covered by OHIP or our benefits plan.

So,Chris and I had a discussion and agreed that $500 was enough for now. After all our debt is paid off, we'll save more for the emergency fund but for now this is sufficient.

Having said that, next month we'll take out the last $155 from our next pay towards the emergency fund. This will also mean we'll have enough to pay Chris' library debt off in January! SO EXCITING! (We just found a few months ago he didn't return some CDs or books long before he met me. He never even  knew about this debt but we're determined to clear this up ASAP!)

The other awesome piece of good news is our city has decided to decrease every one's rent by 1.15% in our building. This means that our rent will be going down by $15,18 from January 1st - April 30th. On May 1st we have the annual rental increase but we've already worked out that cost and it's only $4.39 more than what we pay right now. This is something we can definitely handle. Happy dance!

Beyond that, we'll be looking at our food budget over the next month or two to see if we need to make a few adjustments to it. I always feel like our food budget comes up short and we overspend a little -- not by much -- but it's something we may need to talk about in the future in more detail.

We hope this blog post finds you all thinking about your own Baby Steps victory.  What if something happened tomorrow? Do you have an emergency fund in place that could aid you in case something goes wrong? How would you pay for it? Credit card or line of credit? Perhaps an emergency fund of $500 or $1,000 could help soften the blow when Murphy comes to visit you... Y'know...Murphy's Law? Yup, he loves to pop up on all of us just at the worst of times...