At 6:10 Monday morning, Tyler texted me a picture of a bright green puddle under the Silverado in the carport. No words, just the picture. I was standing at the counter packing my lunch for work, and I knew from that puddle alone that our week had changed.
The truck is a 2015 with about 172,000 miles on it, and it's been paid off for years. Tyler does most of its work himself, right there in the carport: oil, brakes, a starter once. He looked under the hood, saw coolant leaking from the water pump, topped it off and drove it slowly to a shop in town, about a mile away, with one eye on the temperature gauge the whole time.
What it cost
The shop called him a little after lunch. The water pump was going, which we expected. While they were in there, they found the timing chain tensioner was worn too, and on that engine you don't want to button everything back up and leave it. Tyler agreed. He said a timing chain job is not a carport job, and coming from him, that settles it.
- Parts: $540
- Labor: $840
- Total: $1,380
He picked it up Wednesday afternoon. We put the $1,380 on our credit card at the counter, and I moved $1,380 from our emergency fund that same afternoon. When the transfer landed two days later, we paid the card off in full. No interest. That's the exact plan I wrote down when we moved our savings to an online bank last fall, and it worked the way I hoped it would.
Why the house fund didn't pay for it
Here's where things stand after this week. The emergency fund went from $3,000 to $1,620. The house fund is at $28,609.82, exactly where it was Sunday night after Tyler's mowing deposit, and it didn't give up a dollar.
I'll be honest, the house fund was right there. It's about twenty times bigger than what we needed. Tyler even said it on Monday night, half joking: "It's all our money anyway."
He's right that it's all our money. But the house fund has one job, and the emergency fund has a different one. Last summer we split them into separate accounts for exactly this kind of week, and we agreed on the rules back then, before anything was broken and before either of us was stressed. A truck repair is what "Truck and Dog" is for. That's the whole point of having it.
There's also a practical reason. We're planning to get pre-approved for a mortgage this fall. A loan officer is going to look at our bank statements, and I would much rather she see a house fund that only ever goes up.
And there's a reason I can't put a number on. Once you take money out of the house fund for something that isn't a house, it stops being a house fund. It turns into a regular savings account with a nice name, and the next withdrawal is easier than the first one.
If there were no emergency fund, the $1,380 would have sat on our credit card. At the card's rate of about 24 percent, paying it off over six months would have cost us somewhere around $95 in interest. That's not the end of the world, but it's $95 for nothing, plus six months of a balance hanging over us. Instead, we paid zero interest, and the only stress was the puddle.
How we refill it
We set this rule last summer too: if the emergency fund gets used, refilling it comes before the house. The transfer on the 21st, the one that started as my old car payment and now carries every bill we've cut, goes to the emergency fund on July 21 and August 21 instead of the house fund. It's $508.20 now, since the $6.20 we dropped from our car insurance joined it this month. Two of those is $1,016.40.
Tyler's mowing money covers the other $363.60. He's mowing nine yards this summer at $40 each, which is $360 a week. After 25 percent goes into the tax bucket and gas comes out, the first week and a half of August mowing does it. If the weather cooperates and the grass keeps growing, the emergency fund should be back at $3,000 by the end of August.
So the real cost to the house fund is two transfers and a little mowing money, $1,380 in all, landing somewhere else for a while. You could argue the house fund paid for the truck after all, just by waiting. I can live with waiting. Nothing comes out of it, and it still gets the $300 left over at the end of each month and the rest of the mowing money all summer.
Our goal is still $35,000 by the end of the year. In September, the transfer on the 21st goes back to its regular job.
