31 Ways to Kick Debt in the Teeth: EMERGENCY FUNDS (2024)

Tips like thesehelped us pay off $127K in debt. You can read our story inSlaying the Debt Dragon: How One Family Conquered Their Money Monster and Found an Inspired Happily Ever After.

Here’s my little Happy New Year gift to you. Each day in January, I’ll bring you a simple, concrete and easy to put in place tip to fuel your efforts to Save Money, Pay Off Debt, and Be Awesome this year. Looking for a quick plan? Well this might not to be the right place for you. Most things down well take time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t begin to implement systems in your life that will help you achieve your goals. I’ve said it many, many times before.Paying off debt isn’t complex. It’s just not easy. You have to punch the clock daily and do the hard work. Here’s another way to make that happen

It’s never a question of if something will blow up in life, but when it will blow up. Take for instance my Friday afternoon about a year ago. In typical Cherie fashion, I waited until 3 minutes after the absolute last minute to leave. I threw the Princess Youngest’s gymnastics leotard in my bag for her after school lessons. I put the Princess Eldest’s guitar in the trunk along with her binder full of music in the trunk. I quickly threw my bag into the passenger seat and~~peeled~~pulledout of the driveway. As a rumbled down the road I thought, “Man, there’s a lot of ice packed on my tires. I can’t believe it hasn’t fallen off already.” One quick turn onto the next road and it became obvious. There was no ice packed tire. Only a flat as a pancake tire.

Luckily, I was able to navigate back to the driveway. There were no gymnastics or guitar lessons that afternoon. Certainly my afternoon didn’t go as planned. A small setback like this one would have been a major one a few years ago before we had an emergency fund. Not having dollars in the bank for a flat tire, a dead dryer, or a unexpected doctor’s visit would have set us back financially. Even a minor emergency digs you further into a hole that you feel like you’ll never be able to climb out of again.

To kick debt in the teeth, you’ve got to have anemergency fund. Honestly, it has to be the first step you take. We saved up $1000 as quickly as we could when we began our debt slaying journey. I can’t count the number of times that our emergency fund was completely emptied during those four years. As frustrating as it was to pause our efforts at paying off debt, the very first thing we did was to rebuild that emergency fund. A root canal, braces, a new dryer, more than one car woe, a water heater, over and over again, life happens. Sometimes it happens more than once a week or even more than once a day.

But who has a $1000 laying around the house, right? We actually used Christmas money, a tax refund, and adjusting our withholdings to quickly save a cool 1K, the first time. The 2nd, 3rd, 45th time we used any means possible to refill it, including using the extra money that we would have put toward debt to re-save that emergency fund. After paying off debt, we expanded that $1000 to an amount that would allow us to run our household for 3-6 months if something would happen to one of us. Now, we have an emergency fund for the emergency fund.

A flat tire? Pbffft. Bring it on.

Kicking debt in the teeth requires an emergency fund. Get one as fast as you can.

31 Ways to Kick Debt in the Teeth: EMERGENCY FUNDS (2024)

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