Spending to Save?

As I posted about a few days ago, Haley and I added to our family a little over a week ago.  Clearly, we knew our first child was on the way for quite some time and we planned on saving as much money as we could so that we could pay cash for her hospital stay.  We did achieve our goal, but as always we ran into old Murphy’s Law and were forced to spend on some things now that should help us save money in the future.

The first thing that happened was my garage door opener (we have a split garage, so we have two) went out and needed to get replaced.  It took shorter than I expected to get it replaced and since Haley was already on her maternity leave we didn’t have to take time off work.  This is the one repair that happened that doesn’t directly translate into savings in the future.  We don’t benefit much from the change, except it’s a lot quieter and it works a lot better than our last one.  My fear is that this is an indicator that our other opener is on its last legs and may need to get replaced soon.  That being said, I’m so happy to have a garage door opener that isn’t so loud that it wakes up the entire neighborhood when it opens.  That is the other benefit since two rooms in our house are located directly over our garage.

The second thing we’ve done in the past couple of weeks is to refinance our house.  In all honesty, this is a no-brainer for us and we started it about a month ago, but it all culminated this week.  We refinanced to a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage that was at a considerably lower interest rate.  This lowers our monthly rate be a few hundred dollars and gives our budget a little more flexibility in the coming months with a new baby.  We wrapped most of our closing costs into the new mortgage and only had to pay a few hundred dollars, but we will get some money back from escrow and our old mortgage company.  This is going to be huge for us down the road because we will probably never see interest rates this low for a long time and our local bank and title company has been wonderfully accommodating since we have a newborn to schedule around.

The last thing that we’ve had to spend money on is we had to buy a new dryer.  Since we’ve moved into our house about two years ago our dryer has been spotty at best.  We have days that it works perfectly and days that it won’t dry a thing.  We reached our breaking point this week with it and ordered a new one.  Before this I tried everything to give it a last burst of usefulness.  I cleared the vent on the indoor and outdoor side with a nifty little brush, changed the basic dryer hose with a semi-rigid hose to promote air flow, and even took a leaf blower to the vent to clear it all out.  When all of this didn’t work we decided to have it replaced with a newer model.  This model is going to be more efficient and will no doubt dry clothes faster than our current one.  On top of that, we cleaned out the fire hazard that was our clogged venting, so this was a no brainer.

All these things were stressful decisions to make because we were eating into savings, but in the end they will for sure make living with an infant much easier and cost efficient.  I think sometimes I get caught up in the short term without thinking about the long-term implications.  Either that or I’m rationalizing the spending of a lot of money.  I think that these were the best decisions for my family both now and in the future.

In Process

I like to pride myself in finishing what I start.  I like to think that when I put my mind to it I can get things done in a timely fashion.  You would think that having our first baby in April of this year would push me to get everything set and ready for her arrival in the swiftest of fashions, but I’m really not feeling like it.

I don’t mean to say that I’ve been lazy.  We’re getting things done, but they just aren’t happening at our usual pace.  For example, I spent a weekend during our Christmas break knocking out DIY jobs around the house, but restoring the house to a livable space still hasn’t happened.  Our upstairs area is an absolute wreck, but we’re waiting on certain things to happen before we can really move forward.  Another example is that the nursery is waiting to be painted.  We’ve moved stuff out and even picked out a color to paint it, but that’s where it stands…bare room with paint swatches on the walls to compare colors.  It’s about time to buckle down and get things done again and I’m hoping this weekend I’ll get motivated to at least start the painting of the nursery because I hate painting and would like to get it done.

The silver lining here is that I realize my laziness and thus my conscience will only let me get so far gone before it goads me into action.

The DIY Bug

I’m wouldn’t consider myself a “handyman” by any stretch of the imagination.  That being said, I know my way around basic tools and their uses in my house and I love to try new things.  My wife and some friends went out of town last week and I took the opportunity (after talking it through with her) to upgrade some basic things in our house that we’d talked about, but hadn’t actually done.

The first thing that had to happen was I needed to clear out the room that we will be turning into a nursery very soon.  No tools involved really, just a lot of picking up and moving.  The room was my “office” which could also be called the room with the computer and everything else that doesn’t have a place in our house.  Needless to say, the room was a wreck and full of all kinds of things.  I cleared out all the trash and things that needed to get thrown away and began taking everything else to a holding area on the second floor of the house.  Estimated time: About 2 hours.  Estimated savings: I didn’t check how much movers cost for that short of a time.

The second thing that I chose to do was to install vented gas logs in our fireplace.  We have a wood burning fireplace in our house, but we never use it because it never really gets that cold in Texas and we don’t really want to store wood in our backyard.  I had made some returns to Lowe’s and had some gift cards to spend and I bought a set of vented gas logs, which essentially are fake logs that look like they are burning because of natural gas.  Essentially the process is remove gas log lighter, put together log’s gas line, stack logs on top, and enjoy…but it didn’t go like that.  I had the most trouble getting the original log lighter and once I got that done I didn’t have everything I needed included in the box.  Needless to say, there were approximately 2 too many trips to Lowe’s to make this one happen even though it wasn’t that difficult. Estimated time: About 2 hours of actual work.  Estimated savings: Conservatively, about $200 based on word of mouth.

Once the aesthetically pleasing project was done, I turned my attention to the nuts and bolts of all this, getting the nursery prepared.  I then went about moving and putting together a twin bed in the nursery and a queen bed in one of our guest rooms.  We want there to be a twin bed in the nursery for the first few months our baby is with us so my wife doesn’t necessarily have to hike back and forth so much for all the feedings.  It’s my wife’s bed from college and it is a mess to put together, but eventually I did.  Earlier this year, we upgraded to a king bed and it’s revolutionized the way we sleep (especially once my wife opted for a huge body pillow) and our old queen bed went into the guest room.  This bed was exceptionally easy to put together.  Estimated time: About and hour and a half.  Estimated savings: This is why I pay movers.

My final project over my Christmas break was to install ceiling fans in all the guest rooms and nursery.  Texas summers are typically pretty brutal.  We had always talked about having ceiling fans put in, but never really needed them.  This all changed when we babysat for some friends and noticed how warm it was in the room that became the nursery (although this had more to do with our A/C unit going out).  So I went out and bought four identical ceiling fans and started installing them.  The guy at Lowe’s said “the first one will be the hardest, but it gets easier” and boy was he right.  The first one took twice as much time as any other and I had to install it three separate times before it worked correctly, but the rest were much easier.  Took me bits of four days to finish. Estimated time: Between 5-6 hours total.  Estimated savings: Around $350.

I think I ended up saving more than the estimated $550, but more than that I feel good about being able to install and fix things.  I enjoy working on things and I love the satisfaction of knowing I accomplished something.  The hardest part for me was convincing myself that the power was actually out and I wasn’t going to shock the mess out of myself when I touched the fan wires together.  Next up is to prepare the nursery for a new coat of paint which includes fixing some wall cracks and filling in holes in the walls from pictures.