Money Stuff

Every time I pay the mortgage these days, I find myself feeling incredible gratitude that Josh's paychecks are, well, a lot better than they used to be. I also find myself marveling that we lasted so long on so little. No foreclosures, no credit card debt, and the only late payment we had was my fault because I forgot to make sure we paid our internet bill on time. :oops: I resolved that issue quickly enough by setting up auto draft, only to find that the money I "saved" by not incurring further late fees was swallowed up by an increase in our charges by the same amount monthly. Oh well.

So budgeting is interesting...I finally see enough money coming in regularly that I know our bare minimum expenses will be met and then some. We've been working on catching up on all the stuff we waited on and sometimes it gets discouraging to see how much money that can require. But now that Christmas is about here, I'm wondering if I just simply got confused. It appears that we're finally gaining ground, I hope, anyway. We do have a few things coming up pretty soon...

One is plumbing repairs. When our hot water heater broke, the plumber tested our water pressure for the house and found that the hardware needs to be replaced. And our kitchen plumbing needs some serious attention. I rather wish at times that I knew enough about plumbing to manage. The dishwasher has been giving me issues for several months, but it just became completely unmanageable the other night. As I was sopping up water from under baseboards and in the cabinet and drawer, I just found myself feeling like I did as I was trying to keep up with the ever-draining water heater when it broke. Water damage is so easily caused! All I did was start the dishwasher and leave the room.

Oh well...I guess it's the hazard of being a homeowner. Or a residence-dweller. It's not bad. It's just weird. Living in an apartment definitely had the perk of being able to call on maintenance whenever necessary without having to worry about whether we could afford it. But I do prefer living in a house.

Anyway, I need to figure out what's going on with our money so I can know how much we can afford to spend on plumbing repairs. I suspect we'll need a replacement garbage disposal and, at the very least, new external parts for the dishwasher. We'll need new hardware for our house water. And we'll need something for our shower/bathtub faucets that have been dripping lately. They may just need to be tightened and re-sealed, I'm guessing. And then the labor to go with that...I have no idea what to expect. Part of me wants to buy a plumbing repair kit on Amazon and then watch some YouTube videos. ;-) But for some reason Josh thinks that's a bad idea.