Hi, Reader!

I don't know about you, but in the middle of Illinois it took a lot longer for fall to arrive - our temps stayed in the upper 80s until October 8th and our family schedule didn't really slow down until then either.

Flag football season is over and it was a good one! Our second son who is 8.5 years old played on an in-house flag football team for the very first time this year and absolutely loved it. He was asked by a neighbor to join their team and it was a fantastic way to meet friends, try something new, and stay active. AND I'm glad that it's over. :)

The boys are starting a new-to-us basketball league and on a team with friends! Basketball practice for the 3 boys starts on Saturday, but I am SO grateful we have been able to find these in-house leagues for sports. This league does three weeks of Saturday practices followed by 10 Saturday games (a few weeks off for holidays). Kyle is also coaching one of the teams!

Ruby and I travelled to Colorado two weeks ago to visit cousins for 4 days. Ruby has all brothers, but on Kyle's side of the family all four cousins are girls and all live in Colorado! So we took a girls' trip to spend time with them, see the pretty fall colors, and get special 1 on 1 time together.

We've owned our home for exactly 5 months and things are starting to break. This is to be expected! All summer I felt like I was holding my breath waiting for something to fall apart.

In the last 2 weeks:

• Kyle's car battery has died fully. It's a standard 12V battery but an expensive one since the car is an old hybrid.
• My van needs an oil change, brakes, and tires. We knew about the oil change and brakes, tires is new.
• Our main garage door broke. It will go up, but the spring is broken. So it drops down (major danger!) and then has to be manually pulled up. Repairman coming tomorrow!
• Dishwasher is on the fritz. It's original to the house from early 2013. When we moved in, I painted over the rusted spots on the racks in order to prolong the life. Now the dishes are all sopping wet when the cycle is done even though we have it on high heat - which wasn't the case when we first moved in.

So what do we do when several unexpected expenses occur at one time? I look first to my budget to see how much of the expenses can be worked into our existing budget. Some things (like ordering a new heating element) will come out of our current pay period. Other things like our van repairs can get added to our next pay period because our appointment is later this week and our mechanic just sends us a bill about a week later that we write a check for.

I'll do things like lower how much I thought I'd be adding to our EF in that pay period or how much personal spending cash I planned

I try to avoid using the emergency fund AND I willingly and gladly use it anytime these expenses can't fit easily into my current budget.

While this means we almost certainly won't meet our goal of increasing our emergency fund from $20,000 to $30,000 by the end of this calendar year (currently at $24,300), it doesn't mean we did anything wrong!

Sometimes people say things like "shouldn't you have a car repair fund?" But think about the math on that, if I had added to a car repair fund this year instead of adding to our emergency fund, our emergency fund would still end up in the same place because we would've added less to it during the year. How you organize or name your savings accounts is much less important than having them - period!

I'll keep you updated as the year progresses to see how we round out the year and how much these estimated repairs actually end up costing us.

xoxo and happy budgeting,

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