Emergency But No Panic

It has been a whirlwind this past week. Last Tuesday, our Heating and Air Conditioning Company came to check the A/C aand make sure we were ready for the A/C season. Since he had the equipment, he decided to take a look at the heat exchanger. He found 3 cracks in it which he showed Hubby. Our furnace is over 16 years old. He checked our warranty and found we had a 30 year one. The new heat exchanger would be covered but the labor would not be. There would also be a shipping charge that we would have to pay to have the part shipped in from another state. It would not be a cheap repair. When we purchased this furnace, the builder wanted to only put in the cheapest one they could get installed. We were not happy with that and wanted to upgrade it to a high efficiency one. The builder agreed to that but would only let the company that they used all the time into the house to do that. So we had the highest efficiency one at that time installed that their company sold. The first year that we moved into the house, we had to have a major repair which was covered by warranty. We had that done. However, now looking at a hefty bill for this repair, we decided to get a quote for a new furnace and then make our decision. From our many years of experience when you make major repairs, things just keep cascading down.

Over the years we have found other issues. One of our spare bedrooms is so cold in the winter that we need to run a space heater in it if anyone is visiting and using that room. That room has 3 outside walls. Whenever Alexa would come to visit, we would put the space heater in it. I always worried that she was not warm enough. Another problem is we did not like the way the exhaust pipes came out through the concrete wall. They just had pipes sticking straight outside. No elbow was put on the end of those pipes to turn it up so that we didn’t have to worry so much about snow building up in a storm and blocking those pipes. There has been a couple of winters that I have had to shovel back to those pipes and dig the snow out around them.

A major issue was that there was only one return in the house. Hubby put another one in between our master bedroom and the hallway right after we moved in. But that was not enough. Our house is all on one floor but it is 2112 square feet. It’s big.

There are other issues also. So our company sent the sales representative out to look at everything and give us recommendations. We are having 2 more returns put in and other add ins done.

The heat exchanger would have cost us under warranty about $2700. A new furnace will cost us about $4389. We have opted to go with the new furnace. It has a 96% efficiency rating. That is higher than we have now. We are also having a lot of extras done besides the returns and the exhaust pipes being done correctly. That extra cost will bring the bill up to $7350.

It is a lot of money and this was so unexpected. However for peace of mind and not having the heat go out in the middle of next winter or have the carbon monoxide detector go off, safety comes first.

I trust this company so I expect they will do a great job installing the furnace and all of the add ins. We will see if our bills go down with the new furnace since it is more efficient than the old one. Since it is freezing here, we still have the heat on. So we will see some heating charges on our next bill with the new furnace. But we won’t truly know until next winter.

They are coming to do all the work tomorrow. They have also booked out Tuesday to us in case they can’t get all the work done in one day. We are hoping it is only one day. We will have no heat from 9am tomorrow morning until when ever they are finished. We have temps in the 30’s-40’s in the mornings and it looks like our high tomorrow will be 54. However, we can bundle up during the day and can use the space heater to keep us and Eloise warm during the night if need be. We will not freeze.

The reason I gave you all this boring information is to show you that we didn’t panic when this emergency happened. I have told you many times that we save a large percentage of our monthly income and have even while we have been retired all of these years. So the money to pay for all of this work isn’t an issue. Our emergency fund is there when we need it. And we will continue saving because we will be having all of the ceilings in our home painted soon and we will have the outside trim, shutters and all the wood around windows and all the doors painted outside next along with some painting on our shed. Then the next project is to have all of the tile in our master bathroom ripped out along with the shower and soaking tub. We want to replace them with a walk in shower and walk in jacuzzi tub. We will replace the grout around these things with thin granite on the walls so there will only be a couple of joints that need grout and it will be easier to clean. So this is the year of projects and we are thankful that we have saved and can do these things.

I have had people, even some of my readers, ask me why we continue to save in retirement. This is why. Things still need to be maintained. We also want to leave a large inheritance to our children and grandchildren. This is all very important to us. Plus think how inflated everything is now. It ticks me off but we have been through these times before and survived. We will again. If we hadn’t saved, inflation would really be kicking our butts.

On Thursday, we were busy keeping an eye on our 5 man landscape crew. They were weeding, trimming bushes, transplanting some bushes, removing some overgrown bushes, and mulching gardens, etc. They were here all day. With tips, that job was $2000. This is another reason we save. They will come back whenever we need weeding or anything else done all summer and autumn.

So for all the people that think we are too frugal, we do spend money as you can see. We spend it on things that are important to us. We spend most of our time in our home so we make it the refuge we want it to be. Plus we want to stay in our home as long as possible. No nursing homes for us. So we save for when we need to hire people to help us as we age.

Many parents never teach their kids about money. Don’t be one of those parents. I am trying to teach my readers who still have time to save for retirement to do it. This shows you how important it is.

I will be back tomorrow with a little of this and a little of that post.