Money Keeps Rolling Out the Door

No matter how hard we try these days, we seem to keep spending money on major purchases. If you recall, we recently had to put a new roof on our house to the tune of $13,000. That hurt, but luckily we had been budgeting for that for quite some time and were able to pay cash, like we do for everything else. After that major purchase my wife and I agreed to buckle down for a few months to build our cash reserves back up so that we can feel more comfy about our financial state.

I’m disappointed to say the saving spree didn’t last very long, but it ended for a good reason. Let me explain. Our refrigerator is about 17 years old. I’ve always been under the impression that we could expect our fridge to last for many decades and we’d only replace it when it actually died. About 6 months ago my wife started pointing out how ridiculous it was that we hadn’t replaced the fridge. She opened the door one day and said, “Look at this!”. As I stared at the pile of food items in the bottom drawer of the fridge I knew it was only a matter of time. For the last 9 months or so we’ve had to just pile many of the items up in the lower “crisper” drawer because the shelf above that drawer broke so that there is about a 2 foot section of air space above the drawer with no top to it. Since the shelf is gone, the food has all been piled in to that lower drawer. There are a couple other shelves, but there never seemed to be enough room for everything, especially when we had leftovers in containers. If it was just me, I would have suffered with that for a lot longer, but since I don’t live alone and have an equal partner in the house, I had to listen up. The other thing about the fridge that actually did bother me was that it was on just about ALL the time. I could almost see the dollars signs rolling off the top of the darned thing. It’s safe to say the fridge wasn’t energy efficient, that’s for sure.

My strategy of ignoring the complaints had been working for about 6 months when the neighbor down the street mentioned to us that they were going to buy a fridge and were working a deal through a friend of theirs that owns an appliance store. As soon as I heard the word “deal” my ears perked up. I love paying wholesale when I have to buy something! It turns out that we were able to buy a very energy efficient $2000 replacement fridge that we found in a couple different stores for less than $1300 out the door. A $700 discount on something I knew I’d need to buy sooner rather than later? You bet. After doing some research on the fridge and deciding that it was well rated and reliable, we pulled the trigger.

I’m happy to report that we installed it yesterday and it looks GREAT! It has the dual french doors on top with a bottom freezer drawer that slides out. While we really didn’t want to spend the money, we are glad that we did. I think my favorite part of the whole thing was seeing the yellow energy rating tag on the fridge when we unpacked it. It’s the first time I’ve ever purchased the most efficient fridge possible. The little rating was all the way to left side of the energy spectrum indicating it was the most efficient fridge in it’s category! My rough estimate is that we’ll save somewhere around $35-50 a year on energy with this new fridge which will help offset the purchase price over time. We also checked with our local utility and they will come get our old fridge and give us a $30 credit on our bill. SOLD.