The Ides of March

I’ve heard that when you go on the Dave Ramsey plan (or any kind of plan for that matter), anything that can go wrong, will.  In terms of the baby steps, I think a lot of people experience Murphy’s Law in the first month of baby step two.  You get all excited about saving money to put toward your debt and then all of a sudden, boom!  Your water heater breaks, or the transmission on your car bites the dust.  It’s sort of the universe testing your resolve to get out of debt. 

We experienced a bit of that in the beginning of our debt snowball plan, but for the most part we didn’t have too much bad luck during baby step 2.  And then, a few days after we mailed our final payoff, I was driving home from work and heard a small crack! sound.  In the corner of my windshield was a little star-shaped chip, no more than a half inch in diameter.  It’s ok, I thought.  We can get that repaired.  No big deal.  And then, a couple minutes later, I heard a much louder crack! and saw that the star-shaped chip suddenly spread a foot across into my line of vision.  

That’s probably going to cost more than a hundred dollars, I thought.  That’s how much money we had left in ourchecking account after paying off the last of our debt.  We still had our baby emergency fund, of course, but I really didn’t want to dip into it because that would basically put us back at baby step 1.  After getting a few estimates, I found someone who could replace the windshield with OEM glass for just over $200.  So we dipped into our emergency fund to get it repaired, and that was that.  But still, it felt like March 15^th was never going to come.  That’s our next payday (which means we have had to go two weeks from our debt payoff to payday with just the cash in our envelopes and our emergency fund).  

Then yesterday I checked the mail.  I’d forgotten that a couple of months ago, I had to undergo some medical tests, and we hadn’t yet been billed for our portion.  So now we owe the hospital $300.  It feels like we’re going into debt again, but since we will have enough to replenish our emergency fund and pay the hospital bill tomorrow, I know we’ll be ok. It’s just a little irritating since it seems like our reward for becoming debt free hasn’t been so handsome.  

On a brighter note, I rediscovered this video today.  One of my law school friends emailed it to me last year and it makes me laugh no matter how many times I watch it.  Kids, just remember, if you did not go to Harvard in the 1970’s, and you do not have a time machine (so you can go back to the 1970’s and graduate from Harvard) then DON’T GO TO LAW SCHOOL!  Unless you want to go six figures into debt and have nothing to show for it in the end but a cracked windshield...

Has anyone else out there experienced Murphy's Law just when it seemed like things were looking up?