Our get out of debt plan is tested by huge car repair bill

I knew we’d be tested on our plan to get out of debt and it didn’t take long.

Thank goodness we’ve been working hard to try to get out of debt. The extra breathing space helped us deal with all the car repair bills that we had last week.  Without that space I am not sure what we would have done.

Let me just say here that last week was pretty ugly with car repair bills.

Here’s what the cost round-up looked like last week:

$451 Midas trip

$220 Jim Cogdill Dodge trip

$48.95 Midas 

$299.81 Midas

$10 Wal-Mart

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Total car repair bills: $1,030.00

Plus, receipts show that we spent just under $200 in gas. We wound up making several trips with both vehicles on the road between here and there. Add the car repair bills to the gas amount and the total is shocking. 

Earlier this month, I took some of what used to be bill payments and renewed our $207 AAA Premiere membership.  Knowing that we had it in place was a huge comfort last week! 

The bad thing is that I did have to use the credit card for part of the car repair bills. I'm pretty bummed out about it. We remembered our credit card lesson from the last big car repair bill. Juggling and finagling reduced the credit amount we needed.

Getting out of this hole will take some digging. However, our earlier work kept the hole from being as deep as it could have been. The car repair bills that could have blown us out of the water didn’t. That’s a pretty good feeling.