If it wasn’t for our sink fund, we would be in a lot of trouble this week. In fact, even with the sink fund, things are looking a little shaky.
This week alone, we lost our water to our house faced with a major repair costing a few thousand dollars to a truck we just bought, after already sinking $500 into this same truck. Sigh. It has not been a good few days financially. We’ve only owned the truck for about four weeks, did all of our homework, bought it from a relative, and did everything we could have to avoid getting a lemon. Life laughs at you sometimes.
Still, if we didn’t have a sink fund (or an emergency fund), we would be in a whole lot of trouble, possibly forced to put these expenses on our credit cards and have to deal with interest charges on top of the expenses. perhaps we would have been forced to live without water or transportation. Yikes.
It is true that life throws you some curve balls, that is for sure. That is why it is so important to have that sink fund in place. A sink fund is an amount of money that is readily available to pay for those unexpected expenses that might come up, or it is money saved toward estimated repair or replacement costs. For example, if the warranty on your mattress or the expected lifespan of your refrigerator is ten years, you’ll want to put enough money aside each year, so that when you hit the ten year mark on these must-have items, you will have saved enough to replace them.
We also have a sort of sink fund in our pantry as well. Having extra food on hand, we can make the decision to skip the grocery store for a few weeks, with the exception of some basics such as eggs and milk, and conserve the budget by cooking from the pantry. This works on a temporary basis to get through some tight times.