Reluctantly Saving Money

During the last couple of months I’ve saved around $1000, and I’m not very happy about it. It’s money I really didn’t want to save. I’d rather have blown it big time. My most earnest efforts and hopes to do so were thwarted by circumstances entirely beyond my control.

During this timeframe I’ve had the misfortune of being hit by a string of low level, unrelated plumbing issues. A shower diverter valve jammed, a toilet cistern flush button broke, and a different cistern decided to continually overflow into the bowl. A little shut off valve then developed a tiny leak the moment I turned it off, so we didn’t have to listen to the overflowing cistern all night. I had to spend a lot of time and effort fixing all of it myself, because I couldn’t find a tradesman willing to waste his time on jobs so small.

Then, as if the house itself had joined some conspiracy against my finances, the little rain cap on the wood burner’s chimney chose this exact window to snap clean off and sail away in a gust. This left the flue open to the elements. Naturally, no tradesman was interested in hauling out a ladder for a part that costs about thirty dollars.

So I found myself clinging to the roof tiles with the wind doing its best to reintroduce me to the ground, fitting a replacement cap myself and muttering about how this was somehow going to be the job that finally broke me financially. It wasn’t. I came down, dusted the soot off my hands, and grimly totted up yet another job I hadn’t paid anyone else to do.

By the time the plumbing had calmed down and the chimney was capped, I looked at my bank balance and felt genuinely aggrieved. There it sat: an extra thousand dollars, entirely unspent, entirely unwanted, and entirely my own fault for being so infuriatingly incapable of attracting a trade person. I had “tried” to give this money away, to plumbers, to roofers, to anyone with a van and a vague willingness to charge me for thirty minutes of work, and every single one of them had turned me down for being too small a job. What, precisely, is the point of having money if nobody will take it off you?

I suppose there’s nothing for it but to keep the money invested and let it grow, on the off chance some future household disaster is finally significant enough to attract a tradesman willing to take it off my hands. Until then, it just sits there, patiently waiting for the next crisis it fails to solve.