Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

Unlike Jane Dough, I don’t have a five-year plan. I think in the last two months, I’ve gotten all willy-nilly about my finances. Granted, I’ve had quite a few distracting, enormous life events happen to me during this time. I feel like I’ve turned into an ostrich with my head in the sand. At one point, I had to call my insurance company to make a payment by telephone at the last minute because I had forgotten to mail the payment. Life’s definitely kept me spinning around in a whirl of busyness. Last night was the first time I went grocery shopping in about two months and cooked myself a very frugal dinner. (And wouldn’t you know it, I left my lunch at home this morning.)

Right now, I have a lot of short term expenses that are killing me. Four weddings requiring out of state travel and a massive health expense, for which I am underinsured and underfunded. I actually think I can do it all without stumbling too much, but any hopes I had of maintaining the Emergency Basket of Cash has flown out the window.

I’ve always known that I had to go and get some dental work done. It’s been lurking in the back of my mind. I was already saving $3K in a flexible spending account to get this work done in 2006. I’ve spent about $1K of the FSA on some other medical expenses (glasses, co-pays, prescriptions, etc.), and dental insurance will only end up covering about $1.5K. Out of an expected $10K in expenditures, about $3.5K I will be able to finance immediately. I will need to find another $6.5K.

I will be liquidating the short term savings portion of the basket when work is done in July and then again when one of my CDs expires in September. I will be reserving about 40% my since those are locked up in CDs. Unexpected health expenses are what the EBoC is for, right? That will leave me with $4K to finance.

I could pay myself first very aggressively and start saving 10% of my monthly pay, a la Single Ma style, but that would mean short shrift on paying down my credit card debts which are only racking up because of these weddings.

I just don’t know what to do. Should I start paying the minimums on my credit cards and saving more cash? Should I put it all on credit cards and start shoving money to the lenders? Should I liquidate all of my cash reserves?

I shouldn’t have ignored my health for this long and yes, I’m paying a hefty price. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Dental floss is cheap and even if you don’t have dental insurance, try to get your teeth cleaned anyway. Trust me. You’d rather put $300 a credit card now for a cleaning, rather than pay $3000K later for an extraction and dental appliance.