A lot of hot water...

So, in the spirit of keeping with the Naginata, I'm listing $26.37 for gas for my truck and about $15 for fuses for our fusebox. Yes, our house is old enough to have a fusebox. I blew them after hooking back up our hot tub in order to test it before selling it. Here's the story on that...

Naginata and I have been working on cleaning, streamlining and fixing up the house. It's a good pursuit, and there is plenty to keep us busy since we've decided to curtail extraneous consumption. It's a nice change of focus to make us thankful for what we already have and to give us the chance to get it in better shape. I have complained for some time that it feels like we "don't have anything," when in fact we're quite blessed to have a lot. It's time to take stock of it and leverage things we don't need/use in productive ways.

Out hot tub came with the house. We've used it only a handful of times. In fact, it has been drained empty for the better part of two years, now, and it occurred to me that we could sell it for some extra income and to help us in the clean up of our house. But before we can sell it, I wanted to make sure it worked, so I filled it back up and ran the system overnight. I figured if it was in good condition, we could make a fair amount off of the sale.

Well, we had arranged some of our appliances differently since we last ran the tub, so the resulting addition of 30+ amps to that circuit blew out the fuse. I went through two before I realized what was going on. I unplugged some things and got it back on, but we had to get some new fuses to replace those lost in the line of duty. The next morning, even though the system looks to be running, we still don't have warm water. We look at the options of either repairing the motor and sell the full working system (which we think will still net us a better price, even though we would have to invest something up front) or we sell it as is and expect to recoup less. We decide that the small hassle is better for more money. We also discuss putting a ceiling on how much we think its worth to repair vs. how much we think it's worth to junk and just sell the tub. It's not worth our time to repair the motor for 50-60% of our total asking price when the remaining 40% is what we'd sell the broken tub for anyway. But a repair that's 10-20% would give us a better price and overall improve our cash return.

The repairman now has our motor and is supposed to return an estimate soon. I'm planning on calling him in a bit to see if it is worth our money. Naginata and I talked about what this means and ways that we should look at income like this. We don't have a stack of hot tubs to sell, so we shouldn't expect this as steady income. In the past we would have split it up and had fun with it. We probably would have eaten a lot of take out or go to a few good restaurants. Under our new, self-imposed restrictions, those options are off the table, making us really examine how money like this should be best applied.

We came up with home repair. There are a couple of things that we need fixed around the house that require the touch of a professional. Assuming we can come close to what we're looking to list the tub for, it would give us more than enough to get that fixed up. This is the kind of thing we should have been doing all along. If we had figured out a better savings schema, we wouldn't have had to sell our hot tub just to get these things fixed. Mind you, we don't need the tub. We're selling it because we don't need it. The cash is an exceptionally nice fringe benefit that lets us do things we should have been responsible enough to tackle anyways.

I may sound like a broken record, but I say these things because I need to reinforce in my own mind that it shouldn't take selling off my possessions at a fraction of cost to supplement my income. We have the resources already, we just manage them badly. Inasmuch as I'd like to save as much money as possible between now and next Mayday, I'm taking this time to rewire my brain into handling this money better when it is given to me the first time around. I'm going to go back to the food analogy I started way back when. I read something this week that talked about not using exercise as either a punishment or reward for food you had eaten recently. I'd like to draw the parallel back to finance. I don't think the budget or the budgetary restriction should be viewed like a punishment. When you do that, you tend to see temporary cash gains as a means to grant yourself with a reward. But once you've sold the hot tub and spent the cash on comic books and penny whistles, what have you gained? I'm thinking on that quite a bit while I wait for the call of the repairman.