The Wintertime before the last one, my fiance and I were trying to save money to go on a cruise the next summer season.
We actually split many corners that year— no large date evenings, no shopping sprees, no video games, no ridiculous purchases; we had legitimately tighten our belts.
When Fall rolled around, we thought it was best to just skip our correct heating system servicing to save money; the fall had been entirely warm, and the Wintertime was projected to be mild as well. The fall season seemed to last quite a while, the temperature hovered right around 50 degrees even into what was conventionally thought of as the “Wintertime months”. The temperature was entirely mild up until it wasn’t. It was in mid-July when the bottom dropped out of the temperature and our furnace was not up to the job of being moved to full blast to keep us warm. In fact, our furnace broke down. While we were waiting on repairs– clearly the Heating and Air Conditioning suppliers were legitimately backed up as multiple folks in the area had thought it would be best to skip the fall furnace service– we had to stay at a local hotel for 3 evenings. Of course, as supply and demand would have it, the hotel had multiple local customers that Wintertime and their prices had skyrocketed. By the time it was all said and done, our fiance and I had spent nearly all of our vacation savings on the hotel room and furnace service costs. Lesson l had to learn. Since then, we haven’t gone a single year without having our furnace maintained in the fall to make sure it can get us through the Wintertime.