I am definitely the frugal type who likes to be sure the money spent from the household budget is being spent wisely.
So, just forking over money for anything that I don’t recognize to have much value in not something that makes me very happy.
We do enough of that around here already. I try to weigh the value of each item in our household budget. Recently my wife and I thought maybe we could cut out the cost of seasonal maintenance for the HVAC unit. While not a back breaking expense, it was still a sizeable amount that could be used elsewhere. It was a tempting idea but I didn’t feel all that great about it in my gut. There had never been any sort of major breakdown before. The HVAC unit was upgraded when we purchased the home several years ago. So, it was still relatively new. Since then, we have had the heating & cooling unit serviced semi annually. Personally, preventive maintenance is a good use of money in most every situation. I know that I like knowing that both our vehicles are taken care of very well by our mechanic. I think this is why I felt so funny about reducing or altogether removing the HVAC maintenance. So, I did some quick checking online to see if I was considering something really stupid. Turns out that I most certainly was. It didn’t take but minutes to see that the vast majority of HVAC service calls for major repairs are a result of something that would have been noticed during seasonal maintenance. Then there was the longevity issue that was also effected by not getting regular maintenance on the HVAC. We kept it in the budget.