Debt $ense

I was driving home from a weekend trip to visit a friend (and help her rip out linoleum) when my check engine light came on. Not the occasional flicker, or the thing where it randomly comes on and my mechanic can’t figure out why. This was the “blink three times then stay on” that means something major. Unfortunately, I was about two hours from home, so I just kept my speed down and kept going.

I’ve been having issues with the car refusing to shift out of Park when I turn it on. It’s an automatic transmission and I’ve been having trouble getting the button to depress so I can shift into reverse or drive. So when the light went on and the car was jerking at highway speed, you can imagine what my first thought was.

Turns out it was just a misfiring cylinder and new plugs and wires fixed it. But it was 24 hours before I knew that, and in the meantime I was trying to figure out at what point it wasn’t worth fixing a car worth less than $1,000 and how I would come up with a downpayment if I did have to replace it.

So - lesson learned - I’m cutting back my weekly CC payments a bit and sticking about $250 a month ($65/week, to be precise) into an ING Direct account, which I’ll start in a couple of weeks when I have the $250 stashed for a referral bonus. It will prolong my CC debt, but if I don’t have money stashed, the downpayment would have to go on my card, which also would prolong it. And if I get close to the end and the car’s running well, I can make a big lump-sum payment from that fund to kill it for good, then rebuild my fund with the money no longer going toward debt.