They say:

With a house things will go wrong.

Our house, built through hard work by my dad, is around 30-years old. Except for cosmetic redecoration inside, everything’s generally been the way it always has (shows the quality of construction material used back then). But of late, the roof was beginning to show leaks here and there. We had a contractor check things out and got to know that the initial couple of inches of roof-layer had to be dug up and redone. Else we ran the risk of the problem worsening.

Given the cost of construction material these days, the cost estimate turned out to be a really BIG number. In fact, we’d had the contractor give us an estimate a couple of months back but had dilly-dallied on taking a decision. In just the couple of months, the cost had increased by around 30%! Since the problem was turning worse, we had to no choice but to go for the repair at the increased cost.

Thanks to the emergency fund and a little financial help from D — I’m in negative cash flow thanks to my recent amazon.com binge — we managed to foot the expenses without breaking a sweat. Things were all noisy at home for the last two weeks and my whole attention was out there. Thankfully, everything’s fixed and done now — except for one lighting fixture that needs to go back up.

I can’t emphasize enough on the need for a healthy emergency fund. In cash. It’s saved me every time.

Also explains why I haven’t been able to announce the ERE-book giveaway winner. I promise to do that in a day or two.

Note: D’s mighty shrewd when it comes to lending me money. In this particular case, the cash deficit that she helped bridge was in exchange for some equity that I’d invested in (but whose value had gone down from when I invested and whose value now coincidentally matched the cash deficit). That’s value investing in my opinion!