Bad Things Always Happen in Threes

You know how they say that bad things come in threes? In the past 24 hours, I have learned firsthand that it's totally true.

My Tuesday was one of those days where I received bad news on top of bad news...I'd recently booked a hotel for an upcoming trip and when I booked the hotel, the website said "free cancellations" and the checkout page said that I would not be charged until I checked in. Now that my plans have changed, I had to cancel the hotel before the 72 hours cancellation period.

When I called to cancel, I was told that $701 had already been charged to my credit card and no cancellations were allowed. Apparently, I missed the fine print that said "pre-paid, no cancellations" somewhere on my reservation page during the checkout process. Sigh.

To add insult to injury, we were supposed to pick up Chris's car from the shop that afternoon, and when he called to find out if it was ready, not only did they tell him that it's not ready, but that they think there is something else wrong with it.

A part that costs $2000. On top of the $800+ job they'd already done...

OUCH. We have to take his GTO down to the dealership because our mechanic doesn't the part, nor the equipment necessary to fix it, even if they were to order the part for us.

That's a total of $3500 that we were hit with within 12 hours.

As I sat there feeling sorry for myself, and wondering how we were going to be able to finish paying for Angeline's birthday cruise by April 8th with these unexpected expenses, I remembered that I can raise a little cash by selling old movies, CDs or games on music Magpie. With as quickly as Chris beats his video games, and with Angeline boring of her video games so quickly, we have plenty that I can sell! I don't even have to do any research to see how much they go for, musicMagpie allows you to just enter the UPC from the back of the product and they have the information right there - they even tell you how much it goes for!

Now, I don't have enough movies and games laying around to cover the entire hotel charge, let alone the car repair, but I will figure something out. I've decided that instead of sitting around dwelling on these unexpected expenses, I am going to find the silver lining in this cloudy day...

We can definitely put these expenses on the credit card, along with the remaining $2100 due for Angeline's birthday cruise. We normally only charge things that we can afford to pay off as soon as the charge comes through, but under circumstances like these, we will just have to make due.

I have to count my blessings; not everyone has the luxury of a credit card to fall back on when they get hit with these financial disasters. And somehow, after years and years of our credit card interest rate being at 29.9%, they've just lowered our rate to 11.9% on purchases made through July. Yes, it sucks that we have to pay all this money - but at least we have a way to pay for it.

It's so easy to sit around feeling sorry for yourself. But you don't have to - sometimes things are just out of our control, and while life isn't always fair, obsessing over car repairs and lost money doesn't do anyone any good!