A friend posted this on Facebook a while back, and I wanted to share it with you.
Chris and I were recently beginning to plan a European Carnival cruise for next summer. I’ve always wanted to see Europe, and it would be my daughter’s 16th birthday present. We had saved up about $1000 and that would have made a nice deposit to lock in a reasonable rate for the trip.
Guess what happened that afternoon, as I still had the Carnival cruise lines booking page open on my laptop?
My refrigerator door broke. Well, I thought it was my refrigerator door – it turned out to be the fridge actually broke, as evidenced by all of the food that was no longer cold a few hours later. It’s a 20 year old refrigerator, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise. But talk about bad timing!
We went shopping for a new fridge that evening and surprise, surprise, the least expensive fridge that would fit the space where ours is now…was $1000.
Was I momentarily devastated that I lost our savings? Yes.
Did I almost cry when I realized that we would no longer be able to put down a deposit on the European Carnival cruise? Yes.
But instead of moping around about the situation, I let it go – after being upset about it for about an hour and cursing the home-ownership gods.
Losing my European cruise deposit to buying a new side by side Whirlpool with a built in ice maker and water dispenser…it really is a first world problem.
I’ll survive. Instead of whining about it, I was grateful that we actually had the money saved to buy our new fridge, and that it just so happened to be Labor Day weekend, when appliances are on sale all over the city. We had the good fortune not only to have the money saved, but were able to get a $1199 refrigerator for $949.
The infographic I’ve shared struck me because of the whole food in the fridge thing – it is so easy to feel sorry for yourself when bad things happen. So many of us live such a privileged life – some of us don’t even realize how privileged we really are.
We all need a little perspective now and then.
Europe will still be there when you’re ready to go!
In my years it seems that I have been blessed to have money when I needed it even though it was for something else. I use to keep my savings in an account that took 3-4 days to transfer to my own bank account for use. In April one year I decided to move the money over early to have it ready for when my summer day care payment would need to be paid (I was moving it a whole MONTH early). The day the money became available to me I learned that my father had unexpectedly passed away and need to get to Michigan ASAP. Thankfully the money was sitting in my account that night to make the travel arrangements.