I was waiting on the bill from the hospital to know how much I would have to use out of the emergency fund. I would then see how much I would have left over to pay the hospital bill. A friend told me that the bill would take months to come because it had to go through the school insurance office and that moved very slowly.
I have decided to go back to my original plan of using the money to pay off the loan on the Colt so that I will have one less bill to worry about. I figure that by the time the bill from the doctor comes around I will have the money to pay it because I will be saving a few more dollars by not having that monthly payment go to the loan. I hope the school bears the brunt of the bill because I think I just might faint if I see a high bill.
I am also going to use the upcoming opportunity to rebuild my emergency fund little by little. I was happy to be able to say that I had the fund and I was even happier to be able to pull from it when I felt that I needed it.
That is doable, but just make sure that you understand what you are doing. You were going to take from the emergency fund and pay the medical bill, but now you are going to use it for debt repayment.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, per se, but make sure and ask yourself if you would have taken from the EF to pay off a debt if you weren’t in the hospital in the first place.
There’s no right answer for everyone, however.
-Thanks for the site referrals on my blog. I’ll have to go check them out.
Actually I was thinking about it for a while because the loan is at 10% and the two EFs combined were getting about 8% in interest. I did a little analysis and decided that as part of my debt snowball I could pay off that loan and I would not miss the EFs because they did not have any money in them anyway. 🙂