It has not been an easy few years.
Even before the pandemic hit, we were having to hustle to pay our bills.
The pandemic effectively changed all of that and not for the better. Suddenly, we were working from home in the safety of our air conditioning. But, we were doing so at a greatly reduced salary just to keep our jobs. We had to cut spending like crazy. The summer of 2020 was the warmest I’ve ever experienced while working. Since we were working from home, we decided to sharply curtail the HVAC cooling in order to save money. We pushed the thermostat into the mid 80’s during the day and used fans to try and cool off a bit. However, we did end up saving a bundle on HVAC cooling that summer. We did the same thing that winter as well. It was coolish in our home as we tried to make do with as little HVAC heating as we could. 2021 saw our finances getting a bit better as our full salaries were reinstated. But then we were hit with an HVAC breakdown. This came right as the summer heat hit our area this past summer. While we were in better shape financially, an HVAC repair was going to hurt. That led us to look into a handyman type fix. The thing was that there was no guarantee on the work. That was a deal breaker for us. And I’m sort of thankful because the HVAC equipment is just too vital to our comfort to have anyone but an HVAC professional work on.