We had to buy a new fridge. Boo! We did get a great deal though, and a cool "pay your tithing" lesson out of it. Our old fridge is not quite broken yet, but it's showing all the signs that the end is near soon. The outside has some really hot spots, it leaves puddles on the floor, the inside of the freezer is always frosty, and the ice cream is always half melted. We decided that we would rather avoid the whole "The-fridge-is-broken-we-need-a-new-one-NOW-cuz-all-our-food-is-spoiling-and-making-a-huge-stinky-mess." kind of problem.
We therefore spent Saturday buying a new one. I did all the consumer reports research and picked out the fridge that I thought I wanted, and hunted for the store with the best price on that particular fridge. Bruce and I headed out to Best Buy, paper in hand, and I asked the first sales person I saw to ring me up for that particular fridge. He walked us back to the fridge section, where I saw the one that I had picked out. Upon actually seeing the fridge in person, I realized that it looked rather plasticy and flimsy, and that my kids would probably rip the door off in the first week. We started looking at other fridges. We found a floor model that had a couple of minor dings in it that made them knock the price down by $700. The original price was twice the price of the one that I had gone to the store to buy, but with the dings, it was now only a couple of hundred more than the other one. When you are already committed to spend $800, really why not spend $1000 and get a MUCH nicer fridge? So that's what we did.
Here comes the tithing lesson. As you might already know, we are ALWAYS EXTREMELY stressed where the money situation is concerned, so spending $1000 dollars on a new fridge out of the blue really made me want to puke. Of course we don't have that kind of money sitting around. We had to take get a Best Buy credit card, and put it on that. It's an 18 month same as cash deal. If I budget it right, we should be able to do it. Still, it makes me want to vomit. As it turns out, this week is Bruce's week to be on call, and Anheuser Busch had a major truck scale go down in a major way. Bruce put in 11 hours of over time on it the other night. That alone should bring in $450. Earlier this week, Bruce had about four hours of over time put in on something else. With that we are over half way there to have that fridge paid off. In a completely insane twist of fate, that same truck scale that they had JUST spent so many hours of over time fixing got struck by lightening in a storm the next night. So on Bruce's last night of on call, which was Sunday when over time pays double time instead of just time and a half, Bruce got called out to work for about nine more hours on that same scale. Upon doing the math, all that over time adds up to about $1000 (the price of our new fridge). Now TELL me that paying your tithing doesn't take care of you! We certainly are not wealthy. We barely scrape by, but guess what: We always have just enough for what we need. It's rather amazing when you think about it!
