Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. -Murphy’s law

A few weeks ago I was at the beginning of a 2 hour drive back from a friends lakehouse with my brother when, in the 105 degree Texas heat, the motor for the passenger window broke and the window would not roll up. I spent the rest of the drive progressing in emotional state from pissed off that my brother broke the car (which he wasn’t at fault) to being flat out grumpy because I was so hot, to laughing so hard I cried because of how ridiculous we felt.

Have you ever noticed that setbacks always seem to occur at the worst possible time, and more importantly that they always occur to you? Your computer crashes the night before a paper is due, you get sick before new health insurance kicks in, or you get in a wreck just after you drained your emergency fund to get your transmission fixed. It never fails, Murphy’s law (or what my family has come to know as “Luck of the Bowen”) always seems to show up at the most inopportune times making life much more hectic.

Now take a second and think about all the incidents like this you have had in your life; where it seemed like something that ordinarily would have just sucked, happened at the most awful time.

In looking back, was it really that bad? I would guess not. I know that when I think about the events in my life where everything seemed to go wrong, I realize that whether it was a true catastrophic event or something as silly as the car window not rolling up I am the person I am today because of how I got through them and what I learned from them.

Being a member of the Bowen clan, luck of the Bowen is always in effect and it always hits the pocketbook. As a result Mary and I have taken what we’ve learned from past experiences and started some “hedge” funds to hedge our bets against the expenses that always come out of nowhere.

We have our emergency fund for general emergencies, so far we have managed to save away 3 months expenses if both of us loose our jobs, and 6-8 months if one of us loses a job. We feel like we are in a good place with our emergency fund, and we continue to add to it every month, but we realized that there were other things for which we needed to be putting money away in preparation.

The car window breaking led to us starting a fund to replace the car. After all it is 11 years old with 150k+ miles on it. On top of that, my Labrador continually eating things she shouldn’t (Christmas Ornaments, Bottle of Tums, the Couch, a Chair…) and our Chihuahuas overly expensive teeth cleaning bills ($600) led us to hedging our bets for the dogs and creating a pets fund in which we put money every month for when one of the big pet expenses comes up. (Yes, pets can be VERY expensive, but in my opinion they are completely worth it).

We created these additional funds because we have learned from past experiences which forced us to use credit cards when we didn’t have the money available.

On top of all of these things we are currently evaluating life insurance policies outside of our work coverage, because life is just that unpredictable.

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