Flat Tires and Emergency Funds

I got a flat tire today while on my way up the hill to teach my 8:00 a.m. Intro to Logic class at the university. Fortunately I managed to make it to the parking lot at the university before the car really became un-drivable. As all my friends are well aware, I am nothing of a morning person. Because of this (or maybe despite this), I actually give myself lots of extra time to get to work in the morning so I have a chance to wake up and get a cup of coffee before class. This morning I had an extra 45 minutes or so before class was supposed to begin, so I figured I would just change my tire before class and I would be able to zip over to the tire store afterward to get the tire fixed or replaced as need be. I would just have to teach class looking like a mechanic. No big deal.

The changing of the tire went flawlessly. Despite being a relatively bookish academic, I am still pretty earthy-crunchy like that. I cranked the car down, only to discover that the spare tire was just as flat as the main tire! (It can be hard to tell on a spare tire, because it feels fairly firm even when low on air.) At this point I had brake dust all over my teaching clothes, but once I decided to change the tire myself I had accepted the fact that I would just be showing up to class with brake dust all over myself. This was not an exaggeration. I am notoriously bad at staying clean while doing physical work. So I got to class at 8:00 and I apologized to the students for being dirty for class, and they were fairly impressed that a geeky-trendy professor like me would be hands-on enough to change his own tire (trust me, the professor image is just a facade!).

I was supposed to hold office hours after class, but I canceled them so I could call AAA and get my car towed to a tire store after class. Now I didn't really have the money in my budget to spend on a new tire since I was so generous to myself by making large contributions to my Roth IRA and to my summer savings fund this month, but I needed a tire no matter what and I was prepared to pay for one if the flat could not be patched up. Waiting at the local donut shop for my tire to be fixed, I got started thinking about how I would have paid for the tire if I didn't have some money already stashed away for summer. I would either have to borrow some cash from my wife or have to raid my Roth IRA (seriously off-limits).

Luckily I had been trying to establish my summer savings fund due to my tenuous job-prospects this summer. It appeared that this fund would have to moonlight as my emergency fund this morning if I needed to buy a tire, and I was glad that I had had the wherewithal to put some money in a regular old money market fund in addition to my Roth IRA.

So after an hour and a half of waiting at the local donut shop and several delightful Friday morning chats with the patrons, I got a call from the tire shop that my car was ready and that they were able to patch the tire after all. Whew! Fortunately my summer savings could go unscathed, seeing as the bill came to a whopping $15.00 for the tire patch. But I got a valuable lesson this morning in the virtues of keeping some cash aside in an emergency fund, despite my overwhelming desire to take that money and dump it into my Roth IRA portfolio instead. Had I not had some extra cash handy, and had the tire not been fixable, I would have had a very different story to tell today about having pilfered from my Roth IRA to fix a spare tire. Now that would have been stupid of me indeed!