Money Obedience

Once you have set up a budget, you want to make sure that it works for you and your family. Things change in life and the family budget got to adapt. Sometimes big things change (like if you have a child), at other times only little things change (like your preferences). I just experienced one of the latter changes.

We used to have a service that was cleaning out our gutters twice a year. Cleaning gutters seemed to be a fairly involved job to me. Our house is tall, so one section of the gutters is pretty darn high up on our house. How the heck am I supposed to get up there? Well, you guessed it: with a ladder. As it happens I own a big enough ladder to get up to the highest sections of the house easily. But I’m “kind of” afraid of heights.

When I paid the last bill for gutter cleaning I was shocked how expensive it was. Come on! I witnessed how much work was actually involved. I was at home when the guys came in to clean the gutters last spring. It took two of them less than an hour. The bill was $186! Ok, I understand that they need a truck, ladders, etc., but still, the price I was paying was a little steep in my mind. It irked me to shell out that much money for something I could do myself.

I just cleaned my gutters last weekend, with my wife holding the ladder so I wouldn’t kill myself. The spring cleaning is a lot easier than the fall cleaning, but I am pretty sure it took me a lot less than 2 hours to do this all alone. Part of the gutters were actually clean! Plus, unlike the gutter cleaning service, I also blow off the roof the other debris – after all, it’s sitting on the roof waiting to clog the gutters again. That took some extra time, but since this is my house and my property I am careful about what I do with the debris. The gutter guys don’t care. They either throw it on the grounds or leave bags strewn around my property. I do a much neater job if I may say so myself.

Believe it or not, but I get another benefit from cleaning my gutters and being on the roof of my house besides saving money and keeping my property neat. I like mountains and climbing. Getting up on the roof gives me a little sense of climbing. I know it is not like actual rock climbing but it is better than nothing. If you were an ocean lover you would probably still prefer sitting by a lake to not seeing any body of water in front of you at all, right? A lake is not as good as the ocean but better than nothing. So, as it turns out I not only save money doing the gutters myself, I actually enjoy some aspects of doing the work. What could be better than that?