Frugal Friday...

 

Portreath Harbour - May 2026

You know we have talked before about the value of having an emergency fund if at all possible? Well - we have just found ourselves in one of those periods of time where we are reminded exactly why that is such a good position to be in! 

It started back in May when you might remember we had a nice camping trip down in Cornwall at the start of the month. All was going wonderfully on the way back until MrEH's car suddenly threw up an engine fault. Uh-Oh, we thought, that's not ideal! It was still driving fine, so we decided to chance driving it back rather than calling for breakdown recovery, and then get it looked at on our return. A few days later lovely Neil - a good pal and also handily a mechanic - popped it onto his diagnostic thingummy and, as we feared, agreed that it looked like the Diesel Particulate Filter ("DPF") was almost certainly blocked - not something he could fix, sadly, but he did confirm that the car was drivable enough until it was repaired. We opted for using it a little less than normal while MrEH started finding someone to deal with it (not something Neil could do unfortunately) and so my car got a bit more exercise than she is used to (AND was the one popped onto our ferry booking for our upcoming Hebrides adventuring - hurrah for that!) In true MrEH style it took a rapidly approaching MOT Test for him to get around to this, but sure enough in mid July, off went the car...

The car, pre-problems, lurking quietly on the campsite!

I don't think either of us were expecting "cheap", but nonetheless the options of a bit over £1000 to remove the DPF, get it cleaned, and re-fit, or nearly £4000 to replace it completely were a bit painful. Even more so was the fact that the "clean and replace" option might not actually solve the issue...OUCH! Conversations were had - the car itself was worth less than the higher figure, so we rapidly came to the conclusion that we wouldn't be spending that much on it, so the repair and some crossed fingers seemed to be the way forwards. Still though - that's a big old chunk of money to find isn't it! MrREH gave the go ahead for the clean, and the garage got cracking. Meanwhile we set to thinking about the money. Of course we DO have the emergency fund - but needless to say we really don't want to dip into it any more than we absolutely have to, so the first mission was to see where we might be able to round up any oddments of money to at least put towards it. The surplus in the joint account - which would usually be steered off towards savings - netted £200. A "spare" £100 in the account that funds payments to one of the Regular Saver accounts also got siphoned off, as did a balance slightly higher than needed in the account where we budget for logs and coal for the winter - another £100 there. Our car costs pot also has a tiny bit of slack in it - although we have insurances and breakdown cover on the horizon so need to account for those too. 

Tintagel

All in all our scraping together of bits of money from here and there has netted over £550 towards the £1020 repair bill - so more than half. The balance will of course come from our Emergency Fund - but we'll be focusing all savings we can make elsewhere into paying that money back into the pot as fast as we can - it makes me uncomfortable not knowing that money is there ready in case the proverbial hits the whizzy thing! We will also be ramping up efforts to put money aside ready for a car replacement without having to hit the long term pots more than necessary as it is fair to say that we've both lost a bit of confidence in his car now, and we know from experience that once one major thing like this goes wrong, more things tend to follow! For now though the DPF clean seems to have been effective - indeed the MoT test has been passed with one of the cleanest emissions test results I have EVER seen - so that at least is something! The bill itself was paid on the cashback credit card so there will be at least a small amount of money to come back on that, which is something! 

I will be sitting down at some stage with my budget book and working through some figures for the next few months - there may be some rejigging of what goes where as we want to bolster the car account a bit as well - neither of us are comfortable leaving it running on empty for long! Maybe that will be another Frugal Friday post..? 

Robyn