Financial Security: The Comfort of Having Problems that Money Can Solve

The past few weeks have been frustrating for our family.

While visiting our vacation rental cabin in Tennessee, we discovered a major roof leak. Then while we were still on that trip, we got a call that a tree had fallen on one of our rental duplexes back in Austin. Our truck then started having some quirky mechanical issues, and when we finally got home, we discovered that our refrigerator had completely died.

I’m prone to getting bogged down by these kinds of “annoyances” and quickly spiral into an “everything is going wrong” mindset. But on another (more cerebral) level, some part of me realizes that we should actually feel pretty lucky.

Every single one of these problems can be solved by money. We have an emergency fund, so while none of these things are particularly fun to deal with, we can pay for the roof repair, remove the tree, fix the truck, and replace the refrigerator.

But this also makes me think: Is something really a problem if it can be easily solved with money?

My husband and I have been through times in our lives when we had major problems that couldn't be solved by any amount of money. When we were in our twenties, he lost his brother and I lost my mom. I wish there had been some amount of money we could have thrown at those situations to make them different.

Those experiences unfortunately taught us that there are some problems money simply cannot solve. So why am I letting myself get so stuck on the ones that it can?

Maybe the real benefit of having enough money isn't that bad things stop happening.

The roof still leaks. Trees still fall. Trucks still break down. Refrigerators still die at incredibly inconvenient times. Financial security doesn't make you immune to life's problems. It just gives you more options for dealing with them.

You can call the roofer instead of wondering how you're going to come up with the money. You can replace the refrigerator instead of switching to a diet solely of crackers and canned beans. You can pay for repairs and move on with your life. And I think that's one of the most underrated things money can buy: the ability to make some problems smaller.

An emergency fund isn't sexy. It's not an investment strategy that you can brag about at a party. It doesn't generate an impressive return. But when the roof starts leaking, money can turn a crisis into an inconvenience.

And maybe that's what we're really trying to accomplish when we're building wealth; not a life where nothing goes wrong, but a life where the things that inevitably go wrong don't have the power to derail everything else.

So, yes, I'm still annoyed about the roof. And the tree. And the truck. And especially the refrigerator. (Although it did give me a good excuse to finally throw out a lot of moldy expired food that was buried in the drawers!)

But I'm also trying to remind myself that these are pretty good problems to have. They're expensive. They're inconvenient. And they're solvable.