I have been accused of being really tight with my money.
- It is a fairly accurate description but, with some context needed.
I just simply hate paying for stuff that has limited or absolutely no long term value. My brain just wants to explode whenever I spend money on a stupid purchase. My wife and I perform a deep dive on our household budget once about every three months or so. We do this just to be sure that we aren’t throwing away money on something dumb. The issue of HVAC maintenance came up the last time we were going over the budget. Both of us were feeling a deep temptation for cutting out the seasonal HVAC maintenance to save some money. Our thinking was that our HVAC was actually only 4 or 5 years old so, how much maintenance does it actually need? There had never been a hint of a problem with the HVAC unit although, we had it on a semi annual maintenance program since the day it was installed. Still, we were really thinking that we could spend the money somewhere else more useful. My dad used to always say to spend on preventive maintenance because it will save you so much in the long term. So, I decided to do some research online to get some stats for myself on HVAC maintenance. There was plenty of independent data out there. I was shocked to find that 85 percent of heating and cooling service calls are due to a problem that would have been caught during routine maintenance. Then, I read the stats on the difference regular HVAC maintenance has on the longevity of these systems. HVAC systems that were regularly serviced outlasted their counterparts by a whopping 6 years on average. That was all it took. The HVAC maintenance was staying in the budget.