I got into a bad position where I had not only all of our utility plus debit card bills on autopay, but I also had products on Amazon that were set to subscription purchases every 3 months.
One day I accidentally dropped into the red on our bank account plus 3 autopayments caused me to get 3 separate overdraft fees, totalling $105.
I managed to convince the bank to refund 2 of them, however that still left me on the hook for $35. That meant making dire sacrifices this month regarding our purchases at the grocery store, as I had to come up with the extra $35 somehow. When you’re on a limited income, you can’t pull cash out of thin air if you are hit with an unexpected charge. Some essentials are extravagant enough. For instance, the HEPA filters inside our whole-house air purifier are literally $32 a piece, so I suppose I’m blissful they’re supposed to last for 6 months in total. I can’t imagine paying that much cash every 4 to 6 weeks to have a clean whole-house air purifier. The HEPA filters in our whole-house air purifier are dense so they don’t get clogged nearly as fast as a normal Heating & Air Conditioning filter in an air conditioning system or oil furnace. All of these filters are discouragingly extravagant in the long run. I don’t have the luxury of having a normal set of lungs that could handle leaving an cooling system filter inside the component for 3 months or longer love some people try to do. In the end, our indoor air quality suffers heavily if I’m not replacing our HEPA plus Heating & Air Conditioning filters when the manufacturer suggests.