Sorry, I wasn&#x27;t clear, I put $1000&#x2F;month into a savings tagged as &quot;maintenance&quot;, and as maintenance tasks have come up I&#x27;ve deducted from that account to pay for them. Yes, you&#x27;ll go months where you put money in, and then you have to re-roof and it costs you $7,500. And then a lull and then maybe you need to paint the house or replace the rain gutters, etc. In my budget I put the &quot;expected&quot; cost of maintenance to be about $5&#x2F;square foot per year. And then divided that number by the number of pay periods to get a contribution into that account per paycheck. Since actual maintenance costs turned out to be less than that my maintenance account was running a surplus and growing so I reduced the amount I was contributing.<p>This is a very common way to annualize a very volatile cost, but what it means in practice is you find yourself putting money into the maintenance account when no maintenance needs to be done that month, with the understanding that <i>eventually</i> in the future you&#x27;re going to have a cost which you can then pay out of that account. You don&#x27;t go into debt that way to cover random maintenance expenses, because if you did it right there is always enough money in the account to cover your costs.<p>Granted a string of costs all at once will bite you, but statistically that is not likely to happen.<p>The goal though is to never use credit card debt to finance anything because you pay so much interest on that debt if you can&#x27;t pay it off at the end of the month. And in practice it means putting what seems like all your money into weird &quot;future&quot; accounts (maintenance, food, insurance, taxes, etc) but it also means than when you pay to those expected bills you already have the money to pay them and don&#x27;t have to borrow. You are mailing yourself the funds in the future to cover that cost.