idk, maybe it's just me but dads secretly want a hobby they can share with you

How many of you had a guy like that? A buddy of mine got hired at a shop down in Grand Rapids and his trainer was an old timer named Dennis who ran a big old manual lathe. Dennis made him cut scrap stock for a week straight, just listening, and would not let him touch a feed dial until he could call out a bad insert by ear from across the aisle. My buddy thought it was a waste of time until his first real job, where he heard a chatter start up and killed the feed before anything broke. Dennis just walked by and said "told you," and never brought it up again. To this day my buddy says he learns more from that week of scrap than any class he sat through.

We keep about $2k liquid in a plain savings account and that's our number for stuff like this. When our furnace crapped out in January the guy quoted $2,400 and we were short, so we put the rest on a card and paid it off in three weeks. After that I started tossing $25 a week into the same account instead of $40 a month, since weekly stings less and it adds up quicker. Skip the separate appliance fund, one boring account you don't touch unless something breaks is way easier to keep track of.