Yes. Ugh. Of my two shelter kitties, one is getting old and peeing everywhere and needs thyroid pills and may have cancer, and the other one gets FLUTED on a recurring basis, despite the ass-kicking expensive “urinary” food we have him on. And my good-deed 3-legged rescue kitty brought not one but two intestinal bacteria with her, which she promptly handed off to the other two. And now the washer is making very bad noises (dryer died last year). And now we are looking at thousands for finding some way to insulate the joist space in the house, which DH’s new FLIR camera (yet another expense) was showing at about 3-4 degrees during the big recent cold snap.
The thing is, it’s always something. What is misleading is believing that a “normal” year won’t inevitably include at least a few of those things. I couldn’t begin to tell you what my unexpected cost-sucks were last year, or the year before, but I can guarantee you that I had a bunch of them. So if you plan your budget around what you think of as “normal,” your savings will always wind up behind your expectations — sort of like it always takes me longer to get to work than I think it will, because for some reason my mental image of “my commute” is anchored around hitting all the lights green and no one parked at 50 mph in the left lane.
That’s why I always keep a delta between income and savings/expenses. Because the one thing I am confident about is that I will not be able to predict all of the shit that will land in any given year.