Water Heater Bust - Living With One Car

On Tuesday our water heater bust.  Tuesday night Dr. J called a plumber.  Wednesday morning he came out and gave me the bad news, your water heater is gone forever, you need a new one.  Three hours, me having to help lift the new tank up with him, and $950 later we were back in business.  We had the money in our emergency fund, but it basically wiped us out.  Why does it take so long to build up an emergency fund and it takes so little time to clear out.  When we first came to work here Dr. J had the presence of mind to send an automatic 6% of his pay check to a separate account.  It has been a life saver in these types of emergency situations but it is always so depressing to see that number drop, especially since Kenya.  It would be safe to say we were are still feeling the pinch of our summer trip which wiped out all of our savings and put us in debt.  Living in debt is so frustrating.  We make enough to live on but not enough to live on and pay enough to make our debts go away, well not comfortably.  In six more months Dr. J will have his new job and then we will be in business.  In a months time living like we are now we will easily have all our trip debt paid off.  That's the thing about doctors, they can make a nice living, but baby doctors, getting educated to get to that money, well you don't make much money at all.  We are on year twelve of being broke.  It would be possible for Dr. J to moonlight, theoretically now since he has a license, but because his residency no longer does in house moonlighting he'd have to pay for insurance on his own...which honestly we can't really afford right now plus he'd still have to stay within the allotted eighty hours a week and have the time to do it.  He only gets four days off this month, I just can't think of one I want to sacrifice so that he can make a little more money.  So instead we wiped out our emergency fund.  And now we have to slowly build it up because right now we have a car in our garage that we can't drive because we needed that emergency fund to fix it.  Living with one car is probably helpful for our emergency fund.  I spend almost every day trapped in the house so it isn't like I can do a lot of spending.  Living with one car though is pretty boring.  We can't go anywhere when Dr. J is gone unless we drive him to work first and honestly who wants to do that, I mean really, so were just doing a lot of hanging out at home.  On the positive I'm getting a lot of organizing done and a lot of unfinished projects finished.  Everyday I'm grateful that Dr. J decided to get a job this year rather than continuing on to fellowship.  I can't imagine what we would do if we had to chug along another three years like this.  Now we have a deadline for our reprieve....six more months has become my mantra, my salvation, and my relief.