BLUF - I had a major car issue that came up last weekend, and it was either use the money i allocated to goto SGDQ and find another $2.3K to fix car for mom to get around, or leave her stranded during SGDQ and still have to find more funds to take care of that.  Didn't want to dip more into personal funds after taking care of a $7K funeral for a lost friend and taking care of my 4 godchildren expenses (college tutition, etc) and of course my own regular expenses. So i had to make the no-brainer decision to put family > SGDQ and my run so that'd be less of a financial burden for myself unless a monetary miracle happened.  Sometimes you have the funds, but you need to know when you NEED to and NOT need to spend outside of a comfortable means....