When does no income become an emergency?
I guess the full force of my wife not bringing home any income is starting to show itself. Spending habits have not changed and in fact seem to have increased this month. Our EF is almost drained at the moment to the tune of $700 because of all these extra expenses that seem to come up like emergencies.
I’m having a real hard time trying to keep my head above water here trying to manage everything. Last week and this week has been very stressful for me and I haven’t put a lot of thought into where we stand in the financial areas. We really need to stop eating out. Spending is really out of control and something has to be done to get the EF back on track and get through this month. I need my wife to be on board with how we’re going about spending money since paying off debt isn’t working. This is getting too stressful for me to handle on my own.
Our debt is going nowhere because not operating on the income we have. I hope all the bills at least get paid this month to say the least. Pulling money from the EF to avoid hot checks I really don’t like doing. I think our bigger problem is the bulk of our income comes at the later end of the month, but there’s still stuff at the beginning of the month too. Something has to be done to reorganize things so when money gets low the EF doesn’t have to hold things over until the next paycheck.
I am fairly confident that I can get the EF back on track by the end of the month but not certain we won’t continue to run into this situation every month. This student teaching experience is important but not having her income is really putting some real pressure on us. The last thing I want to have happen is turning to the credit cards. This really sucks.
You need to spread out your paychecks. If you get more money at the end of the month you need to be saving some of it for the beginning of the following month, so you have a balanced income. If you find you can’t do that, you need to cut your spending.
You might want to try this: Figure out the average of your various bills for each month or just estimate about how much your bills will be (easy to do with the prior month bills since your electric/gas/water should be fairly stable). Add them all up, divide by the number of paychecks you will get that month, and set that amount aside. That will give you all the money you need to pay your bills for that month. Anything left over (if anything) you can spend.
Once you get that going every month you can look at bigger, long term bills like that auto insurance bill that hit you hard a while back. Good luck!
Are “hot checks” being created because money for bills is going towards eating out and such?