There are all sorts of reasons people might be living paycheck to paycheck. I am personally just getting out of a year of living like that.
Why? Because my family had two major (to us) medical problems last January and February. My daughter had pneumonia and I had a MRSA infection that required outpatient surgery. It may not sound like a huge amount of money to other folks but between the two issues, it was about $17000. I drained my emergency fund of $6000 that I’d been saving up for years, then moved on to credit cards because when you are sick enough that there’s a risk of death or loss of limb, you do what you’ve gotta do.
Of course, when I was ill, I was not able to work for several days, which meant the loss of more income since I am self-employed. Meanwhile, bills were still coming due and I had drained every penny out of my accounts to pay for medical care and medication. This meant I was now maxed out on credit cards and in overdraft in every bank account. And penniless. Not a good place to be and not somewhere I’ve been for a long time.
So for the past year, I’ve been eking by, paycheck to paycheck, getting all that debt paid off and paying tremendous amounts of interest.
I’m not saying this to have anyone feel sorry for me – we survived this and I am back to building a modest emergency fund again. But I just wanted to give some perspective that there are all sorts of reasons to be paycheck to paycheck. It just takes one thing going terribly wrong to really mess up your budget.
I’m sure hoping that 2019 is much less stressful.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by
Daisy.