<$Friday, April 20, 2007$>
Payday decisions
| Today is payday. That doesn't just mean I get paid today; it also means everyone I owe money to for this half of the month gets paid. Crazy as it sounds, I usually look forward to doing my bills on payday. It's actually fun when there's money left over, and I can watch my debts shrink and my savings grow. Today, though, was not so much with the fun. Despite this being the first paycheck to include my new raise, it was unusually small, being that it only covered ten working days, and it was a rare earning period where I didn't rack up any overtime. In a word: stress. We had enough to cover all of the bills and necessities, but only just. Once I deducted the tithe, rent, all of the bills, and food budget for the next two weeks, we had about two dollars left over--not enough to cover cost of living expenses until next payday. I have a little money in my Paypal account, but not that much, and I don't have another payment scheduled from PayPerPost for another six days, plus I'm counting on that money to cover my car insurance bill that's due next month. So what to do? I considered just doing without. I really doubt we could both make it, though, and we'd be too tempted to use the credit cards. Besides, since this would also mean my husband had no spending money for the next two weeks, I was worried that this might just set us up for two weeks of fighting. I next considered not paying the full amount on our rent. Since our landlady is my mother, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten away with this; but then it would have felt like borrowing money from the bank of mom, and I'd not only have to worry about budgeting the remainder into the next payday cycle, but I'd also have to deal with all of the emotional interest that went with it. Then it occurred to me that we could borrow from our savings to carry us through until next week. I'm so unused to even having any savings that I forgot it was even an option. Even when I did, I debated taking any money out of it. I wasn't sure this constituted enough of an emergency to justify touching it, and I'm so gung-ho about adding money to it that it hurts me to take anything out of it that I don't have to. In the end, though, I did just that, borrowing enough to cover miscellaneous expenses for the next couple of weeks. It didn't put that big a dent in the savings, so now that it's done, I'm at peace with it. I guess this is one of the things we have savings for, isn't it? Labels: money management, personal, spending |
