I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Give yourself a payday advance - Have an emergency fund

In a perfect world, no one would be living paycheck to paycheck. We’d all be paying this month’s bills and expenses with money we’d been paid last month (or longer ago). But, sadly, this is not a perfect world, and many people (me included) rely on what we are currently earning to pay our expenses day to day. That’s why payday loans on the surface sound so attractive. The commercials promise that you can just come in, give them a check postdated to your payday, and walk out with cash right now. Of course, once you do a little research into them, they become much more frightening than enticing, but that fundamental lure is still there. If only I could get my money a little bit sooner. If only I could get a little bit ahead.

I struggle with that too. Neither my spouse or I get paid at the beginning of the month. My compensation for the previous month’s work arrives about the 15th every month, and my spouse is on a biweekly pay schedule. If we were ahead enough that his second paycheck of the month was going to the beginning of next month’s expenses, that would be one thing, but we’re not, and probably won’t be for some time. This month, my spouse gets paid the 7th and the 21st. Usually it is not a huge problem to get to that first paycheck, because there is money carried over from the previous month for irregular expenses and sometimes a small surplus, and we do not have a lot of bills due at the beginning of the month (I pay our mortgage for the current month out of the second paycheck of the previous month, so we are in fact barely ahead of the game on something). But this month, I have been biting my nails. My son’s preschool tuition and gymnastics class fee is due this week (which I have been saving for every month, but part of it comes out of September’s budget), plus the normal groceries and gasoline and diapers and other miscellaneous things that come up and the few bills that are due at the beginning of the month. It is making things feel pretty tight and I’m afraid we won’t have enough cash to go around until Friday.

These are the times when the concept of a payday loan feels most attractive. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get one! But the idea that if I just could have money a little bit earlier we would be doing better, not more money over the month just allocated differently, is very real and present to me right now. I was driving to Babies R Us today to buy diapers and passed a Payday Advance place, and although I was not tempted to stop, I understood all too well the allure. So I thought to myself - why is it that I don’t want to stop?

Because we have an emergency fund. I have already discussed it with my spouse and although not at all ideal, if it turns out we can’t quite make it to Friday, we can transfer a small amount out of our emergency fund for the rest of the week, and then transfer it back in on Friday. Having that emergency fund is in some ways like having the ability to give ourselves a payday advance. No, not the ideal use of the emergency fund, but it keeps us afloat and able to weather large early month payments if necessary. And keeps us from turning to credit or a scary payday advance place.  Maybe that’s a little how people who don’t live paycheck to paycheck feel, that there is always that built in buffer there for when spending throughout the month is unequally distributed from start to finish. Maybe. Hopefully in a few years I’ll find out for myself.

~J

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