by Tricia
The other day, something happened that normally would create utter chaos in our household. My husband received a call and was told that there was a problem with payroll and he won’t be getting his regularly scheduled paycheck.
Since I forcast ahead in Quicken to make sure we have enough cash for everything, to have a source of income taken away for a few weeks could be tragic. Even a smaller check like that one (it’s for a part-time job) can send our bank balance into the red zone because I run our checking account so low.
My husband’s boss apologized for the error; he’s not sure what happened. He even offered to give my husband a loan for the amount until the next paycheck. It still feels weird to say it, but I looked at my husband and told him that we can wait until his next payday for that money. Why? Because we can pull from our savings. It wasn’t a problem.
If something like this had happened a year and a half ago, I would have been pacing the house back and forth trying to figure out what to do. I wouldn’t want to take up his boss’ offer of a loan (too darn proud to do that). I would have been thinking of how we could make some money fast. I’d also be calculating how much we could possibly put on our credit cards (groceries, gas, etc.).
Oh how things have changed. I’ll just initiate a balance transfer from one of our savings accounts and pay it back as soon as we can, probably when some more money comes in. Slowly but surely, we are getting closer to living a life that doesn’t involve living paycheck-to-paycheck.
We’d have a problem if this happened with our major paycheck (don’t quite have enough in our savings yet to cover that one), but it felt nice that we were able to do it with this one. Actually, it feels more than nice…it feels pretty darn good.
