Living paycheck to paycheck

Once you enter the workforce, you soon realize that unless you had a lot of generational wealth handed down to you, you will have to work your way up the societal ladder the hard way. Not only that but everybody around you is trying to do the same thing which makes it even more complicated because now it's a competition for the same limited resources.

We all want cars, houses, luxury, or at the very least a fairly decent life, unfortunately the resources all around us are very limited and that ends up making things complicated. I was reflecting on how it was even possible for a person to end up living paycheck to paycheck until it happened to me. Even though it is something so common, strangely enough, I never understood why it happened that way, in my mind I just thought that if everybody knew how to manage their income then they would not have to live paycheck to paycheck.

The explanation is nothing complicated, it's quite simple actually. When you have a person with very little generational wealth (which is a huge chunk of the population) they have to spend most of their income investing in to getting that and the rest to keep them alive. With time, doing both becomes more and more expensive. Your responsibilities grow, investments get expensive, you start having children and unfortunately, your paycheck doesn’t grow with that, which makes it all the more complicated and leads you to expect that paycheck every month with a traumatic eagerness.

How bad it gets

It gets so bad that when pay is late even by a day, it can cause people to crash out, tension builds up in the home and everybody is on edge. Bills start piling up, creditors are on your phone non-stop and your stress skyrockets. You wait for that paycheck like your life depended on it (which it does in some cases) and you live so close to the edge all the time that it becomes traumatic. This really shows how entrapped we’ve become to our paycheck and essentially to the system in place in such a way that they basically control and dictate our every move. A paycheck has essentially become that leash that not only keeps us chained but also provides us with the nutrients we need to live.

I feel uncomfortable living so close to the edge and I’m definitely not alone, there are millions of people out there who feel the same way, and thats why they strive with all of their energy to either increase their pay or setup an income stream which is much more reliable and less reliant on their constant presence.

What you should do

Definitely, living so close to the edge is not good for anybody, you shouldn’t have to be so reliant on a single paycheck. It's like all of your life hanging by a single pillar, if it crumbles your life comes crashing down. There are obvious solutions here that tend to be difficult to put in place mostly because people realize that they are in trouble only when it becomes very difficult to get out of it. At some point your paycheck is more than enough, soon it becomes good enough, then barely enough, finally not enough at all and its usually at the “barely enough” part where we realize we have to do something.

I’ll not give you the common advice of starting a business, or setup passive income streams etc What I’ll say is that you should definitely have better self control on the responsibilities you take and for the choices you make to factor in that paycheck and not vice versa. From my observation, you start living paycheck to paycheck because you’ve taken on more responsibilities than your paycheck can handle, more kids, more debts, more luxury, higher standards etc. I think managing your responsibilities is as important as making more.

You can also choose to go the hard way which will entail working extremely hard to obtain even more income, setup up multiple income streams, grow your paycheck etc

Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how much water comes in if more and more holes just keep showing up, at the end, nothing will remain in the container.

Conclusion

It is very stressful to live paycheck to paycheck and often times we only realize its the case when it's much too late. You should take advantage of when your paycheck is still “more than enough” to build healthy habits that will last you way past the difficult periods. I read somewhere that you should have at least 6 months' worth of your pay saved so that in case you don’t have a paycheck anymore, you’ve got 6 months to figure something out.

Thanks for reading ☺️