Over the past few years, I have discovered that I am a bit of a rare beast -- a religious conservative with liberal political beliefs. I won't go into all the details of why I don't find the two contradictory or how being what I am puts me in the dog house with both groups, the religious conservatives far more often that the political liberals, it pains me to say. That would be fodder for my other blog, if I am ever feeling that brave.
Anyway, I'm a Liberal, so you can just guess how I feel about corporate greed, etc. I don't like it one bit, but as much as I blame the top 1% for a lot of the problems many of the rest of us are facing right now, there really isn't a lot I can do about them on a day-to-day basis. Much closer, and more addressable is the financial enemy that lives in my very own skin. Me.
I spent the better part of my childhood and have spent most of my adult years in some level of poverty. Poverty is more than not having very much money. Poverty messes with your head. When you are always and foreseeably behind the eight ball it gets very, very hard to keep a long-range mentality going. It becomes very easy to think "No matter what I do, I lose, so I might as well do what I want." It leads to a feast and famine cycle and that cycle is self-perpetuating. If you have regular income, be it a monthly government check, food stamps, or a weekly paycheck if you've been broke for awhile and are feeling deprived, it's mighty hard to use restraint and self-discipline when you get those food stamps or that check.
I've gotten pretty good about paying bills first and, unless I really let my gears slip and hit the bookstore too soon, food and gas second. I don't use credit cards, so I'm not digging us a high interest hole that way. But Friday's paycheck is usually gone without a trace by Saturday night, even when we should have had some left over and our emergency fund is non-existent. When you have no emergency fund the first little thing to go wrong is going to either put you very behind or completely cripple you. Not a good place to be.
If you find yourself in a feast and famine cycle, don't feel alone. You aren't the only one. According to one theory, self-control is a depletable resource. If you are struggling to make ends meet, you can use up a lot of that resource really quickly, making it harder to make good long-range choices than it would be for someone of greater means. "Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost."
If you are looking for an excuse, that one is as good as any. I don't want an excuse though, I want an emergency fund. I love information like this for a couple of reasons. One, it helps me to feel less like a bum and two, it helps me work around myself so that I can achieve whatever goal I'm working towards. It sort of allows me access to my own control panel so that I can try to tweak my default settings, so to speak.
My current default setting is to get up Friday morning, check the bank account, transfer the cash for the mortgage payment to the proper account, subtract cash for gas, groceries, etc to get through a typical week and divide the rest between the bills, prioritizing by most urgent to least. Then I go out 'running errands.' Usually it involves getting lunch out somewhere, maybe hitting the bookstore or some other fun place. Each weekend, I try to get to both Sam's and Kroger's for groceries. I know roughly what we spend on groceries in a typical week and that remains pretty consistent. But otherwise, I don't keep very good track of things and sometimes I manage to overdraft us. This is not good and it's not helping us save.
I want to break the cycle. I think if I can not spend most of the week completely broke, it will reduce the temptation to spend money I shouldn't on Friday. What I need to do is give myself a little leeway without extending enough rope to hang myself. What I believe I will do this week, is go ahead and pay the bills the way I normally do. Then I will allow myself the treat of an audiobook from Audible.com and lunch from my favorite Chinese take out (conveniently located in the same strip mall as Kroger's) and I will do the Kroger's shopping. Then I will go home and stay home. I won't spend anymore money until Monday. That is my story. Now we'll see if I can stick to it. If so, hopefully I can at least contain The Enemy Within.
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