I’m a week late on rent due, I only paid half, I had to call all my credit card companies and utilities to tell them what’s going on. And now my check engine light turned on because the bastard is misfiring. My wife lost her dad which fucked us both up due to missing a ton of work, and I don’t know what to do. I’m tired of asking my family for help, the for bank is only available while I’m working, I work 2 jobs. My wife is working too and we’re even took in a person to live in our spare room.
How in the world do people survive in this world when they don’t even have time to be happy? I use upside for gas and shopping I’m enrolled in every stores rewards program, I make my own cleaning supplies to save money and cook from scratch. What else could I do to save money? Also with the looming government shutdown I’m going to be furloughed for however long that is. Also what are some apps you guys use to help save money? I guess this is a lot of questions.
I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression for almost 20 years now. Sometime durring that there are times where it would get bad, every little thing seemed like the end of the world, and I would need to just ride it out. Durring those times I have a rather morbid but effective saying I would say to myself. It’s kind of a bastardization of the army EOD motto which is officially “Initial sucess or total failure”. It makes sense because when someone is defusing a bomb and they fail then the bomb goes off and they die. But logic would dictate that if they’re not dead then they haven’t failed yet. So when my brain is being uncooperative about something I did I just think to myself “That didn’t kill me so I didn’t fail yet.” It’s just a way to remind myself that unless a decision I make or thing that happens actually kills me, I still have a chance to fix it.
As far as actual help with money and budgeting I can’t be much help because Im in the same boat myself. There was a budgeting app I used a while back called “You Need A Budget” (I think the app is just named YNAB). It works really well for actually seeing exactly where all your money is going. The only problem I had with it is that it just assumes that you will actually make enough money to fully cover all of your expenses and as I’m sure you’re aware that isn’t always the case when you’re broke.
As far as more immediate help I have personally been using a payday loan app called earnin to help buffer some expenses. It’s nice because it doesn’t directly charge any interest on the money you borrow. Instead it just asks for “tips” and you can just choose to tip $0 if money is really tight. It does guilt you a bit for doing that but it doesn’t stop you. I normally tip $6 and it doesn’t complain about that. You can borrow up to $100 per day up to your pay period limit which is based on how much you make and will go up based on you reliably making payments and if you tip at all (don’t do the default tip, $6 is plenty to make it go up) If you want let me know and I can send you my link (I think we both get $25) but just posting it here makes me feel like a spam bot.
That ‘if I didn’t die, I didn’t fail’ mantra is exactly what kept me going through hard times aswell! I commented here about a similar thing my dad told me (“somehow everything continues”).