Emergency Money Management: 4 Hacks To Get You Through To Your Next Payday
We’ve all been there: those times in life when it feels as if the hands of time are stealthily adding in extra days to the two-week pay period we’ve always been on. Maybe unexpected events have brought more bills than we were anticipating. Maybe that raise we were counting on didn’t come. Or maybe we just booked that lavish vacation we were saving up for, or put that down payment on our first house.
No matter the reasons, the question is the same: How can we better manage our money in between paychecks?
To find out, we spoke to Aaliyah Kissick, a financial literacy advocate who serves as CEO of The Financial Literacy Diaries and director of public relations for The Financial Literacy Foundation.
Check out her tips for not only getting through to your next payday with less stress, but setting yourself up to have more financial peace of mind in the future.
1. Put your bills on autopay.
First things first: Kissick recommends making sure your basic needs are met, a.k.a. all your bills that keep a roof over your head and are the foundations of your daily life. “Put your bills on autopay— the day you are paid. That way, if you’re feeling weak and want to make a decision you know will hurt you in the long run, you can’t. The money’s gone.”
2. Be mindful of how you cope with stress.
“If you want to make your paycheck last longer, you should consider unplugging and practicing mindfulness,” she added. “Running out of money is a very serious concern that you have every right to be worried about, but if you don’t slow down to calm down, you may lean into unhealthy coping mechanisms, like overspending on consumer goods, that will put you in a worse situation.” Cultivating mindfulness helps us notice when the urge to spend to soothe our stress arises, and gives us more agency to choose something different.
3. Cut spending by percentages, not whole spending groups.
If you’re feeling pressure to cut entire spending groups in order to save money and make your paycheck last, Kissick warns against it. The well-intentioned strategy could backfire. “If you think that cutting entertainment is a good idea, it’s not,” she said. “You don’t want to completely cut out your joy in life, because you will get burnt out. And if you can’t show up to work because you’re too depressed, there goes all of your income.” Instead, she suggests looking at all of your spending groups and deciding where you can reduce your spending by a percentage. She gives an example.
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“Rather than cutting out entire spending groups like cutting out 100% of dining out, cutting out 100% of entertainment, you look at the categories that are not necessary for survival and then cut certain percentages of them,” she said. “If you cut 50% of dining out and 50% of entertainment, you’ll probably see the exact same level of decreased spending. But your lifestyle is not going to have a [dramatic] cut, because you’re still going to be dining out.”
4. Use this time to research and negotiate.
If feeling like you really have to work to make your paychecks stretch is becoming a consistent pattern, Kissick encourages women to use this time to increase your financial literacy and do the necessary research to help you negotiate and advocate for yourself.
“Some information gaps that I think are really relevant [for women] are wage information,” she said. “On average, whenever women negotiate, they are highly successful. But a lot of women don’t even try to negotiate. If you don’t have salary information, that may prevent women from feeling empowered to negotiate their salaries.” Kissick explained that researching salary information could look like engaging in internet research or having more conversations about salary with friends and those in your industry.
