Not Getting Paid: The Dreadful Horror
By Matt - Monday, January 14th, 2008
I won’t shy away from the fact that I am still living mostly from paycheck to paycheck. I’ve been making a fair bit of progress though my debt load and lifestyle really didn’t have me rolling in the money. This past weekend the reality of such a lifestyle really came crashing down. My paycheck wasn’t in the bank when it was supposed to be. The company didn’t go bankrupt but there was some odd clerical error and the automatic deposit wasn’t in the bank. I’ve been assured that it will be there tomorrow. Fortunately this happened at a time when few payments were automatically withdrawn.
What did happen was a forced reality check on my part and the impact that something as simple as not getting paid can have for me. The reality for me is that I spend more money than I make and I somehow manage to float along. Savings are something that I think are a great thing but never manage to keep for too long. And the worst part of the whole scenario is the fact that I truly live from pay to pay.
Would you survive if you didn’t get a paycheck?
I now know that I would be very hard pressed to survive if I missed a pay. I hate the effects that this has on me and I don’t think the full gravity of them shone through until I missed one of these magical pays. Coasting along in the status quo is what a great many people do. They don’t do this for a couple months or a year they do it for years on end and sometimes decades and then when retirement sets in they’re in trouble.
Retirement aside many people, myself included, would be in serious trouble if a single pay was missed. Some people would be able to cope for a few weeks or months on credit cards alone but that’s not a way to live. This little misadventure should be resolved shortly for myself but that does not mean there is no lesson to be learnt. It’s time to make some sacrifices and changes to remove the need to rely on the pay to pay never ending cycle.
This entry is filed under Budgeting and Planning, Debt.
5 Responses to “Not Getting Paid: The Dreadful Horror”
1 msminiducky says:
January 15th, 2008
at 1:51 pm
I would get quite panicky if I missed a paycheck. Even though I have an emergency fund, it wouldn’t last more than 5 months of regular expenses, and I know both how quickly that can pass by and how emergencies can happen in clumps, not just with a single job loss.
2 thebaglady says:
January 15th, 2008
at 8:12 pm
though I don’t live paycheck to paycheck I would still be angry if what is due to be mine isn’t there on the day it’s supposed to be. I think you should be able to ask for lost interest money.
3 dawn says:
January 15th, 2008
at 8:47 pm
We lived on the edge for years…
That is why having an emergency fund is such a stress reliever. Even if you have debt, you should try to build up an emergency fun. It really helps…
4 Cindy says:
January 17th, 2008
at 3:07 pm
The first time it happened (boss’ wife was payroll clerk; she didn’t like me), it was devastating. Many checks bounced. Replacement check was not available for a full week. Disaster.
The second time it happened (checks didn’t make it from Oregon to Alaska due to weather), I’d learned my lesson and still had a small reserve in the bank.
The third time it happened (wrong address on file), it was a stretch, but not a disaster.
Going without one paycheck was enough to convince me to FIND a way to keep at least half of a check in the bank. (Finding a job that didn’t penalize me for working more than 20 hours a week was a major step in the right direction …)
5 One Million and Beyond - My journey to a million dollars and beyond. » Alternate Income Streams says:
January 28th, 2008
at 7:27 am
[…] Although your day job might be enjoyable and something that you’re passionate about it does not guarantee that you’ll get money from it all the time. I know the nay Sayers will argue that their job is secure but the reality is no single source of income is every guaranteed. Most of the time I like my day job but I am also tied to it because I have few other sources of income. In the back of my mind I worry about not getting paid (which happened lately) and the impact this would have on my life. […]
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