Personal Finance Friday – Government Shut Down!!!
This will be a highly political post! Get ready to get upset!
J/K anyone on facebook who is an adult has hopefully realized talking politics here is equivalent of using $100 bills as kindling for a fire J But now that I have you reading!...
The government shut down does help to bring up several things about personal finance. One, you don’t know what tomorrow holds. Even what many think are pretty “safe” jobs in government are not immune to something bad happening so you should always be aiming to be prepared. Two, being prepared means among other things, having an emergency savings. The government workers will get their back pay, if they had one to two months of emergency savings this shut down would literally be a paid vacation for them or at least not have a negative impact. But many of them don’t have any savings, or very little. Below is a link to an article this last year that indicates that 4 in 10 Americans don’t have $400 if an emergency came up…
So this is where I might make some people upset… I think that is beyond crazy to not have $400 to your name for an emergency. If they said 1 in 20 Americans, I would think well maybe okay, the super poor or students or something like that but not 4 in 10, 40% of Americans! That is frankly ridiculous, and I think really shows that many of our money troubles (not all of course, please no comments about how one time this person got cancer while they were in-between jobs and it ruined them financially, there are always exceptions) are because of our decisions.
We live in a very wealthy country, this has made us very lax about our personal finance. We know that in the end things will probably be okay even if we don’t save money because we look around us, and usually it is. In other countries that have much less than us, saving rates are much much higher! They know there are consequences to not being ready for an emergency. Many developing countries people save 30% of their income… let that sink in. People who have way, way, WAY less than us, who are really and truly poor can save 30% of their income. How is that possible? Sacrifice.
Savings rate article:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/022415/top-10-countries-save-most.asp
I want these posts to be positive in general, to be encouraging. We should be saving more, we all know it. If the poorest people in the world can save large portions of their income so can we. Do you have to scrimp and save your whole life and be miserable scrooge McDuck? NO!!! All I’m saying is get that emergency savings put together. Start investing in your future and down the road you will have the luxury of easing up. In other posts I’ve tried to be humble about having the same problems that I was writing about, but here I can say I practice what I preach, and the outcomes have been good. Andrea and I basically have zero fights about money. We both desire to save money. If we have any arguments its because I’m telling her it’s okay to spend certain amounts because she is so frugal. I know many of you reading this don’t have the above issue, but if you do or if you think you can do better, invest some time and effort. Build a budget and see where a little sacrifice could make for a better brighter future for yourself!