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Paycheck to Paycheck
Tips for Making Ends Meet
By Jenn Director Knudsen
Cari* recently went on a shopping trip with her mom and found a pair of shoes she really liked. She turned them over to check out the price and quickly replaced them on the display. At $125, the new treads were way over her budget.
"The 'old' me wouldn't have thought too much about buying them," says Cari, a former paralegal and now mother of 3-year-old twin girls. "But the 'new' me realized that was more than I'd spent on clothes for myself in the past year."
Cari and her husband, Gary*, a public relations manager, live paycheck to paycheck. They clothe their daughters in hand-me-downs from friends or buy only sale items. They purchase strictly the groceries they need – mainly at a club-type supermarket – use coupons and shop the specials.
"When the girls were babies, we negotiated a discount of 14 percent of the retail cost [of formula] by purchasing these things by the case," Cari says. Yet the couple also owns two cars and a three-bedroom house in a suburb of Portland, Ore. Their daughters attend preschool. And Cari is a full-time at-home mom.
How do they swing what to some couples may seem like luxuries? They've done what financial-planning experts say paycheck-to-paycheck families must do: create a budget, stick to it and squirrel away some money – even if only a smidge – each month.
"You never go without," says Christine Walker, an at-home mother of three young children and author of The Smart Mom's Guide to Staying at Home: 65 Simple Ways to Thrive, Not Deprive, on One Income (Trafford Publishing, 2004). "You just get it for less. That's something I'm a big believer in."
"One of the best things we did was sit down and come up with a budget," Cari says. Doing so not only will help you see where each penny goes, but also will help you fret less over your tight funds.
"It helps you relax about it," says Gail Shapiro, a Wayland, Mass., mother of three adult children, executive director of Womankind Educational and Resource Center Inc. and author of Money Order: The Money Management Guide for Women
Want to see more?
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