Safety Nets

It's that time of the month again.

Over a week until pay day and we are wondering what in the heck we are going to do.  We will manage.  We will cope.

But it all comes with a lot of jumping through hoops and a lot of thinking outside of the box.

At this moment in time I am considering my options; I'm mentally going through everything in my head - what we need to have and how much money we will need in order to get to the finish line.  What we have to sell which might be able to tide us over.

Our safety nets.

We've been going through our safety nets a lot quicker recently.  It used to be that they were a last resort - we had too much, so we set things aside and never even thought about them.  Never even thought of them as saleable items, never even realised that we would be using them as resources.

Now I tally them mentally every month when yet another crises arises, when yet another bill rears it's ugly head.

Things are very tight, there's no doubt about it, but we are very good at strategising, very good at working out what we can live without.

We are lucky to have safety nets like this.  Not everyone does.

A lot of people get uncomfortable when they talk about money, about finances, about not having enough of it or having too much of it.  Nobody likes to discuss their own personal situation, unless it's in hindsight or with a close personal friend.

Money is life's great equalizer, the great judge who deems whether we eat or heat, the one who separates the have from the have nots and divides and rules.

Our dealings with it, be it the debt we owe or the millions we have stashed away are whispered, like a huge dirty secret.

It's a strange old thing.

The concept gets weirder, the more you think about it.

Why do I document this?  Why do I write this down? Surely I should be quiet and get on with it like everyone else?

For the future, I suppose.  So we can record what it is like now and hope that one day we will look back at it and know that we got through it.  To laugh at the crazy things we got up to later on.  To hopefully remind myself in the future to build more safety nets.

And to teach my children that they can build them too.  And to be grateful for each and every one.