I would like to talk about travel and all the cool things I’ve seen lately.  However, the shutdown is still in progress so instead we will chat a bit about money.

Sometime around 1983 I saw the video for Donna Summer’s song “She Works Hard for the Money.”  I sat transfixed and mouth agape. Video was new, so this was definitely the first story video that I had ever seen. I was a story video fan forevermore.  But I digress. . .

My husband and I do work hard for our money and we are trying to make sure that our money works equally hard for us. I mention all this because people have definitely asked me how we are doing this.  When co-workers and friends learned that I was leaving my job and going on the road with my husband, I got lots of questions about how that was going to work financially.  We hoped that the plan would be to replace several larger expenses with several smaller expenses.

I am not the finance guru in the family, so I am just giving basics here.  Before our life transition to being HomeFree, we paid for several things each month that we no longer need to pay.  Among these items are:

  • Apartment rent
  • Renter’s insurance
  • Utilities
  • Wi-fi
  • Auto insurance for two vehicles

When we gave up an address, we picked up the following new monthly costs:

  • Post office box
  • Storage unit
  • Insurance on stuff in storage unit
  • VPN subscription

We also sold one car, so our auto insurance only needs to cover one vehicle now.  We save a little money there.  However, life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, right?  So, along came the unprecedented freeze of traditional American life amid the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown.  His employer normally pays our lodging.  During the virus shutdown we are, of course, paying for our lodging ourselves.  This is a very large expense that we were not expecting.

I am a big believer in emergency funds. EVERYONE should have an emergency fund in their personal budget.  Ideally, everyone should have 3-6 months’ worth of their monthly expenses set aside.  We did and now we are able to pay for our lodging when we were not originally planning to have that expense.  Imagine how different society would be right now if everyone in our country had even two months’ worth of their household’s expenses saved up in an emergency fund when the pandemic hit.  Here’s a CNBC article from earlier this year about American emergency funds.

Once the emergency is over, you begin to replenish your fund.  I know for some people this will stretch an already-tight budget, but the idea is that even if it takes a long time to replenish the emergency fund, at least something will be there when the next emergency hits.  There will, after all, always be another emergency, whether it is a federal government shutdown with staff furloughs because of an impasse in budget talks or a pandemic.  If you are a person who has never had an emergency fund for your household before, I am gently suggesting that you learn the lesson now rather than continuing to do the same thing you have always done and expecting a different result.  The peace of mind of sleeping soundly each night even though you know the unexpected will come again is invaluable.  Truly.

Now (with cheesy 80’s nostalgia), I leave you with this: