Prime Rate Credit

I read a story the other day that really touched a nerve with me, because I had lived in constant fear of how I was going to pay my bills month to month, let alone my rent in my small one bedroom apartment my boyfriend affectionately now calls the “cracker box” apartment, for years. I was working on one salary, and a modest one at that.

I was making a car payment, paying electric, heat, insurance, groceries - basically everything, and God forbid something go wrong with my car or anything came along that required hundreds of instant dollars, because I simply didn’t have it. I would have to charge it on a credit card, and that’s how I got myself into trouble with credit cards for a long time.

You see, people don’t realize how important an “emergency fund” is, because they simply don’t have the money leftover at the end of the month to even think about it. I know I felt this way. I thought, jeez, if I can barely make ends meet now, how am I going to worry about setting aside any additional money every month for a fund that I’d probably have to dip into every month anyways, because I’d fall short on the bills and have to use one of my four credit cards which never seemed to get paid down to un-stressful levels.

I’ve said before that one of my friends had a great idea when she started saving almost all of the change she ever got from anything in a jar. At the end of the month, many times she’d have almost fifty to a hundred dollars, and that was a nice little sum to start stashing away for a rainy day, or something worse, like bad health or a defunct car that costs hundreds of dollars to repair.

Look, I know financial times can be really hard sometimes, I’ve been there. But an emergency fund of some sort is almost like insurance for times when we need money the most and feel the most pressure to put things on credit, which can always snowball out of control if we’re not careful.