Life tends to enjoy throwing the odd hurdle in our way and has quite a habit of doing so at the worst possible time. Money is tight for many of us right now, with living costs seemingly rising by the day while wages plateau. That means most of us are living financially in the moment, so what happens when something unexpected comes along?
With more young adults than ever having little to no savings whatsoever, emergencies can cause huge financial strain on people who simply don’t have the money to pay for whatever has come their way. Of course, you can go and get some financial help, but it’d be even better if you had some emergency funds ready to go.
Here, we talk about three of the harsher financial realities that any of us could face – ones which we could all do with planning for.
A change of circumstances at work
Problems at work can come steadily over the horizon or just hit you square in the face. Say you’re not performing that well and you think your head may be on the chopping block, you’ll at least have some time to think about the economic ramifications of losing your job. If redundancy hits, however, it can appear completely out of the blue and leave you somewhat out in the cold.
Either way, but particularly in the case of the latter, it pays to have backup funds in place. With plenty of young workers spending the entirety of their pay cheque each month, it isn’t easy to generate reserve savings. However, if you could, it would take a huge amount of strain out of an incredibly distressing time.
Trouble at home
A burst pipe. The washing machine has stopped working. The boiler’s broken. Things going wrong in the house tend to be unforeseen and annoyingly costly to resolve. House repairs are “status quo” spends – nothing changes except you’ve lost a lot of money. Of course, if you can’t or won’t repair whatever damage has occurred, your standard of living may be drastically reduced, so often you’re not really left with a choice on dealing with the problem.
How can you help yourself here? Well, the emergency fund is good, but it’d be better not to dip into it. Carry out regular check-ups on your key appliances, either by yourself or through a professional like https://www.paulrepairs.com, and you should be able to identify and deal with problems before they get out of hand, financially and otherwise.
Car repairs
Another of life’s wonderful status quo expenditures, keeping the car running is likely essential for you getting to work, getting to the shops and getting just about everywhere, so there isn’t much of a choice if something goes wrong.
Regular check-ups and maintenance are common practice in the industry, but many of us duck them in favour of saving a few quid. The thing is, if you spend a little here and there keeping the car ticking over, not only are you spending money you planned to spend in a controlled manner, but you’re also preventing yourself from winding up with a much more costly repair bill when your engine blows up (engines don’t really blow up, but you get the picture).
No one said saving your hard-earned cash for emergency spends is fun, but it’s a diligent and responsible move that will keep you out of trouble if something does go wrong. Of course, if you never encounter any problems with your car or home, you’ve then got that money to spend elsewhere – so it pays to back yourself against the worst happening.