How I Learned To Budget While Living Paycheck To Paycheck
There’s no question that we are living through one of the most financially fraught times in history. As of late 2020, 63% of Americans said they were living paycheck to paycheck, with 21% having no emergency savings. This was the case for 32-year-old Yalonda — until she took control over her finances and started budgeting, eventually embracing the freedom she felt when she knew where her money was going. Below, Yalonda shares how she broke out of a cycle of debt, became financially literate, and made budgeting work for her lifestyle. As told to Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner.
My parents split up when I was five. I lived with my mom in Texas. She didn't get child support and had to work multiple jobs to support me and my older sister. She refused welfare, or any type of government assistance, and it always seemed like she was working 1,000 hours a week.
Still, money wasn’t mysterious in our household. Our money talks were about how you have to work to pay your bills. Work, pay your bills, work, pay your bills, repeat. We didn’t go on vacations or do a lot of fun things. We barely had money for food, clothes, or really anything. After graduating high school, I realized we hadn't even had a finance class, or learned anything about money. That was so strange to me. I was 18 and knew that I had to go out, work, and pay my bills; everything I knew about money I had learned from watching my mom.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for work, but I knew I could make a lot of money as a server, so I started waiting tables and getting a nice weekly paycheck. Once my bills were paid, I thought I could do whatever I wanted with my money. I’d get paid Friday and would spend it all by Monday. The rest of the week, I would pray that I'd even have enough gas to get to work. I started working multiple jobs, but working more didn't help because I didn't know how to manage my money. I'd have more to spend, so I’d go get my nails done, go out with friends, buy new outfits. I was being reckless. I had a savings account, but I’d put money in just to take it out. It was a cycle, a game I played with myself. My friends were also all living paycheck to paycheck and had the same spending habits, which normalized this behavior.
Eventually, I moved from San Antonio to Waco and enrolled in college. I received a Pell Grant, but it wasn’t even close to being enough to cover my expenses, so I had to take out student loans. Once at school, I decided I wanted to study accounting. My brother-in-law was a partner at an accounting firm and convinced me it was a great career — it hadn’t failed him the way working multiple jobs had failed me. Plus, I could get a job as an accountant straight out of school.
