Preventative Finances | brokeGIRLrich
I have always been super susceptible to colds. From like mid-October to mid-May, I’ve got a perpetual case of the sniffles.
Touring makes this even worse usually. On the ships, the canned air circulating through cruise ship cabins would infect us all with ship plagues that would just hop from one person to another and then right back to me after about one day of breathing freely.
The circus plague is pretty much the same thing, with a nice touch of living in a trailer that almost certainly has mold growing somewhere (never pull up the carpets).
And busses! Don’t even get me started on busses. I’m 100% convinced they have the worst of the recycled air, blowing right into your face on your bunk.
The thing is though – despite how easily I get sick, it only takes a small step to stave off the vast majority of my colds. If I actually drink Emergen-C with some water and apple cider vinegar, I’m not getting sick.
5 minutes of prevention a day can keep me healthy all winter.
But do I do it?
Generally… no.
I’m not a stupid woman. This ounce of prevention really does work wonders for me, and yet, it’s so freaking hard for me to commit to doing it. It’s too many bottles to carry around. I have to remember to fill up a water bottle. I run out of Emergen-C packets and forget to buy more. Apple cider vinegar smells funny.
I’ve got a long list of reasons why I fail at this daily.
AND if I don’t do it daily, it doesn’t build up enough of whatever is in there in my body to fight off a cold that’s already happening. If the sniffles have already hit, it’s too late.
Sometimes I feel this way about my finances. Fortunately, I’m a little better at squirreling away cash than I am about drinking Emergen-C all winter.
Projects that are really just an ounce of financial prevention can go a long way. When I got my first apartment in New York City, the first three months I squirreled away an extra $20 here, an extra $50 there, $200 from a side hustle, etc., until one month I realized I could pay my rent on the first day of the month for the following month instead of the last.
That financial prevention built me up a one month buffer on my rent. From then on, I paid my rent on the first of the month and had 30 extra days of time before I needed to come up with that money again.
I used the same sort of squirreling to get my emergency fund started. The money seemed almost useless in the little increments I was depositing it in until I realized it had reached $500 with no real pain – and $500 can cover an awful lot of average 20-something emergencies.
A little bit of financial prevention is setting your 401(k) contribution to the company match from day one day just getting used to that being your regular pay amount. If that’s been going ok, it’s inching it up 1-2% each year. Or 1-2% with each raise.
If you can’t squeeze any more money out of your budget no matter what, financial prevention can be making a carefully budgeted list and training yourself to check for coupons before you shop.
There are lots of little things that are no more difficult that downing a daily shot of Emergen-C that can help strengthen your finances little by little over time.
