How do YOU Survive on YOUR Salary?

When you first get out of school you have grand dreams of going out into the world and eventually making oodles of money and living comfortably. At least we did! Don’t get me wrong, I knew it would be hard in the beginning- oh boy did we learn that one quickly! But a few years later we got lucky and both had amazing paying jobs. We didn’t have to live on rice anymore. We had money to splurge- it was great! But money isn’t everything….my husband had a passion to teach, and couldn’t find a teaching job.

So we moved to where there was a teaching job. We were so excited, we moved back to Florida…..we couldn’t be happier. Until it hit us just how little we would actually make. Until we realized that there was almost no jobs in the field I had worked in originally. Until we found out we were pregnant. It felt like we were starting all over again! Seven years later we have found that it is not as hard for us as it was in the beginning. In fact we have even less money than we started our lives together down here, but we’re OK with that.

I think we’ve come to appreciate each other more, and appreciate that it really does take some serious hard work for us to make it. It does get difficult when someone waltzes by making six figures or just gets ‘lucky’ to have everyone do everything for them. We’ve found plenty of that along the way. But at the end of the day we have each other. We have two very happy little children. We have our integrity. And we have a roof over our heads. In the end that’s all that really matters. It would be nice to make more money and not have to scrimp so much to pay the bills. In fact I still dream about that job that makes us a lot more income! But it’s not our focus anymore. We do what we have to do to get by.

There are a huge amount of things that we do to save our pennies and meet the bills at the end of the month. You can read my earlier post on just a few ways we survive living on a teachers salary. I’d love to know how YOU survive on YOUR salary? What do you do when you get down about your situation? How have you creatively learned to cut corners and save a little extra?