I voted that yes we need more money. We are in a strange spot financially. You know those emergencies you have been saving for? We had several of them all at once. My husband lost his job the week before our wedding (which was paid for by other people so our wedding was free to us), we had to pay a significant fee to have someone help us get out of our old, crappy apartment and into our new, safe apartment (ceiling collapses are now a thing of the past for us!), we have to pay to move him onto my health insurance which is a fairly significant expense, etc. Our emergency fund still has money in it but it is much less full than it was 90 days ago.
We are at a point where we are just bringing in enough to live on with my salary and his unemployment but he has lots of interviews and it looks like he will be employed by October if this interview on Monday works out so theoretically we should be fine. However, if this interview or one of the others doesn’t work out and he is still unemployed on 12/1 our insurance costs are going up by $600 a month and that will fast suck away any money left in our emergency account. We are teetering on the temporarily-broke-but-fine/begging-for-change-downtown line and doing everything we can to avoid taking a turn for the worse.
We fall between the last two options. We have enough for the moment, but my husband was laid off last week, so unless he finds something pretty soon we are going to be in deep yogurt. We spent most of 2009 without income and are still paying back the debt we incurred at that time, but this time I have a small job and we’ll get unemployment, so it’s not so dire. I hope.
The question is do you need more money? It’s a different question to ask do you need more money to be happy.
I agree with your view of need. Certainly the last two categories are not concerned with being set for life. Need is the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy plus physical safety. I don’t classify the higher rungs as needs, because I don’t believe anyone really needs self-actualization, self-esteem, love, or future job / financial security. Those are “wants”.
I had to do a household budget last night for the first time in a long time. I had to decide how much money I could spend on my private pilot certificate and how much I had to save for my wedding. Turns out, I can do both easily. I’m running a surplus of about $2,000 a month, which is more than I thought.
It pisses me off when people describe me as “fortunate” or “blessed”. Um, no. I’ve been working toward this goal since I was 15, thanks. Luck didn’t have anything to do with it! /minirant.
At risk of pissing you off, I’ll go ahead and say, yes, you are fortunate and blessed (that our federal government hasn’t deem it too much of a surplus for you and helpfully taxed it away).
Being fortunate and blessed doesn’t mean you didn’t work your ass off to get there. It means lots of other people worked their asses off too but became disabled, had companies that went under and left them out of work, or other things that would have meant that their hard work didn’t work out the same way yours did. You certainly earned your place but a lot of crazy shit happens in life that could have derailed even the best laid plans.