vilkri-she wrote a post about the poor in the US last week. She wrote about the millions of people right here in the US who live on funds that are “below the poverty line.” This post is devoted to another set of strugglers who do not live below the poverty line.

I am thinking about friends of mine who do all the right things. Both, the husband and wife work hard, they both have a college degree, they take good care of their children, and they live a frugal lifestyle. I don’t think they even remember the last time they could go on vacation. Yet, they can barely make ends meet. No matter how much they dice and slice their budget, not much is left over at the end of the day. They may even have considered living in a cheaper place, but nothing cheaper is available in the area where they live. They are as low as they can go with housing expenses without totally uprooting their family and beginning again.

As we said in the previous post, we (vilkri-he and vilkri-she) are lucky enough that setting up a budget yields good results for us. We manage to have some money left over to put towards savings. But our friends are not so lucky. I wonder how many Americans are out there who are in the same situation, who are not below the poverty line, yet have a very hard time making ends meet no matter how hard they try.

We know that there are some “bad people” who overextended themselves in the past and who struggle now so that they can pay back their debts. Some of them also find it impossible to get themselves out of the hole, but in a way they kind of got themselves into the hole all on their own in the first place. My friends do not fall into that category. They did not make any foolish financial moves. They just find it very difficult getting by, plain and simple.

When my friends ask me what they can do to get themselves into a better financial place, I can only suggest that they try to find better paying jobs; we all know that is easier said than done. No one I know well has been able to get a better job yet, and as it is right now most of the ones working are struggling to hold onto their current jobs. I really don’t have any good answers for my friends. To make a long question short, what answers do you have?

Tags: free budget planner, setting up a budget