You Make Good Money. So Why Do You Still Feel Broke?

You make good money.

You’re not irresponsible.

You’re paying the mortgage, feeding everybody, keeping the lights on, and maybe you even have a decent salary on paper.

But somehow, you still feel like one unexpected expense could come along and punch you directly in the face.

Making good money and being financially secure are not the same thing.

I have slowly climbed the ranks at my job, and I make a very decent salary by almost any measurable standard. When I was married, I would bet that my partner and I combined didn’t make that much more than I make now.

So it begs the question:

If my lifestyle hasn’t drastically expanded, why do I always feel broke?

Why do I feel like I’m not financially secure?

On paper, my gross income looks really, really good. But when I take that gross income and subtract all the expenses I have, I quickly realize that the money I actually have available to spend doesn’t seem to go very far.

And I think when you have a higher income, there’s this natural feeling that you should be able to afford things.

I should be able to go on a vacation once a year.

I should be able to survive my kids starting sports in the fall without feeling like my bank account is under attack.

I should be able to pay the annual school fees without wondering what else I’m going to have to move around that month.

I should be able to absorb normal life without treating every mildly expensive Tuesday like a financial emergency.

But that isn’t always how it works.

When I was married, we had two incomes, yes, but I also think we had two brains carrying the financial obligations of the household.

Now I have one income and one financial manager.

Me.

And apparently she has a lot of departments.

Kids are also expensive in ways that don’t always show up neatly in a monthly budget.

There are months where my kids have four to six birthday parties between the two of them. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal when you’re spending $40 on a gift, but somehow $40 becomes $50, and before you know it you’ve spent $250 on birthday gifts for children who do not live in your house.

Then there are sports.

Your kid is playing hockey and suddenly their skates don’t fit. You weren’t planning on replacing them this year, but there goes another $350.

They break a stick. You don’t have a proper backup. There’s another $150.

One of your kids hits a growth spurt and apparently decides to grow three sizes in six months, so now you’re buying an entirely new wardrobe every other Tuesday.

Kids are expensive, but the bigger issue is that their expenses don’t always arrive predictably.

They don’t show up in perfectly organized monthly installments so you can calmly plug them into a spreadsheet and feel superior.

They just appear.

So while my income is good, my actual cash flow is not.

And I also need to be very clear about something else:

I did not properly downsize my life when I got divorced.

I decided I was going to find ways to maintain the lifestyle I already had, when the reality is that I probably should have looked at ways to reduce some of my lifestyle spending so that living off one income, and carrying the financial obligations of the household alone, had a little more breathing room.

I didn’t do that.

And I am 100% accountable for where I ended up.

I certainly wasn’t sitting around thinking, none of this is my fault.

I knew some of it was.

There was probably a period of overspending.

Maybe there was a period where income dropped.

Maybe I was emotionally exhausted.

Maybe I was trying to recreate stability after a divorce.

Maybe I spent money because life felt hard and I wanted something to feel easy.

Maybe I simply wasn’t paying enough attention.

There are a hundred different ways you can end up making good money and still feeling broke.

That doesn’t mean you need to lie to yourself about it.

But it also doesn’t mean you need to beat yourself over the head with it forever.

The most important thing is that you’re paying attention now.

The Problem Is Not That I Can’t Pay My Bills

For me, it often feels like I’m stuck on a hamster wheel and every payday is just another financial Groundhog Day.

Money comes in.

Money goes out.

Mortgage.

Insurance.

Groceries.

Household costs.

Debt payments.

Kids.

Utilities.

Cell phone.

Repeat.

The problem has never been that I can’t pay today’s bills.

My bills are paid.

My cell phone gets paid. My utilities get paid. I have never missed a mortgage payment.

That’s not the issue.

The issue is that there is very little cash left over to create any kind of meaningful buffer.

So I live with this underlying fear that the next big expense could derail me.

Eventually, if enough things come up, you run out of buffer room.

And for me, that buffer has never really been cash.

It has been credit.

That is not a buffer.

That is borrowed time.

And borrowed time eventually sends you a bill.

I cannot keep relying on credit to fill the gap every time life costs slightly more than I expected it to.

At some point, something has to change.

Irregular Expenses Are Still Expenses

I think one of the biggest things standard budgeting gets wrong, or maybe one of the biggest things I got wrong, is treating irregular expenses like they somehow don’t count.

If you have $4,000 coming in and $4,000 going out every month, but you also know that once a year you’ll have a $500 school fee, that $500 still has to come from somewhere.

It does not magically appear because it wasn’t part of the monthly budget.

Property tax.

School fees.

Car repairs.

Vacations.

Home repairs.

Annual insurance payments.

Back-to-school clothes.

Birthdays.

Christmas.

Anything that costs money but doesn’t fit neatly into your regular monthly expenses still counts.

And I need to stop treating those things like emergencies just because they are not monthly.

Christmas has occurred on December 25 every year of your entire life.

At some point we have to stop calling it an unexpected expense.

It is expected.

You know the birthday is coming.

You know the school fees are coming.

You know your car will eventually need maintenance.

You know the shingles on your house are not immortal.

You know property taxes are due every year.

These are not emergencies.

They are irregular expenses.

And if we know they are coming, they should not repeatedly become financial crises.

I’m not saying that as someone who has mastered this.

I’m saying it because these are all the same things I am currently telling myself.

Your Past Spending Decisions Are Taking a Cut of Every Paycheque

You can earn a lot and still feel broke because your past spending decisions are taking a cut of every paycheque.

For me, every dollar I put toward debt today is paying for a decision I made yesterday.

And that is one of the most uncomfortable parts of this whole thing.

Because that money could be doing something else.

It could be building an emergency fund.

It could be sitting in a sinking fund for Christmas.

It could be paying for hockey registration.

It could be covering a car repair.

It could be sitting there quietly doing the deeply unsexy but incredibly useful job of making my future life less stressful.

Instead, a significant chunk of my income is cleaning up the past.

Not because debt repayment is bad.

Because that is money that cannot currently build financial security.

Imagine taking the amount you pay toward debt every month and putting it into sinking funds instead.

Christmas comes, and the money is already there.

Your kid needs new skates, and the money is already there.

The car breaks down, and the money is already there.

You don’t panic.

You don’t transfer things around.

You don’t stare at your credit card wondering which future version of you is going to deal with this.

The money is simply there.

That is the kind of financial life I want.

I Don’t Think the Answer Is to Stop Buying Lattes

I touched on this earlier, but when I got divorced I didn’t really shrink my lifestyle to match the fact that I had become a single-income household.

And I don’t think the answer is to live miserably and stop buying every latte that makes your morning slightly better.

I think the bigger issue is lifestyle creep.

We spend because things are convenient.

We add another subscription because the kids want it.

We upgrade the house because the room feels tired.

We walk into HomeSense for one thing and somehow leave with a throw pillow, a candle and a new personality.

It happens.

But it still matters.

If every pay increase, bonus or extra dollar automatically becomes a nicer version of my current lifestyle, then I can keep earning more forever and never actually feel more secure.

That is the trap.

More income should not always equal more lifestyle.

Sometimes more income should equal more margin.

More savings.

More debt reduction.

More stability.

More options.

More peace.

The Goal Is More Breathing Room

I don’t think the goal is necessarily to make more money.

More money helps, obviously.

But if your financial system is broken, more money can just make the broken system larger.

The goal is to create breathing room.

That means getting to a place where there is positive monthly cash flow.

It means having sinking funds for the expenses you know are coming.

It means building an emergency fund.

It means reducing debt.

It means knowing where your money goes.

It means deciding intentionally what your income needs to accomplish before it gets absorbed into your life.

And before automatically deciding the solution is another raise, another side hustle or somehow finding even more money, I think there are three very boring questions worth answering:

• What actually lands in my account?

• How much of that money is already committed — including the expenses that don’t happen every month?

• What is genuinely left without using credit?

Because if the answer to that last question is basically nothing, that’s the problem we actually need to solve.

You may not have an income problem.

You may have a systems problem.

A margin problem.

An allocation problem.

You may also, from time to time, have an impulse-control problem.

Don’t we all.

But the point is not to shame yourself.

The point is to actually look at what is happening.

Because making good money does not automatically make you financially secure.

And earning more will not necessarily fix the problem if every additional dollar disappears into the same system.

I don’t have all the answers.

I am walking down this road too.

But I am paying attention now, and I plan to share the wins, the mistakes, the systems that actually work and everything I learn along the way.

Because I would very much like to reach the point where a normal life expense no longer feels like it could punch me directly in the face.

If you’re trying to get your financial shit together too, join the TMIC Pep Talk. I’ll send you the things I’m learning, testing and figuring out as I go — without pretending I had it all figured out before I started.

TMIC money content shares personal experience and general educational information. It is not individualized financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Your circumstances are your own; use qualified professional advice where appropriate.