You may have spent the past 4-weeks saving every last penny you own, skimping on the bare essentials just to get buy. You may have JUST enough money to get you through to your next paycheck - and then your boss goes and starts spending. Soon enough, you’re well into the red and you don’t know what you’re going to do. There’s not even enough money to buy a train ticket to get into town for work, those train tickets are expensive you know… What are you going to do?!

I’m sure the majority of you are thinking that: 1) You would never let yourself get that low in funds, and 2) If you WERE you wouldn’t let the boss spend it!! Well that’s all well and good to say that now, but just listen to what I have to say and we’ll see how you feel afterwards.

Ok - so here’s one of my scenario’s to get the ball rolling: Imagine you have fallen onto tough times financially. Your finances are quickly sinking into the red and your future is starting to look a little bleak - no more fancy restaurant dinners, no gas in your car, not even a DVD rental. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You have a new job lined up to start very shortly, and after two weeks you will get your first paycheck. You study your finances into the early hours of the morning and figure out exactly how to afford three weeks of transport into work, once that’s done you’re home free. The first paycheck is more than you have all together at the moment, and once you’ve reached that you’re saved. But, with this plan to work to be able to stretch the money through to three weeks, that means you’ll be packing a lunch (and not a very extravagant one) and hauling it into work every day, no exceptions. On your first day you meet your new boss once again (clearly you met them in the interview process) and start to meet your new co-workers. Everyone else has better lunch than you, but that’s ok, you’ll have lunch like theirs soon enough. All seems to be going well when it happens…………. Your boss asks you out for lunch two days later.

What are you going to do?

There’s no way that you can tell your brand new boss that your finances are so bad at the moment that you can’t even afford a simple food-court lunch from downstairs - if they knew that, there’s no way that they’d trust you to work for them! I mean, if you can’t figure out how to save your money, what hope is there for you working for THEM? You think about the alternative - tell them the truth, bosses appreciate that. They might even feel sorry for you and offer you an advance on your paycheck or a raise, or, even better, they’ll pay for lunch! All of these questions race through your head in an instant, and when you notice that your boss is looking at you with that, “why is it taking them so long to answer?” look on their face, and you instinctively accept. It’s like a survival reflex - when someone comes up to you with a knife and asks you if you have a gun timidly, you don’t say no… it’s just common sense. So within that instant you have added a $10 minimum to your budget for lunch with the new boss. Normally this wouldn’t be a major issue, but with your finances the way they are now, that $10 means you will have to sacrifice your last train ticket, which means you can’t get into work for the third week of your employment. You’ll have to call in sick for the three days it takes for payroll to be processed. Once you’ve gotten your pay on Wednesday you’ll be back in the office. I mean, it wont look great to take three days off in your first three weeks, but anyone can get an easy gastro-related doctor’s certificate… It’s better than admitting that you’re broke to your boss!

So now I address you skeptics who latched on to my 2) before - what would you do in this situation?

We can go through all the planning in the world, financially down to the cent if we have to. But it only takes one person to completely throw off the whole plan, in this case, your boss to throw out your whole financial life-life, leaving you faking gastro for three days… I guess the moral of the story is: if you’re desperate when it comes to finances but starting a new job, make sure you budget in that lunch with the boss. It may never happen - that’s an easy $10 added to your budget for leeway - but you never know when it will…