According to a recent report, close to 60% of US earners are living paycheck to paycheck. Put simply, this means missing a single paycheck would be financially detrimental and missing more than one would be financially devastating.

This is particularly troubling as we head into a recession and possibly higher unemployment as clearly many families aren’t prepared for hard times.

This is a hard situation to correct for most people as they are likely highly leveraged with debt. However, it is possible to correct by simply adopting two philosophies that you’ve likely heard before.

• Live beneath your means: This is very simple. If every dime you make is going out the door the next day, you are living well above you means. Find ways to cut your budget to create a surplus each payday. For most people, there are a lot of ways to reduce expenses but there is simply a lack of desire to actually do it.

• Pay yourself first: Everyone should take a percentage of their check and put it into some type of savings and then live on what is left. It doesn’t even have to be a lot as $100 – $200 a payday will grow into a nice nest egg rather quickly. You can also fund this with a side job or rental (Airbnb).

Taking some simple steps now can get you out of that 60% and will almost certainly reduce stress, tension, and anxiety in your life.

Suppose you want to make a large purchase but don’t have cash available right now but expect to in the coming months. You can use credit cards to allow you to make the purchase now and pay later. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you want to buy something that costs $3,000. You make the purchase on the day after the statement date of you credit card (let’s say that’s 9/15). Now, if you are using a 2% rewards card per my previous advice, you will get $60 of that back immediately. The purchase will not appear until your next statement on 10/15 and you will generally have almost another 30 days to pay it (in this case the payment date will likely be 11/13). So, you have created an automatic 2 month deferral with cash back and no interest.

Let’s say you can’t pay it off on 11/13. A common tactic would be to take a cash advance on another credit card on 11/13 and pay off the balance. This would give you another almost 30 days to pay off the balance. There is a caveat here in that some banks do not allow an interest free grace period on cash advances. However, if your bank card does, you just made a purchase with no payment for 90 days interest free.

Rolling transactions such as this are nothing new and are a common cash flow tactic businesses have been using for years. However, there is no reason any individual can’t take advantage of this same strategy to time purchases and payments to their advantage.