The Covid-19 pandemic that started as a couple of weeks at home back in March has slowly consumed more than half of the year, and there is a very good chance that our lives have been forever changed thanks to our time spent in quarantine.
No matter how much or how little your personal life has changed over the past few months, there is simply no denying that most of our personal finance budgets are never going to be the same as a result of Covid-19.
With that in mind, let’s dive in and take a closer look at exactly how our personal finance budgets are going to look different on the backside of this pandemic.
Emergency Funds Are Front and Center
The most significant thing that just about everyone has learned during the pandemic is that those emergency funds that never seemed particularly necessary were actually essential for carrying on with our lives when things got serious.
Much like the Great Depression did for anyone who lived through it, the Covid-19 pandemic is going to forever remind all of us that we absolutely must have plenty of extra savings available to us if anything like this ever happens again.
Healthcare Expenses Are More Acceptable
The pandemic has also been a firm reminder that we owe it to ourselves to make sure that we take care of our bodies as much as we possibly can.
Because this virus preys on people with compromised immune systems, anyone who was willing to spend money on their health and wellbeing has looked like a pretty savvy investor over the past few months.
Moving forward, we can expect people to put an even bigger premium on those health and wellness expenses as a way to make sure that their bodies are prepared for the next global pandemic.
Investing is Scarier Than Ever
The stock market started out the pandemic with a spectacular crash, but since that time it has been on a fantastic climax run that has anyone who bought in at the bottom feeling like a genius.
Unfortunately, that entire run was accompanied by a striking fear that the bottom is going to fall out of the market the minute that the federal government decides to stop printing money and handing it out like water.
When you combine a big crash and a huge run with plenty of reasons for another crash, you get one of the most frightening investing climates the world has ever seen, which means that the average person doesn’t stand a chance in the markets of the future.
No Need to Pay for Unnecessary Travel
Whenever we do get back to some version of our formal lives, it is almost a foregone conclusion that those lives won’t include anywhere near the amount of leisure travel as we had grown accustomed too in recent years.
When you combine fears of the virus with a lack of discretionary funds, there just won’t be good reasons to travel in the years to come.
But while these changes will certainly stick with us in the years to come, they won’t exactly make us prisoners in our own homes the way that the pandemic has. We’re all looking forward to the days when we can get together in public to discuss these changes in even more detail.
