We have officially arrived at the most stressful point in the semester.  Classes are winding down or already completed.  Papers are coming due.  Exams loom near.  Sometimes it seems like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.  It happens to everyone.  And, sadly, it doesn’t end when you finish school.  There will always be times in your life when you find yourself overextended.

I’m having one of those weeks right now.  I was traveling this weekend, so I didn’t have quite enough time to get all of my typical weekend adulting done.  I was able to complete my laundry, but I just didn’t have it in me to get to a grocery store last night.  Sometimes you have to cut corners when time is tight.  But the important thing is not to overextend your budget just because your time is stretched too thin.  It would be really easy to exist for the entire week on takeout food and Au Bon Pain.  But that would cause serious pain to my pocketbook.  The better alternative for me was to log into the Walmart grocery app this morning and put together a grocery order for pickup tonight.  Since I really don’t have anything resembling a dinner in my house right now, I’ll stop at Wegmans on my way home to grab something from the frozen case for tonight’s nourishment, and then by 8 tonight I’ll have my Walmart grocery order.  It could have been a whole week of restaurant food, which would have easily been $20 a day or more for my husband and me.  Instead, I took a short cut to really get some groceries.

We can’t always do things exactly the way we’d like, especially when time is tight.  But in this world of modern conveniences there are ways to less expensively work around time constraints.

Exam time is hard.  Sometimes corner must be cut.  But you’ve got this.  Use the tools available to you, and you will make it through!