As a family of 5, our $3,900 stimulus check won't cover even a month of expenses, so we're spending it on home repairs instead

Olivia Christensen

Mar 30, 2020, 22:46 IST

As a family of 5, our $3,900 stimulus check won't cover even a month of expenses, so we're spending it on home repairs instead

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The author is not pictured.

When my husband and I learned we'd be getting a $3,900 stimulus check for our family of five, we talked a lot about what to do with it.
It won't cover one month of expenses for our family, so we decided it's not worth saving. It won't do much to reduce our student loan debt either, so we're going to spend it to stimulate our local economy.
To do that, we're going to hire local contractors to do some repairs on our house that we haven't made the time for in the past six years of owning the house.
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When the coronavirus stimulus package officially passed last week, my husband and I immediately calculated how much money we would receive from the economic relief plan and discussed what to do with it.

During such unprecedented and uncertain times, spending any money feels risky, but not spending might be worse. Our discussions have reflected this dilemma; however, after hours of heated debate, dueling dreams, and differing outlooks on just how long COVID-19 will continue to control our lives, we've come to the same conclusion: The best thing we can do for our family is to think bigger than ourselves and put the money back into our community.

We are able to do this because we are both still employed, but like many families, our financial futures are perilously insecure in the face of a global pandemic. While we have some savings, if he lost his job, we would need to file unemployment like so many others are having to do right now.

We had different ideas about how to use the money

As a work-from-home freelance writer, my financial contribution to our family is mostly in dollars saved (on things like childcare) rather than dollars earned, and it's my husband's job as a recruiter for a bank that serves as our main source of income.

With unemployment skyrocketing, you can imagine how secure we're feeling in that career right about now - which explains my husband's immediate instinct to save every penny of our stimulus check.

I, on the other hand, had the typically millennial impulse to use the money to chip away at our mountain of student loan debt. After all, the money is as unexpected as it is helpful, why not use it to ease our burdens a little? But as my husband pointed out, in proportion to our student loan debt, it would be very little indeed.

With two adults who have yet to file 2019 taxes and earned just under $75,000 in 2018 and three children under the age of 16, our family will receive $1,200 for each adult and $500 per child. In total, we should receive a check of $3,900. As my husband and I talked it over, we realized that while this is a tidy sum, it won't make a meaningful dent in our debt. And, as I pointed out to my husband, it isn't much to save either.

Between our house payment, car payments, insurance, and groceries, our monthly expenditures total around $5,000. In times of severe financial strain, we may be able to trim that down to $4,000. From that perspective, saving $3,900 for an emergency feels less impactful than, say, preventing the emergency in the first place.

But how do we, a middle-class family from the middle of flyover country, keep the global economy from collapsing? We can't. All we can do is our part, and for us, that looks like spending our stimulus money and actually stimulating the economy.

The economy as a Jenga tower

I imagine the economy a bit like a Jenga tower - the novel coronavirus has yanked block after block away, and now the tower is teetering. There's a good chance the tower is about to fall.

Our family has been given a block that we can hold for safekeeping in the form of a stimulus check. As meager as it may be, the block may provide a semblance of cover when the tower falls. Or, we can strategically add our block to the crumbling base and hope that others will as well, and the tower will stabilize.

The challenge is to come up with a thoughtful way to add the block back into the tower so that it will do the most good.

How we're spending our stimulus money

My first reaction, having decided with my husband to spend the money, was to form a big-ticket wish list we could order off Amazon and have at our door within the week.

But we live in a small town, and many of our local businesses have already closed their doors because of COVID-19. Spending our money at Amazon, or any other behemoth corporation with streamlined delivery services and toilet paper aisles they can't stock fast enough, would be as effective as throwing our block in the general direction of the teetering Jenga tower.

So we began to discuss how to spend the money at local businesses. At first, we thought of small purchases - favorite restaurants and coffee shops we would be devastated to see close - but while spending $3,900 on takeout and restaurant gift cards sounded delightful, it also felt somewhat irresponsible. We want to invest in our community, but we would like a higher personal return on our investment beyond a summer's worth of DoorDash.

We began to think of a preexisting list assembled by a home inspector when we moved into our fixer-upper six years ago. There are several small items on the list: broken garage door openers, landscaping, defunct outdoor faucets. While we've spent years renovating this house, as anyone who has fixed up a home knows, there are some projects you just never get to.

My husband and I realized we had found our answer. Our house is, without question, our largest financial asset, and increasing its value through home improvements will simultaneously build our equity and, by shopping and outsourcing the work within our community, support our local economy as well.

Our plan is to hire local contractors as soon as we receive the money, for the sake of keeping people employed and paid right now. All social-distancing approved of course, but most of the jobs we need done are one-guy handy-man gigs.

The money isn't here yet, and while it's almost certainly on its way, if COVID-19 has shown us anything, it's that life holds few guarantees. But while we may not be able to rely on a solid economy or Easter dinner at grandma's house, some things always hold true. And one such truth is that investing in our world is always an investment in ourselves.

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