There are few more gratifying moments than viewing your bank account online and seeing that you’ve just been paid. For most people, payday comes on or around the 1^st and 15^th day of the month. For others it’s on a bi-monthly basis and may arrive every other Friday.  Regardless of when it comes, it is usually a highly anticipated moment.

No matter how you look at it, knowing when you get paid affects how you spend money, especially how you decide to borrow and save.

Of the bills we all pay, rent is most likely the single biggest budget item. For years, experts have recommended setting aside 25% of your monthly paycheck for rent. That means if your monthly gross income – before taxes – is $4,000, you shouldn’t be spending more than $1,000 on your rental needs.

Unfortunately, that percentage is on the rise as rentals costs across the country continue to climb. A new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts, drawing from rental figures in 2016, shows that of 43 million renters, 38% of them were “rent burdened,” which means they had to spend at least 30% of their income on a place to live. And of all the renters, 17% indicated they were “severely rent burdened,” which means they had to spend at least 50% of their income on rent. This number has shown to be even higher for minorities such as Latinos and African-Americans.

That means if you receive two paychecks a month, one entire check could be going entirely to rent alone.

Of course, how much you pay depends on where you live. CNBC, along with the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) recently ranked the 10 most expensive states to live in. It is rather interesting that with the exception of California, none are major energy producing states. Perhaps there’s a connection? We certainly think so.

Thanks to America’s abundant energy production in recent years, for most people, utility costs are relatively low, making it easier to manage the burden of sky-high rent. I guess you could say it pays to live near the energy you consume, and if you don’t, hopefully you are encouraging your elected officials to make good decisions about how you get your energy.

For the most part, when I open my bills in the mail, I know what to expect. Yeah, I know some people like the electronic copy of their bills, but sometimes I miss them, they get caught in my junk mail, or I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at on screen. With that said, I still like to receive the paper statement and at least scan it to make sure everything seems normal. If something looks out of place, I usually make a call to the company. A five-minute call to receive a $25 correction on one of my bills is well worth my time, and sometimes I save a lot more.

Recently though, my jaw dropped when I saw that my mortgage statement jumped nearly $500 per month. Unfortunately, a phone call to my bank didn’t change the new amount due.

While it’s true that 90 percent of Americans have a fixed or locked rate, myself included, that doesn’t mean your mortgage can’t jump.

Here’s what I learned:

The reason our mortgage increased had less to do with our bank and rate, and more to do with tax assessments and what our home is worth.

As PocketSense.com explains, “tax assessments affect mortgage payments because most homeowners pay their property taxes ‘out of escrow.’ Each month, their mortgage payment includes an amount of money specifically designated for paying property taxes. Their mortgage company collects this money and holds it in a separate account – called an escrow account –until it’s time to pay property taxes. When the taxes are due, the mortgage company pays them on behalf of the homeowner, using the money in the escrow account.”

That amount collected for escrow ties in with your home’s value and it can change for a couple of different reasons: perhaps there was a miscalculation when you first secured your mortgage, or quite possibly the value of your home has gone up. The frequency in which property values are assessed for tax purposes can vary depending on your state or county. For some it’s every year, for others, it’s every five to seven years – and in some cases, it’s when a home is sold or refinanced.

A change in your home’s tax assessment is both good news and bad news. If the assessment rises, it means that your property value has gone up — but it also means your property taxes are likely to go up, too.

The bottom line is the amount you’re required to pay can jump even with a fixed mortgage, and given that housing is generally the largest item in a family’s budget, a cost that was once expensive can turn outrageous.  At least that’s how I felt when I saw mine jump $500 dollars.

If I divide that out, I’m now approaching $94 per day for our home mortgage if I divide the cost out over an estimated 30-day monthly period. This is all to say that hard times happen and unexpected costs can spring up.

That’s why it’s important to keep costs low in other areas of our lives. Thankfully, our families combined electric, and natural gas bill averages out to around $200 a month, or roughly $7 per day. Stable energy prices give Americans like me the confidence in knowing that my energy bills are less likely to skyrocket than my mortgage payment. Especially since energy costs, if stable, are a fraction of my family’s budget compared to what it costs us to own our home.

While many of us feel the financial strain of how to juggle all of our bills every day, it’s a real benefit that we don’t have to add energy to it.

The fantasy of being self-employed can be alluring. Setting your hours and creating opportunities for a larger paycheck, which is ultimately derived from your hard work, can be a great fit for many people.

FreshBooks, a company that specializes in basic accounting software for the self-employed, has noticed a growing trend across the nation. According to FreshBooks’ annual Self-Employment Report, millions of workers in the U.S. are happily leaving corporations and becoming self-employed. Their report finds that 27 million Americans could be leaving traditional work in favor of self-employment by 2020. This shift would triple the current population of full-time self-employed professionals, bringing the total number of workers to 42 million.

Moreover, the report added that this revolution in how Americans work would only grow in the future.

Yet taking the risk of leaving a steady paying job to start a business can be intimidating, especially when considering the personal expenses that it takes to keep a decent amount of cash flow while still being able to pay the bills, and yourself, on a monthly basis to cover things like a mortgage, vehicle payment, or student loan.

One of the biggest challenges in starting and managing a new business is cash flow – the sequence and timing of when payment arrives and when it goes out the door to pay for business expenses. This includes, of course, paying your salary. A U.S. Bank study found that as many as 82 percent of startups and small businesses fail due to poor cash-flow management. So, whether you’re self-employed, or still working a traditional job, income must arrive before bills are due in order to stay afloat.

One of the many pitfalls small business owners fall into, especially in the early days of owning a business, is the misuse of write-offs and deductions. In other words, getting into the mentality of: “It’s OK, the business can pay for that.” Yet this can add up to be a bigger cash drain than most people realize. As a solution, some self-employed small business owners have turned to loans or lines of credit – if they can qualify, but adding yet another loan to an existing stack of loans and bills can make a stressful situation downright nerve-racking.

So the issue of cash flow really can make taking a client out to lunch or grabbing a bite to eat with friends or family a tough financial decision. It can even be a major financial burden if you’re nearing the end of the pay period, are short on cash, or have a loan payment due in a couple of days. So when you find yourself with a low balance in your bank account between pay periods, this is when you have to start choosing between developing and maintaining your business and personal relationships or saving money by staying home.

Moreover, if you have to stay home, hopefully, your electricity bill isn’t on the list on the list of things stressing you out. According to ElectirChoice.com, except Hawaii, where just about everything is more expensive, most energy consumers only spend 1-2% of their income on electricity, but there are times when people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck or on a fixed-income have to a bigger percentage of their income to afford their energy bills. While some people can afford a $30-$40 increase in their electric bill, many people can’t. You can check out their formula and rankings in how they determine average state income, energy use and the percentage consumers pay at https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/percentage-income-electricity/.

So while you might be stressed about the bills and loans you have to pay off. Hopefully energy isn’t one of them. That means having a thoughtful conversation about not only what you use and how you use it but making sure local leaders are making good choices about how we as consumers get access to energy.