Right now, the pandemic relief checks are long gone and the extra unemployment bump is over, too. According to Bloomberg, there were an additional million unemployment claims last week, and The Atlantic worries that a second wave of unemployment may be coming. For most of us in the US, job security and savings are a real worry.

I mostly save money by not buying all the books I read. You know I love my local library. and I get most of my books there. Seriously, the closed library was one of the hardest parts of these months of covid quarantine. If you don’t count my ARCs, most of my books come from the library. Pigly’s Brown Bag calculator can be easily repurposed to show how much you’ve saved by getting library books, or to see how much you could save, if you need that motivation to wait for your library requests to come in, instead of buying the books right away.  (Also, Pigly’s original calculator has a space for the price of the lunch you’d brought from home, instead of pretending groceries in the fridge are magically free. Yes! Realism!)

Pigly, a free personal finance site, has other calculators and other money articles, too. There’s a student debt calculator, and Pigly has some articles with realistic student debt advice.  I also like NerdWallet’s guide to paying off student loans, both because they’re more about reasonable and applicable ways to pay down debt.  I haven’t yet found the calculator that explains how to pay off tens of thousands in student debt if you make $20K or $30K year, but let me know if you find one. This infuriating Forbes article, about that couple who got a free condo and years of free rent, is meant to be an inspiring story about paying off extremely high student debt.  For most of us, we’re not getting a free condo from relatives, and if we did, it wouldn’t become a rental income while we lived somewhere else, also free. Ugh. It’s nice to find reasonable suggestions about student debt, instead.

So, I definitely don’t want to sound like canceling Netflix or skipping a Starbucks is magic. But carefully watching spending can help us find where we can trim a little bit. Abby’s blog, IPickUpPennies, regularly records her spending diaries, and explains her budget in detail. (I started reading Abby’s blog for personal finance advice in 2008, you know, in the last once-in-a-lifetime recession.) Carefully tracking spending, especially with a finance calculator to help, can be good for all of our finances in covid times. And keeping a careful eye on any debt is a good plan any time.