What’s Your Cushion?

The numbers that make us feel safe.

Years ago, a friend of mine and I got into a conversation about cushions. The circumstances are murky now; maybe we were having a beer, but more likely, we were on vacation and we were much younger and more financially insecure than we both are now.

“I like to keep about $1,000 in my checking account at all times,” she said, a number that at the time felt so astronomically huge and incomprehensible to me that I probably blushed. Time has erased the rest of the conversation; most likely I said that I had about $75 in the bank and any cushion for me was whatever it took for my bank not to charge me an overdraft fee.

The idea of a $1,000 cushion has fascinated me ever since. What would it feel like to be liquid enough to have that much money as the minimum? I envision stuffing a duvet cover with $1,000 in singles, neatly buttoning up the ends and wearing it around my house like a cape. “This is my cushion,” I would say to the cat sleeping on my tote bag in a patch of sun on my bed. “This is the minimum amount of money I need to feel okay.”

For a very long time, $1,000 seemed like a lot of money. Please don’t get me wrong — it still is a lot of money. But after a year spent squirreling away checks like a tiny rodent hoarding food for the coming apocalypse, it feels much less gobsmacking now than it did in my past.

My cushion right now is higher than it’s ever been, but it’s still not that much in the grand scheme of things: $300. If I have at least $300 in my checking account at all times, the panic about money quiets from an scream to a dull roar. The cushion will grow in time, but for where I’m at this feels just fine.

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