From strikes to wildfire evacuations: How to manage a short-term income loss

Whether it's wildfire evacuations, a labour strike or an unexpected illness, experts say Canadians facing a short-term loss of income should navigate the disruption differently than a longer-term income loss such as a layoff.

“I’ve seen people give up a lot of short-term spending, knowing it’s going to be for a really brief time,” said Mark Kalinowski, a financial educator and credit counsellor at Credit Counselling Society.

“If you know it’s short and you have a target of when you’re going to go back to work and things are going to return to normal, when you do your budget, you can say ‘you know what, I don’t need to have Netflix this month, I don’t need to go to the coffee shop to buy coffee … for now, I can put these things off.’”

It's a different strategy than a longer-term income change, when you still need to “have some happiness in your life,” he said, because you don’t know how long it could take to find your next job. In an emergency, every penny counts.