Make ends meet

To “make ends meet” means to be able to pay your bills, to cover your expenses.

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Make ends meet

Today’s expression is to “make ends meet.” This is a very common expression and it has a very specific meaning. It means to be able to pay your bills, to cover your expenses. It’s most often used to describe a personal or family budget. It can be used to describe a small business, but that is less common.

In the movie Nomadland, many of the characters turned to life on the road after they had trouble making ends meet living a traditional lifestyle. They didn’t have much savings and they couldn’t pay their expenses with government benefits. They couldn’t make ends meet: the end of the month would come and they would have more expenses than income. There’s a gap between money coming in and money going out. They could not make ends meet.

We sometimes describe what people do to make ends meet. If you’re having trouble making ends meet, you can do one of two things: you can either make more money or spend less money. In the case of the nomads, do you remember what they did to make ends meet? They left their homes, sold a lot of belongings, and started living in their vans or trailers.

Having trouble making ends meet is not only for people who make lower incomes. Believe me when I say that many middle-class and upper middle-class people also have trouble making ends meet; you just don’t always see it. A person can live a comfortable life with a nice house and a nice car and a high income and high expenses. If that person’s expenses start getting out of control, even if he has a high income, he might have trouble making ends meet.

Alternatively, if he loses his job, that person living a nice comfortable life in a beautiful house might have trouble making ends meet until he either cuts expenses or starts working again.

If a family can cover their expenses every month, but if it’s hard to do that, if sacrifices are necessary, then it’s common to say, “It’s not easy to make ends meet.”

Here’s an example. It’s not easy to make ends meet as a family in New York City. That’s definitely true. Unless both parents have high-paying jobs, it’s difficult to make ends meet. Rent in New York is extremely high. Everything is more expensive. You can make a lot of money in New York if you work in finance or the arts or media. But salaries in traditional middle-class professions, like teachers, police officers, nurses, and similar jobs are not very high compared to the cost of living. If you’re in a family with one teacher and one nurse and two kids, it can be very hard to make ends meet in a place like New York or San Francisco. That doesn’t mean you’re poor, it just means it’s difficult to cover a family’s expenses on two middle class salaries in a place like New York.

I lived in New York for three years in my early thirties. I had a good job and I wouldn’t say I had trouble making ends meet when I lived there. However, if I had kids, on my salary, I certainly would have had trouble making ends meet. That’s why so many people leave big cities when they start to have kids. It’s easier to make ends meet in the suburbs.

JR’s song of the week

Today’s song of the week is “The Boxer” performed by Jerry Douglas. This is a famous song, a great song, originally by Simon and Garfunkel. It’s about loneliness and trying to make ends meet in New York; the narrator of the song left home at a young age and sought work in New York, but struggled with loneliness and poverty. My favorite line from the song is, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

The original version is very good, from the album called “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel. But I recently heard a newer version by the artist Jerry Douglas, which I really liked. So that’s the song of the week; in case you can’t tell, I nominated it this week.

See you next time!

And that’s all today. Congratulations on making it to the end of another Plain English lesson. In case you couldn’t tell from the last two lessons, I really, really liked Nomadland, so I strongly recommend it. I know Hulu is only in the States, so I’m not sure how to get it elsewhere. But if you can find it, I highly recommend it. See you next week!

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Story: Nomadland actors playing themselves