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If you’re stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, you may be dealing with the inconvenience of being cooped up for potentially weeks on end. Staying inside and practicing social distancing is the responsible thing to do. While some employees have been able to transition into working remotely while maintaining their current positions, others haven’t been so lucky. The pandemic has triggered an unprecedented number of layoffs as many brick and mortar businesses shutter due to lack of customers. Workers in retail, hospitality and foodservice have been especially hard-hit.

Several readers sent me a link to this article from CNN Business entitled New threat to the economy: Americans are saving like it’s the 1980s.

Before I start digging into the core of what this article is saying, I want to make something very clear. People choosing to save money is not threatening. People choosing not to spend and instead build up their own economic future is not “hoarding,” as the first line of the article suggests. Those are intentionally negative words which try to create the ridiculous assumption that a person choosing to save rather than spend is somehow a bad personal choice. That’s nonsensical and actually runs counter to sensible personal finance principles, and I’ll touch on this again later.

A few days ago, a reader referred me to this Tweet by Maxine Ali that really left me thinking. In short, her point was that things like exercising in a home gym, having fresh produce delivered to your door, and having a private space to unwind when distressed are all examples of things that are promoted as part of a healthy lifestyle but are actually things that only wealthy people can really afford. It creates this false idea that “healthy living” is something exclusively for people with wealth or with lots of disposable income. She goes on in subsequent Tweets to make the point that many “wellness gurus” offer “wellness tips” that are actually more about showing off how much wealth and disposable income they have, because their “wellness tips” rely on having a lot of money.

As we enter the sixth month of 2020, the historic COVID-19 pandemic is no longer dominating front pages in American newspapers. Instead, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has inspired massive protests against police brutality in dozens of cities across the country, but also around the world. Tragically, police in many cities have used violent tactics to suppress, arrest and intimidate protesters, leaving many protesters in need of medical care and legal assistance, and reminding us of why reform is so crucial.