Or as Mr. Micawber, for whom “something will turn up” but never seems to, succinctly tells a young David Copperfield in the Charles Dickens classic:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Enough said, really.

So, here are real examples of people who have problems making ends, or both ends, meet:

1. As the effects of the recession linger on, one place it continues to have a tight grip is on workers’ wallets. Nearly eight-in-ten (77 percent) workers report that they live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. Sixty-one percent of workers said that they felt they lived paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet in 2009. Workers went on to say that sometimes they are unable to make ends meet at all, with one-in-five (22 percent) saying they have missed payments on bills in the last year. This is according to a new nationwide survey of more than 4,400 workers by CareerBuilder that was conducted from May 18 to June 3, 2010.

Workers report they have made a variety of changes to their living and spending habits to help get by. When asked what tactics they have used since the start of the recession to make ends meet, workers said the following:

Cut back on leisure activities - 54 percent

Used coupons or shopped at discount stores - 48 percent

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