Intermittent employment and fluctuating earnings are amongst the most pronounced and common experiences among a group of young adults (25-35) in Khayelitsha Cape Town, SA. When they are unemployed its effect is dependency on family and on household income; for food, shelter and spending money. But, when they are employed they “spend like there is no tomorrow”. The repetitive changes in employment status and therefore earnings impacts their financial lives and their families and yield a common paradoxical sentiment that “money is not enough” yet “work is sometimes not worth the effort”. The study examines participants' experiences of volatile and often declining earnings through a critical engagement with the economic and labour market literature and argues that the ‘volatile earnings’ themselves yield alternating perceptions of economic well-being and uncertainty and despondency. The sentiments are of ‘unhappiness’ expressed as temporal and status anxieties relating to money, which are derived, at least in part, from frustration at all that interrupts, retards, reverses or delays personal economic progress. The anxieties are reflected in feeling of being ‘left behind’ or being ‘held back’ and are also expressed as anxiety at the loss of status or of an absence of the material objects that signify it and are voiced in the refrain - “there is not enough money”. But, paradoxically, money that can be earned is “sometimes not worth the effort” as demonstrated through the voluntary ‘quitting’ of employment and in rapid changes between employment placements (churn) for small increments of additional earnings. This phenomenon can be interpreted not only as a (rational) act of seeking material improvement through an increase in wages and well-being but also as an expression of aspiration towards upward mobility and status.