Okay, I know. That’s a little harsh. I’m trying very hard not to be bitter about having to spend upwards of $1 trillion dollars to
rescue our economy. As hard as I try not to be a little bitter about it, I’m not having a lot of luck. Maybe it’s because I’m not confident that this "rescue" will really save anything. Regardless of whether they do this or not, in my mind, the prices of homes still need to come down and they are. That means that the majority of us will still see massive reductions in our net worth as our real estate assets lose their value. Maybe it’s because I’m so disgusted at the lack of self control exhibited by the greedy people on Wall Street. It kind of reminds me of the simple thieves that steal a little and don’t get caught. Since that was so easy, they steal some more, and then more and then even more, until they’ve stolen so much that people can’t help but notice. Well, we’ve noticed and now we are having to sacrifice our children’s future to bail everyone out.
Yeah, I get the urgency and that this can, and most definitely will, spill over in to my life and those around me. Even with all of that, I’m still inclined to want to oppose the bailout. Oh well. I’m approaching that point where I’ve just resigned myself to accept the inevitable. Maybe there is no other way. When people like Warren Buffet, whom I truly admire and TRUST (now that’s a concept. Live your life in an honest way like Warren has and people will actually trust you) are calling for government intervention, maybe there really is no other way. As you can tell, I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. On one hand I really oppose this bailout while on the other hand I’m not sure I’m smart enough to know that’s the right decision. Arrgghhh.
Okay, enough rambling. There’s no question we are in for a rough ride. What am I going to do about it? I’m addressing this crisis in a couple of ways.
Number 1: Stay employed
The absolute most important thing that pretty much any of us should focus on is staying employed. Once you lose your job, the downhill slide can happen pretty fast. I am doing my best to be a valuable asset to my employer by working hard and doing all I can to be that critical gear in the machine. The more my company believes they can’t live without me, the better chance I have of staying employed
Number 2: Save money
While we’ve always lived below our means, I’m kicking it up a notch. I have gone back through all of our expenses to see what I can lower. It turns out this was the perfect time to lower my cable and Internet costs again so I did that. We are also limiting the driving that we are doing when we have the choice and are using our "5% back" gas card and only buying gas at Costco. We are also avoiding eating out as much as we can and my wife is taking her lunch to work every day instead of eating out. As the temperature outside goes down we are also adjusting by wearing sweatshirts and sweat pants etc around the house in order to keep the furnace from running too much. Nothing here is rocket science. We are just focusing on the expenses in our lives that we can control. The reality is that we aren’t going to fix the crisis on Wall street so we might as well focus our energy on things we can control.
Number 3: Make Extra Money
While we have been focusing on keeping our expenses low, I am also trying to increase revenues coming in. I have a couple sources of alternate income and I’m actively working to keep that coming in as well as explore new opportunities for extra revenues. So far I’ve been relatively successful. I’ll be working harder in the days and weeks to come to raise the bar.
Overall, we are in pretty good financial shape. We’ve worked to maintain an emergency fund, although it never feels like there’s enough in that fund. We have kept our debt low by not carrying any credit card debt and not having car loans, we’ve taken advantage of a cash back credit card to maximize our discount on every day purchases, we’ve done the due diligence to find the lowest price on items that we need to purchase (notice I said "need"), and we’ve managed our desires by not buying things that we really don’t need. Believe me, that has been the toughest thing to do out of all of this. There is not a day that goes by that we don’t come across things we’d "like" to have. We break down and purchase something we want once in awhile but we do our best to make that the exception, rather than the rule.
I should point out we aren’t in a panic at our house. We really aren’t even fretting a little bit, mostly because of everything I mentioned above. We are doing the things above because we like to feel that we have control of our finances and destiny during a time of uncertainty. As I read this post I can see how people might think we are cowering in the corner of a room with our hands over our faces whimpering uncontrollably. That’s not what we are doing. We are just taking this opportunity to make sure that we are prepared for anything that society throws at us. It’s really more of a healthy level of paranoia.
