Everybody Loves Your Money

Those Brits are really embracing frugality.  Rather than go out and spend money they don’t have on useless junk, they are opting to stick to indoor activities that are free:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7755315.stm

You know I’ve been running through the various scenarios in my head for awhile now.  “What if I lose my job?  What if my wife loses her job?  What if we both lose our jobs?”  By doing this, it has given me some sense of security in knowing that I should be prepared for just about anything.  I still think we are in for a prolonged period of ugliness in the economy, but I think that no matter what happens, we’ll be just fine.

It’s times like these that you are forced in to an evaluation of what’s really important.  I know that in our family, the most important things are health, happiness and the basics like food, shelter etc.  From an economic standpoint, that’s a pretty cheap existence.  While I like fancy electronics, nice cars and the rest of the consumer goods that are out there, they are by no means a necessity in life.  Hell, most of the world gets by just fine without all that stuff.

So, we move on.  We are continuing to add to our savings and have drastically reduced our excess spending, (although we are still spending way too much on food).  My company is just starting to announce layoffs and we expect at least a 10% reduction in labor. I think I’m pretty safe for now.  My wife also appears to be pretty safe for the moment.  Now we just need to continue to practice good fiscal discipline and wait to see how things shake out.

While we had the initial fear of “Oh my gosh, what would we do?”, that has pretty much subsided.  Now we just need to work on being prepared for whatever situation we find ourselves in and live each day to the fullest.

Have you changed your practices much since the economy took it’s “dip”?