As everyone knows, the economy has been taking a hit over the past year. Jobs are scarce and companies are hurting. The economic downturn has affected everyone, with the exception of maybe a few industries. Because of this, the CPA and I have had numerous discussions about what this means for us and our future family.
These discussions usually occur after a hard day at the office where I had to handle another termination or explain to someone why their pay was cut. As the HR Manager at my office, it’s been my unfortunate duty to try to help employees make sense of what’s happening. This is difficult to do when there is no easy answer and no ready solution. It doesn’t help to regularly see major corporations such as Panasonic (15,000 jobs), General Motors (10,000 jobs), and Nissan (20,000 jobs) conduct extensive lay-offs.
It’s enough to make most of us concerned, if not downright worried. So concerned, in fact, that the husband and I have talked about our worst case scenario. You know, what would happen if both of us (or one of us) lost our jobs. How long would our savings last? Would we lose our home, would we have to move somewhere else, etc.? These are scary thoughts, but unfortunately they could be realistic ones. So we’ve talked about what we would do without if we had to. I’m guessing our cable would go (very sad, but manageable), there would be no more dining out (not too much of a problem these days), and we’d stop all of our extra spending on unnecessary items. After that, who knows? We’d have to take a serious look at our Internet usage (oh, the horror) and eventually, we would probably have to move. A lot of things in our lives would be affected of course, and it could be really challenging.
While we definitely don’t like to think about it, maybe it’s best to plan now in the event something happens. In fact, I recently took a part-time job as a dog-walker so that I could earn some extra cash to pay off bills. It’s not much, a dog walk here and there doesn’t contribute a lot, but every bit does count and it feels like I’m at least doing something.
Because there’s not a lot that one can do but wait and hope the economy improves. I figure that at the very least, the current economic environment has caused us to take a hard look at our finances and has made us more aware of our spending habits. And if that’s the worst that happens, we’ll consider ourselves very lucky indeed. And if it isn’t, well, we’ll find a way to make it through just like everyone else does.
How has the economic downturn affected you? Have your spending habits changed?
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