Your plan for economic disruption.

[Griff]

Lookout and Ali had a good question. What is everyone doing? We are not changing much financially beyond increasing our cash reserve. We're pretty frugal normally so we don't plan to tighten belts unless there is a layoff. If that happens we'll get very serious about country living skills.

[Aliantha]

When we heard about the 80 redundancies at Dazza's work we had to face the possibility that his company is running out of money. It seems unlikely being a multi-national engineering/consulting company, but a few dodgey things have happened lately that've made us start looking at other options.

The lucky thing for us is that Dazza is able to branch into almost any area of consulting to do with environmental science/economics or aquaculture, so it's realistic to consider that he'll always have a decent income. He is lining up a lot of extra curricular consulting work so that if the worst does happen, there wont be much of a gap between finishing up where he is and moving forward with other projects.

Our biggest problem are my spending habits. With that in mind, I'll be the one who really needs to change my ways as the person who generally manages our budget. I'll have to stop 'going shopping' and impulse buying and start writing out lists and sticking to them. I've already got plans to build a decent sized vege garden so I'll just up the ante a bit on that. We wont really be able to afford to buy organic veges (or any veges for that matter. They're ridiculously expensive here atm) so that will help. I'll also do more home baking and less shop buying. No more buying clothes from Myer and DJ's and more thriftshopping.

I can always go out and get a part time job. I do have a lot of skills in sales (believe it or not) and am willing to work on commission, so I doubt I'd have much trouble getting work, even if I have to sell insurance.

I feel very confident that Dazza will be able to take care of our income though. All I have to do is manage our outgoings with a much stricter hand.

ETA: and if worse comes to worst, I could always murder him. He's worth a fair bit to me dead.

[Clodfobble]

You know, I keep reading about people going all Survivor Man and disaster-preparedness and all that... but I really have a hard time imagining how such a scenario could come about. I mean, individually, the worst that can happen is a layoff followed by eviction, and you end up homeless. Granted, being homeless certainly sucks, but you still have restaurants, the YMCA, the public library--i.e., places you can go to get heat and running water for a few hours, places you can buy a snack with a couple bucks. It's far from post-apocalyptic. Even if shocking numbers of people are homeless, if the streets become dangerous as more are willing to attack strangers and break into homes for food and supplies, where is the step that leads to the general loss of running water or electricity? At what point is food unavailable, as opposed to just unaffordable for individuals with no money? About the only way I can see it happening is if the flow of oil just stops dead, and we simply can't transport the food from the farms to the houses anymore... but is that really what people are thinking is going to happen?

[Aliantha]

I don't think like that, but my Dad does. He's obsessed with doomsday prophesies. He's pretty self sufficient anyway where he is, so if worse really did come to the worst we'd probably just pool our resources with him and move to the farm.

Anyone for a mango?

[TheMercenary]

I wish I had the ability to do some of the stuff you dad has done but I don't own enough property to do it at this time. I will someday. I am not caught up in the doomsday stuff so much as I just want to live off the grid as much as possible, or at least have the ability to do it if I need to.

Back to the original topic. We are concentrating on becoming debt free as much as possible. Paying off everything we can. We are definately spending less, much less this year. We are going to start to pay more into our mortgage this year each month and hopefully have the house paid off in 5 years. We refinanced to a 15 year mortgage and only have 9 years left on it. It is unlikely that we will go on a big family vacation next year, we usually rent a house on the beach in Fla. We are directing more money into savings and investments, buying while the market is down. Job wise, I am in one of the most secure fields there is at the moment but that can all change with a revamping of the health care industry under Obama. So who really knows what the future holds. We are going to keep more money at home that is for sure.

[sweetwater]

There is a whiff of Y2K fear in the air and we can't help but pick up on it, although we do not harbor fears for his job. But we are paying off the car loan faster (already way ahead but we want to cut out every bill possible) and set up an automatic savings allotment beyond the 401K and other investments. I won't cut back on quality food and care for the pets, nor occasional lunches out for us, but dinner is more often here. I strongly believe and live by the saying, If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a hyacinth for the soul. My hyacinth next year is a first trip to Paris, France (hope!), so I have a goal that makes it easier to make changes. I did Christmas shopping using, for the most part, points from the credit cards. And my preference is to live minimally so there are not that many corners to cut, or lower settings for the thermostat, or new clothes to not buy. And I found a generic alternative to the brand name (with no generic) medicine - from $50/month to $3. Yeah!

[Griff]

We're going to be debt free soon if all goes to plan. So much of this recession business a total head game that I'm reluctant to reduce our spending for fear of being part of the problem. I wonder if a lot of businesses jumped the gun on layoffs in November, being more in love with the appearance of seriousness than keeping their workforce happy.

[footfootfoot]

In light of the current correction, layoff, long emergency, global catastrophe, economic meltdown. who is formulating a game plan and what is it? Does it involve stockpiling, alternative living strategies, business as usual?

http://www.cellar.org/showpost.php?p...postcount=2971

[Cloud]

muck it out as I go along, as usual.

Here's a useful blog post from Get Rich Slowly. Common sense, really, but this person says:

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/20...oure-laid-off/

[Cloud]

oops, now we have 2 threads

[footfootfoot]

Maybe a mod can delete mine since it has fewer replies. Or merge them

[Radar]

My wife and I will be 100% debt free as of next month. From this point we'll be putting all the money we were spending on car payments, credit card payments, student loan payments, etc. and put it into the bank to save up 6 months worth of our bills and a down payment for a house. We'll also be trying to buy up some stocks and mutual funds while they are on sale.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

Maybe a mod can delete mine since it has fewer replies. Or merge them

Merged.

[smoothmoniker]

I'm feeling a little odd about this recession. We've been immune to the effects so far, and we're positioned to stay immune for a while.

We looked at buying a home a several years back, and weren't willing to do the insane mortgages that buying in LA required. As a result, we have no crazy mortgage, and we're not locked into a property that's losing value by the day.

About a year and a half ago, we started looking at buying again, in earnest. As a result, we moved a huge chunk of our down payment money out of the stock market and into regular old savings, expecting to need quick access to it, and unwilling to risk losing it in case of a crash.

Because we were actively in the housing market, we felt the first rumblings of the tightening credit crunch, and extrapolated out that if mortgages started seizing up, the housing market market and other credit-dependent industries would start getting bad. We moved our remaining investments into bear-market stocks and funds.

I'm not saying all that to sound smug. I'm saying it because it's shifted my mindset about the recession. If things get kind of bad, or every pretty bad, we'll be OK for a while. We could live off of savings for about 12 months at our current level of expenses, and up to 2 years if we went into bunker mode. A lot of that is hold-over from the mindset of my early professional career, when jobs were few and far between, and we saved every penny to cover the months where I wasn't making much.

Because my family is isolated from the "pretty bad" scenario, I've be obsessing over the "worst case" scenario. I've been consumed by thoughts of what it would take for the economy to collapse to the point where I'm begging on a street corner, or my kids go to bed crying from hunger.

It's made me realize that there's little I wouldn't do to prevent that from happening. Having a family changes your perspective. There was I time when I would have scoffed at "selling out" and doing something other than music for a living.

Now, if I suddenly woke up and there were no more work for me in the music industry, if my university started axing faculty and I were kicked out, I would do anything to put food on the table and to keep a roof over the heads of my wife and kids. Anything. Stand on a corner dancing and holding a sign advertising sub sandwiches? Sure. Work the night-shift on a janitorial crew? OK. Day laborer? If I could get my Spanish back up to par. Begging? Yes.

My dignity comes from seeing my kids warm and fed. Anything that I have to do to accomplish that borrows its dignity from their well-being.

[Cloud]

"As God is my witness, they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."