OOTD’s beat the economic crunch challenge
The idea behind this page is that success stories are not only inspirational but also contagious. The current economic crunch has given many of us an urgent incentive to embrace the good old concept of budgeting, which is why we think that among the growing community of OOTD Budgeting users there must be many inspirational success stories of how smart budgeting is helping individuals, couples and families weather the current economic storm.
This blog page is a place to showcase your budgeting success story, to tell others how you are succeeding in managing hard economic times and maybe even turning these to new opportunities, because we believe that success stories and positive, happy spirits are inspirational and contagious. To share your budgeting success story and also help others take example and learn from your experience, you can leave a comment below with your story.
The OOTD Budgeting team
March 29, 2009 at 9:46 pm |
We are both early 30s employed career professionals both well paid, no kids, two expensive cars, a boat, one motorcycle and an expensive appartment which we own and carry a large mortgage on. One of us has recently became unemployed as a result of the economic crunch and we have plunged into a situation where our combined income was no longer sufficient to support paying, the mortgage, cars, boat and motorcycle loans. With no certainty as to how long we might have to live on one income, we have taken immediat drastic steps to mitigate our new situation by selling the boat, motorcycle and both cars, paying all related loans and buying a significantly less expensive single car for both of us.
We than took a hard look at our new situation with one income and embarked on a strict budget. A friend told us about the OOTD free budgeting website and we opened an account here and created a budget that stretched our single income very tightly to support paying the mortgage, maintaining the cheaper car and managing with the rest for our bare necessities. Our budget helped us being as frugal as we need to be now to get by until things get better without losing our appartment, and it became very clear that without a good budget we could not succeed.
It’s hard to follow a drop in our standard of living, but if you remind yourself that money is something that comes to us today, can go away tomorrow and come again another day, it’s easy to part from stuff in life and concentrate on the real issue of survival. If we hadn’t taken the drastic steps as we did we know that we would have lost the appartment too. Now we no longer dine out but we feel strong because we know that we live within our means and as such will be ready to build again from this position when we can without having lost our home.
It’s true what they say about budgeting, it’s crucial to help keep us away from the debt prison and help us live within our means. And we also realize that even when prosperity come upon us again, we will remain frugal at heart.