OOTD’s Economic Crunch Survival Kit

Step 1.
All the experts say start living within your means, so make sure that your OOTD grey column budget is complete and up to date and review it periodically for currency.  It should be your financial guide for living within your means.

Step 2.
With your good budget in place, start getting used to recording your monthly expenses as you go along instead of waiting to find out that you over-spent, make sure you stick to your budget and live by it by visiting your green column every day or two and updating all your monthly cash transactions as they occur, it will quickly remind you what you can and cannot afford like how much you spent on restaurants already.

Step 3.
Don’t spend a penny if it’s not in your budget.  Need or want to spend on anything that is not in your budget?  Go back to your grey column budget and see if you can afford this new expenditure.  Your guide is simple, you do not want to spend more than you have in each month, and if things get tight, you can always start cutting back on some stuff in the budget in order to make room for other stuff, like less on restaurants and more on fitness.

Step 4.
Be smarter this Christmas.  With the help of your budget and looking at your saved reserves, figure out how much you can afford to spend on Christmas this year.  Open an OOTD Money Bucket Account for this amount called Christmas Spending, and then record each Christmas spending transaction in this account.  It will help you manage your Christmas budget efficiently without spending more than you should.

Step 5.
Take note of the other thing the experts say these days, your job is more valuable then ever during these economic times, make sure that you do everything that you possibly can to re-affirm and augment your dedication and value to your employer.  It can mean the difference between keeping your job and loosing it.

Step 6.
This is probably the harder step for most of us.  It is always sweet and easy to move to a higher spending level but sore and bitter to cut back.  The stories we hear about families embarking on major cut backs like selling off cars and staying with one car only, selling off vacation properties, boats, bikes and other luxuries, are not only real for others but may become our reality too because this economic crunch is a very real burst of an inflated bubble that we all lived in not realizing the extent of how far beyond our means we have been living.

Because of this we are not as realistically tuned to the meaning of survival as people in other countries are.  We need to make this mental adjustment to help us see all the luxuries that we have accumulated over the years and that we do not need now in order to survive.  Cutting back and becoming frugal is first a mental process, and a process that requires real actions of survival.

Take a hard look at what you have and how you live now, place it against your current income, resources and ability to sustain it all, in other words re-evaluate what you can afford at this time and then dispose what you cannot afford and re-draw your financial living by re-drawing your budget or drawing it for the first time to ensure that you are living within your means.  With the help of a good budget, living within our means is easier than may be expected, especially when using the OOTD’s green column in your budget which is solely dedicated to making sure that every penny of your cash is accounted for and is going to where the budget says it should go.

It’s easy to be smart.  We just can’t afford to be lazy about it.

We wish you a safe and happy financial year.

The OOTD team
http://www.myexp.org/OOTD_gate.php