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Calm During the Storm

September 30th, 2008 at 05:49 pm

Somehow I cannot seem to find it in me to get all worked up about the current financial mess this country is in. I guess it is because I feel like we have been in our own personal financial mess for the past 2 years (DH underemployed and no real job stability) and yet we are still hanging in there, paying our bills and not incurring any more real debt. We are still 20+ years from retirement so I don't worry like crazy if our retirement accounts go up, go down etc. I figure things will have gone thru at least a couple more cycles between now and then. I get that this is more than just a down cycle, but I cannot control it and on some level I refuse to worry about things I cannot control. I can only control my own little financial world by maximizing how we use every dollar we do earn and minimizing debt. Even that is not always under control as expenses like my DD's fender bender pop-up. That's why I think it is so important to spend less than you earn, and do it consistently. I have not gotten a statement from our 401K showing the current down market. I make it a point not to log on and check on a daily or even weekly basis. Again, my attitude is why worry about what I cannot change. We are invested in a fund that I believe in so I also believe it will go back up when the market goes back up eventually. I guess my only great regret right now is that I don't have any real excess cash to buy at a bargain price. So, I may be stressed about other things but I am not stressing about what is going on in the financial markets. Call me crazy, but at least I am sleeping well at night.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Calm During the Storm”

  1. mom-sense Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 06:08 pm 1222798124
    1222798124


    Me too. For whatever reason, I am remaining calm (maybe head in the sand) and am staying focused on conquering the debt we have. All in all, our retirement is down about 15K, but it will rebound before we need it.

  2. ceejay74 Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 06:23 pm 1222798991
    1222798991

    I feel the same. I can't tell if this is the end of the world as we know it or just a regular (though extreme) ebb of our country's financial situation, but I feel either it's so huge that we'll all be out on the street no matter what we do, or it's just going to be bad for those who don't know how to economize. If it's the first case, there's nothing I can do to prepare, so I'll just deal with it when it happens. If it's the second case, I know I can get my budget down to less than half of what it is right now, so even if two of us were unemployed, we could still survive. That makes me feel as secure as I can be considering all the doom-and-gloom news stories.

  3. dmontngrey Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 06:33 pm 1222799594
    1222799594

    I feel calm at the moment too. No impending doom for me. I have a fixed rate mortgage and I actually argued with the guy when they tried to approve us for MORE. It's tough with what we wanted, and they wanted to give us more? We are FAR from being in great shape, but we're hanging in there. Knocking down debt and able to pay all our bills plus save some. A job loss would temporarily hurt things, but we both could pick something, anything, up if need be. We'll just be here plugging along normally while all this occurs in the world.

  4. creditcardfree Says:
    September 30th, 2008 at 09:47 pm 1222811245
    1222811245

    Also calm here. We have over 30 years until official retirement.

  5. Broken Arrow Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 12:12 am 1222819972
    1222819972

    I'm not too worked up about it, except that when some people are, I guess I feel the need to calm them or something. Just to let them know that it's actually going to be fine.

    It is interesting to see the beginnings of the super-banks that's going to rise from the ashes though.

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