CK Blog

I recently saw a post by The Frugal Guy that presented the Financial Risk Advisory System, a parody of the government’s terror alert system. While it is meant in part as a tongue-in-cheek system, it does help you consider where you are at in your personal finances and what steps you might consider to improve your situation.

In the not so distant past, I could consider myself in the Blue zone, making ends meet and doing okay but had room for improvement. Lately I have been slipping down the scale into the solid yellow and dipping my toes into the orange zone. It was a two part cause, first I was not as disciplined as I should have been and I had a change in living arrangements that increased my expenses. I do not believe I was ever overly excessive in my spending on discretionary items, but could have tightened the strings a bit more. A larger part of my problem was boundary and enabling issues, otherwise known as a big problem saying no to certain people who “borrowed” money, which diverted money that could have paid down debt or gone towards a bigger emergency fund.

I have been pretty lucky to get a good deal of overtime in my current job which has kept me mostly in the yellow zone now. I do not have cable TV nor do I go on vacations to far away lands. I still have some fluff I could squeeze out of my expenses, but it is not so big and horrible that I can’t survive with them in my life. I have been getting less overtime at my job though and I’m seeing some of the consequences of my past problems with boundary and enabling issues which I have made some improvements on, but still is not perfect.

I’m facing a possible red zone though as my job is going away in less than two months as the company moves my department to a new city. I will get some severance so that will help a bit, but need to clamp down more and solidify plans in place to deal with the issue and move myself back to better threat level.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Personal Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.