Straight up and sideways.
You could almost reach out and grab the financial stress these days. The GDP took a .3% hit last quarter, the Feds cut prime to 1% (seriously?! 1%?), and most folks feel like tightrope walkers in a hurricane. It's hard not to feel one misstep from disaster when you're leveraged to the hilt, your job is in shaky territory at best, and you've got a mortgage to pay and kids to feed. So what do we do?
"Don't panic."
These words are inscribed on <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i> for good reason: you CAN'T panic. Panic makes us act irrationally. Panic robs us of our creativity, our cleverness, our foresight, and leaves us scrambling. Not that we should all be la-di-da pie-in-the-sky, but let's be honest with ourselves: lots of us here are frugal because we've been down before, some of us way down. Yet we're still here, and better off than we were before, for the most part. Being poor didn't kill us. Being real poor didn't kill us. Even being hungry hasn't killed us, although it might've made us hungry in the way that fuels constant improvement and better tomorrows.
So what do we do? We keep doing what we've been doing, if we've been smart. We bust our humps today and prepare for tomorrow. If we know the student loan debt could sink us, we get a second job and throw money at the debt. If we're living in a house that will be our financial undoing, we mourn the loss and we move. We get roommates, sell cars, plant gardens, turn off lights, hang the laundry to dry, cook dinner, pack our lunches, leave the thermostat off, recycle everything. For the frugal, none of this new. To our grandmothers, none of this was new. A large part of the current economic downturn is due to the fact that we used credit to buy what they bought with work.
Do I want to work retail over the holidays to pay down my law school debt faster? Not particularly. But, as my daddy is fond of saying, "There's never shame in honest work." Do any of us want to tell our kids, "No, we can't afford that." Of course not. Do we want to give up lunches out with our co-workers in favor of a PBJ at the desk? Probably not. But will it kill us? Will it even hurt us? Heck, it'll probably be good for us; as the economy has gone from ludicrous speed to lurch, folks seem to be turning away from stuff to what really matters: people. Instead of being out spending money, we're home spending time and love. The cost-benefit analysis strongly favors people over crap in my equations.
So what do we do? We love each other. We take care of each other. We know that even though things are hard and scary right now, tomorrow is just on the other side of tonight. And we know that even if tomorrow is hard, and long, and dirty, it'll be alright, because at the end of the day, we love each other.
