Back to Basics?!?!

If there is one thing, I don’t have is first-hand experience of handling is a recession. Sure our parents can give us advice and our grandparents can tell us how it really was…but what do we really know? We, as in us 80s babies.

A couple of months ago I was telling Amaretto, I don’t know my gut tells me to put a lock-down on the amount of spending I am doing and save even more. And she says to me “Stop acting like you are one step away from being homeless.” (chuckle) That is true I am nowhere near that step or am I, really? So to ease my anxiety, I paid off my undergrad student loan and paid my car insurance in full for the year. Phew…I love it when there are only a few bills to be paid monthly.

Now fast forward, to two weeks before Christmas, my company decides to clean house a bit. URGH!! There goes one of my closet friends, who just bought a house last year and is a single parent with a teenager daughter off to college next year and pre-teen son. WOW! I felt the ground below me shake. But let’s get this straight, the ground wasn’t shaking because I thought that I would be throwing my Gucci purse over my shoulder and walking out the door before lunchtime never to return. I’ve got that covered…I will be fine for a year if things go sour. The ground was shaking because if I had children this would be a different story. A year saved up, plus six months of unemployment wouldn’t be enough for them not to have to wheel me out on a stretcher.

O-kay...get a grip Courvoisier, crazy chic is rearing her head. Either way I am just saying that in today’s economy where next to nobody is hiring and the number of people applying for unemployment is increasing…I am a little uneasy. That is right, I wasn’t uneasy with the mortgage crisis, and I have two of those. And I wasn’t uneasy with job security until last week. I always knew that advertising was the first budget cut but when you work with pharma, an industry that supposedly thrives during recession, I figure, I would be sitting pretty. Oh no, that ideal was shattered last week. Our CEO told us, that even though our sector of the business is growing we needed to show our commitment to our parent company’s need to cut back due to the lost their two biggest clients, one of big 3 and Amex, which to him meant going back to the basics…simple accounting, spend less than we bring in.

I hear you CEO! I think I might do some going back to basics myself…one, cut out cable time and increase the reading. Two, cut out personal internet – I spend more than half my life online at work and lastly three, as basic as it gets, I am officially bartering services!

Extreme?!? I don’t think so…but apparently some 70’s babies tell me it is. And you know what? They might have a point because although this is NOT my first job, it is my first time of potentially being on the chopping block. So paranoid I may be but broke I cannot. Sorry, I know a lot of people were depending on us single, childless well-paid gen-Ys to try and hold it down for the economy but I have to slow my roll on the spending.

(deep sigh) Much luv until next week…and some change? :/
Courvoisier