{"id":52,"date":"2008-03-07T14:15:40","date_gmt":"2008-03-07T19:15:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/blog\/?p=52"},"modified":"2008-03-07T14:17:10","modified_gmt":"2008-03-07T19:17:10","slug":"threat-level-orange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Threat Level Orange"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently saw a post<\/a> by The Frugal Guy <\/a>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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jjmediaoutlet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}