You should, by now, have a very good idea as to where you stand financially. But, don't stop documenting your daily spending and your monthly expenses. We all forget about a few bills until they come due. So, you will no doubt be adding on some more expenses as the days and weeks go by.
If you are like about 95% of those laid off recently, then you found out that your expenses exceed your income. Be concerned if so, but don't get discouraged. With the right help, you can trim down that monthly deficit one step at a time. You may have noticed that we never had you put down how much you have in some accounts - like your checking, savings, and retirement accounts. The reason is that, although you (hopefully) have some money in those accounts, you need to realize that they are mostly static accounts now. Because of the reduction in your income, it's highly unlikely that you will be adding to their balances in the near future. In all likelihood, you will be reducing the balances in some or all of them shortly.
The amount that you are short (as per the figures you have been working on) will have to come from somewhere while you are working hard to reduce your expenses. But, we want to make sure that any money you have in those accounts will be reduced by as little as is possible. How do we plan on helping you with that while you are laid off? By showing you some ways to reduce your expenses. We wish that we could help you to increase your income, but, other than a very few ideas, we can't help much there. However, we can get you on the road to cutting expenses.
Remember those little note pads that we asked you to buy to keep track of your daily spending? We asked you to put an (N) for needs, or a (W) for wants beside each item. The purpose of that was to make it easier now to start trimming your spending. If you have a spreadsheet, this will be easier, but if not, just use a notebook. For the "Needs" items, make one column for the date, another for the item description, and one more for the amount spent. For the "Wants" items, repeat this. You can either keep a separate list for each person, or you can combine all spending into one file. If you make one file for all spending, it would be helpful to make an additional column for the initials of the person that spent the money on the item. Remember, this is a family project, and it will take all of you working together to make this work efficiently.
Work on this list/spreadsheet, and we'll get to work sorting through it in item 10 next.
Don't forget to make your required job search contacts this week.
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