How Far Would You Go To Maintain Your Lifestyle?
May 11, 2010 by Mrs. Frugal
We recently got a Blu-Ray player with Netflix streaming capabilities. This allows us to instantly stream movies and TV shows versus having to wait for a DVD in the mail. I have to say it’s pretty cool. It’s opened up to us a wide array of shows from premium channels, like Showtime and Starz, that we don’t subscribe to. And at only $10.99/month, we’ll likely cancel our cable service soon…but I’ll save that for another post.
One show that we’ve started watching is Weeds. The premise is a recently widowed young housewife with two sons becomes the neighborhood marijuana dealer to maintain her current lifestyle. This lifestyle includes a live-in-housekeeper, Range Rover and what looks like a 3000+ square foot house in a swanky suburb of the fictional, but all too realistic, town of Agrestic, CA.
The storyline is over the top but it got me thinking…how far would we go to maintain our current lifestyle if the unexpected occurred? What if my husband lost his job or one of us became ill? Would we slowly eat through our Emergency Fund without making any significant changes? Would we allow ourselves to access credit to fund our lifestyle? Or would we look at drastic ways to cut back on costs until we found our footing again?
I actually know the answer as I often consider these scenarios and evaluate our options. We have a backup plan in the event we find ourselves in an unfortunate situation. Our plan is designed not to maintain our current lifestyle, but to maximize our savings for the greatest amount of time possible to lessen the likelihood we would need to access credit (build debt) to get us through.
Do you have a backup plan? Would you allow yourself to go into debt to maintain your current lifestyle? Or could you make substantial cuts until your situation normalized?
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I have not yet experienced a situation where I had to either take on a second job to maintain my standard of living, or cut costs, but I like to think that I would not have trouble cutting costs AND lowering my lifestyle. Going out to eat less, buying fewer and cheaper items when I do need them etc. If I were recently widowed and I would downgrade my house, car, eating habits, and other random things as I saw fit.
To me, the common sense reaction would be to cut expenses, not plot and scheme to maintain our current lifestyle in the face of reduced income. If I need to tap into our emergency fund, it’s an emergency, and should be treated as such — it’s not the time to maintain airs.
Well, our current lifestyle is not very extravagant at all, so there isn’t much we could really cut out of our budget something bad happened. So, if my husband lost his job, I would definitely go back to work just to meet expenses. (Emergency funds only last so long.) Although medicinal marijuana is legal in Michigan…
By the way, I love Netflix. We just got it a couple months ago, and I have seen some really great movies. My son and I are trying to get through the AFI top 100 list. I don’t think we will finish it before he goes to college, but Netflix makes it affordable!