Roseanne Rosanna D’Anna, Sequestration and You
March 01, 2013I grew up watching Saturday Night Live, back when it was ridiculously entertaining. I know it’s in a good cycle again now, but the old shows are still funny now. When you can laugh 20-30 years after something was created, you know it’s good. Lucille Ball and the chocolate candy on the assembly line will be funny 100 years from now! That’s quality entertainment…
(One of my favorite skits on the old SNL was Roseanne Roseannadanna played by Gilda Radner. Her tag line was “It’s always something! If it’s not one thing, it’s another!” For that reason, I suggested the name Roseanne Roseannadanna to one of my friends looking for a name for his boat…)
As I write this blog post, the big political story du jour is the sequestration. That’s a terrible name for a political “crisis” that comes quickly on the heels of the last crisis. Does anyone remember the “fiscal cliff” or has that faded into our memories already? And once we get past sequestration, we have the oncoming debt ceiling crisis to look forward to. And, right after that…you can see where this is going. It seems like we are moving from crisis to crisis on the political front and the one thing that my friends on both sides of the political spectrum agree on is that both sides are responsible for this mess and no one is blameless. When it comes to our political leaders, “It’s always something!”
Someone asked me this morning what he should do to prepare for sequestration and the debt ceiling crisis that is sure to follow. Great question! And, like most great questions the answer can be a very simple one. One of the things that we all struggle with is the lack of control that we have over various events and learning how to deal with that lack of control on top of dealing with a lot of uncertainty. We don’t know when the economy is going to recover and be firing on all cylinders again. We don’t know what budget cuts are going to be required under sequestration, nor can we control how this plays out. We can’t control the world economy. We can’t control the U.S. economy. But, we can control our own personal economy.
You have the power to control your personal economy. You control how much you save. You control how much you contribute to your 401k. You control whether you buy something using a credit card or walk away from it. You control how much you spend for your housing, car, food, etc. There are a lot of things that you can influence.
So, no matter what Congress does with the sequestration, the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling, the Next Big Congressional Crisis, etc. you can change your focus from the big picture of what’s going on at a national level to the smaller, more personal, controllable household picture. Too many people that I talk to feel like since they can’t control the big picture, they just let the little picture take care of itself and then they end up in debt or struggling to make ends meet. By taking control of those things over which you can exert control, you can be a financial success regardless of what is happening in Washington. Whether it’s paying down debt, building an emergency fund, contributing more to your 401k, reviewing your investment allocations, etc….you can take actions so that in strengthening your financial position “it’s always something!”