Mokay

FInally just figured out my budget, now that I have two months of data from my latest biggo lifestyle change. I now pay $700-$800 less in monthly expenses than before, which is nice. I have good reason to believe that I needn't freak out for the foreseeable future, so long as I'm satisfied with living the breaking-even life. And I am, for now; it's the sacrifice I make for the sake of the two big-idea projects I have in development, my wager that one of them will pay off big later.

I have been semi-coasting with consulting work, spending the last two months doing only some maintenance and release-engineering work for a single client - no intensive new coding projects. This has been great for my schedule, and has helped advance my other projects, but I can't keep doing this if I want to avoid getting my head bit off again by tax penalties next year. So, yes, time to activate another client. That's fine.

My holdings in both money and debt are both small enough that these are the main ways I fear the global financial poop might hurt me:

1. Businesses experiencing new pain when performing their routine borrowing (for making payroll and such) become more conservative about hiring consultants

2. One of my big projects gets enough traction that I'm ready to consider taking out a business loan to let me focus on it exclusively, but the state of credit has become so poor that it's just not worth doing

We'll see what happens.