When I say "rainy day", what does it make you think? Are you humming Bob Dylan's Rainy Day Women #s 12 and 35 in your head? Are you thinking about what tasks or quiet work you keep recalling that you've put off for a rainy day? Perhaps you're recalling Grandma's excellent financial advice for preparing for times of trouble?

Whether a "rainy day" for you means a time when your mood is blue and your spirit and motivation are flagging, or a period when the economic outlook (whether personal, professional, regional, national or global) is grim, or merely a sleepy, slow day for catching up on little tasks, are you preparing for a rainy day?

FINANCIALLY?

1) Do you live and operate your business within your means?

It can be a foreign concept nowadays, but even in good times, let alone with recessionary woes looming, we really do need to keep our personal and business expenses lean. Financial planning is our dear Kristine's wheelhouse, so I won't invade, but from an organizing perspective, let's remember that although everything should have a home, not everything has to live with you. That means we can't always get/buy what we want (from Dylan to the Stones in one post!) when we want it.

Sometimes, when we are working so hard to achieve our goals, and our businesses are taking all of our energy, we feel that we "deserve" rewards, whether they are expensive meals, tangible goods or vacations. However, just because we deserve them does not mean we have the budget to accommodate the financial outlay now…or on the same grandiose scale.

2) Are raindrops falling on your head?

In other words, are you taking the time to sweat the small stuff long enough to scrutinize the details on your bills to make sure your vendors (from major telecommunications companies to ad hoc independent contractors) and financial institutions are registering your charges and account activities accurately? I'm not maligning anyone's honesty; simply, errors get made. When I help my clients, I find bank errors as small as thirty cents when checks were read incorrectly by scanning machines to thousand-dollar duplicated charges.

Also, not everything is an error. Sometimes, because we don't take the time out to evaluate our costs, so we don't notice that our vendors are offering new, better options. Felicia posted last week that she didn't know her phone company had made a change requiring dialing the area code locally. I'd be willing to bet a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup that at least two if not more of her billing statements had included small-print notations. What else might we be missing on our bills? Have the interest rates on our business or personal credit cards crept up? If so, have we taken a few rainy minutes to call and request that they be decreased again, which often works amazingly well?

Investigate your bills (perhaps on an actually rainy day) for tiny but collectively significant areas where you can cut costs. Keep focused on the future and organize your week and month so that you regularly review your budget, your revenue and expenses, and your financial strategies (again, for your personal life and business). Carry that umbrella with you!

3) Are you saving for a rainy day?

Whether it's Mama's Bank Account (the movie was I Remember Mama) or the coffee can in the kitchen or the moderate-interest sweep account, we know intellectually that we need to build a safety net. If you haven't done so already, sit down with your budget (marketing, operations, etc.) to determine what three to six months of your operating budget…without any frills…would mean. From there, set up an automatic monthly (or weekly) transfer to an interest-bearing online account that helps you build up your reserve. (Check out http://www.bankrate.com/ for the best rates.)

I'm sure Kristine (and of course, your own personal financial expert) can provide more information regarding your next steps for developing your business and personal safety nets. Perhaps this is a good time for you to have a line of credit available for true emergencies (and for expansion, down the line, when the days are a bit sunnier). You pay no interest on a line of credit you're not using, so it might be wise to have your ducks in a row.

4) Have you checked the status of your perks?

We think about cash in the bank and our credit card balances, but what about our goodies? Many of us have frequent flyer and shopper miles, cash back bonuses and other rewards accounts lying dormant. Make a note that on your next operationally-rainy day, you'll sit down with all of your files (you DO have files for these rewards accounts, don't you?) to determine:

--Are any of your points about to expire?

--Can you reactivate about-to-expire points or rewards easily and inexpensively (such as by registering to answer a survey, booking a flight online, using a small number of the points for an online purchase, etc.)?

--Do you rewards plans fit your needs, or are newer/different plans better for you? Today, I realized that one card's plan doesn't yield me a high enough cash back percentage unless/until I charge $30,000; otherwise, I'm not earning more than 3/4 of a percentage point! Oy! Switching to a plan on the same card that earns me a flat 1% on some purchases, and 5% on other categories, all at no increased charge, made better sense. I still may not use that card vs. others, but I've increased my perks with one little rainy-day phone call.

--Do you know alternative ways to use all of your perks? Today, on a different call to see if I might change my Capital One "No Hassle" plan to some other reward scheme (because my pitiful 10,000+ miles weren't going to yield me any reasonable airfares), I learned that after I attend my conference in April and charge my hotel room, I can use those points to get a statement credit of over $100. Basically, the extra night I'd already decided to stay in the hotel in order to attend an optional half-day educational session will now be FREE. One rainy day call. Yippee.

OPERATIONALLY?

Have you planned for emergencies? If you don't already have an emergency plan for your business, I encourage you to go back and check out this post from October.

What about other operational rainy days?

Do you have a plan in place in case you get ill and have to have an operation, or need to care of a loved on who is ill? Do you have someone who can help keep your business afloat, operationally, handling calls, invoicing, or bill-paying? Do you have a network of trusted colleagues whom you could ask to service your clients, replace you at speaking engagements and or on teleclasses, especially those for which you've already collected fees?

Aside from operational challenges to your infrastructure or yourself, what about support staff and resources? Do you have a plan in place in case your VA gets sick or has a problem pregnancy? What if your webmaster goes through a messy and distracting divorce or wins the lottery, your web host goes bankrupt or your car goes kaflooie?

Again, I'm not trying to encourage you to worry, but to anticipate, and to organize your plans.

RAINY DAY PROJECTS?

Low-cachet, low-return (in terms of revenue) projects won't ever get done unless you plan time to do them, and it's hard to carve out time for low-level maintenance. You can't always know when a rainy day will come, but you can create a list of rainy day projects for when a metaphorical rainy day comes over the horizon:

Client cancellations
Appointments rescheduled
Snow Days
Car's-in-the-shop-so-I can't-go-to-the-Chamber-meeting days

Maintain this list in your planner, tickler file or on your computer. Set it to pop up at least once per week so that it's not too far in the back of your mind when the opportunity arises. Use these "rainy days" for projects (and whatever others you can think of) on slow days when you can't (or won't) move on to higher-return projects:

• Call about the status and options on those perks
• Purge out of date information and files from your filing system
• Delete no-longer-applicable bookmarks from your browser
• Transcribe your mileage log from the prior month
• Plan an editorial calendar, or just arcs or themes, for your blog posts, newsletters or other writing
• Review your web site page by page for needed updates
• Review your cold-client files to see with whom you might touch base

These are just a handful ideas to help you plan for self-protection on troubling "rainy days" and also give you some ideas for making the most of rainy days when they arrive…so instead of looking like you belong in a Theraflu ad, you can emulate Gene Kelly and be singing in the rain.

--
Julie Bestry, Certified Professional Organizer®
Best Results Organizing
"Don't apologize. Organize!"
organize@juliebestry.com
Visit http://www.juliebestry.com to save time and money, reduce stress and increase your productivity

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