Here are some financial & career suggestions

If your money machine is being impacted by downsizing or today's economic uncertainties, this may be a good time to reorder your career and finances. This does not mean desperate measures like pinning hopes on the stock market. This does mean reassessing & updating the goals you have for your life.

This regrouping means pulling away from crushing overall trends and reidentifying who you specifically are and where you want your life to go. The first step is to shift the focus from what's happening out there to your own needs and wants.

Lesbians & gays have unique financial profiles. Beware of basing your plan on Money magazine advice. That may give you straight liabilities and sell short your gay or lesbian assets. For example, we have far more discretionary income, mobility, diversity. (For an indepth treatment of this ask me for "Mobilizing Our Differences", one of my columns for Victory!, our national business magazine for entrepreneurs.)

Assessment starts with taking into account your stage of life. Financial & career decisions must be different for someone in the experimental 20s, age 30 transition, building 30s, midlife transition, career peak and retirement years. These stages are extra different for us. Yet if you look carefully most popular books & articles are not only written for marrieds with children they're generally focused on the baby boomer market; even most of the serious works study only straight men. Clearly we need to adapt our own guidelines.

Health is another critical factor. If HIV or cancer are in the picture, job benefits become more important than job salary. Disability benefits, unscreened group life insurance options, generous medical plans an salary continuation become more important than the job itself. If we're at risk for HIV or cancer and we're at risk for losing job-based benefits, we need to line up private life & disability insurance before the barn is burning.

This can be a time to do some helpful homework. For example, spending can be an Achilles heel for us - the flip side of higher discretionary incomes. Here are three ways to get spending under control: pay now, track, annualize, categorize.

• Like any battlefield general we need to know where we stand NOW. One way is to simply shift payment from credit cards to check. Pay as you go.
  
• People in debtors anonymous use one simple trick: they keep their numbers, all their expenses, in one small spiral book - especially important in today's ATM cash world.
  
• One simple shift is to annualize your spending picture; monthly analysis can be misleading and leave key seasonal items out.
  
• Lastly, rank expense categories by how discretionary they are to reveal where you can trade one type of expense for another, putting control back in your life.

This may be a time to overhaul our careers, to network through the emerging lesbian & gay business groups, to hook up through electronic bulletin boards, to join support groups, to go on a retreat. The free interest, skill & style testing often available at universities may give us a mirror to reassess. If the golden handcuffs are off, maybe this is a time where exploring who we truly are.

The best investment some of us can make is in ourselves, not in a financial high flyer. Downtime and tough times are times to add skills. Reading books, taking courses, practicing keyboarding, learning the Internet may be better investments than dabbling in the market. This may be a good time to read books like the Corporate Closet or the 100 Best Corporations for Gays & Lesbians. The exercise of introspection, retreats, reflection, and imagination in rethinking our goals & ways of getting there are as important as all those hours in the gym.

Perhaps this is the time to start a genuine home office - now technically feasible and financially affordable. Is there a passion that can become a side business - and source of deductions as well as income? Are there ways we can become intrapreneurs to not just safeguard our jobs but create better ones?

Entrepreneurship may be a path to expressing ourselves 100%, to stepping out of corporate career constraints & closets. With fewer children and nonworking spouses we can capitalize our new businesses with our discretionary incomes, buying both freedom and an income stream of our own making.

The bottom line is that we can do much more than hang on or dig in. Just like the valley's employers, perhaps now's the time to divest, downsize, refocus on our core concerns and reinvest around that central vision. If corporate America's doing it, why not us - with the advantage of our mobility, lower fixed costs, greater ability to handle risk and guerilla life skills. No matter where the check is coming from, welcome to the era of Me-As-I-Really-Am, Inc.