Cops Alive | Careers, stress and health - survival

Everyone is talking these days about higher gasoline prices, higher food costs and generally higher costs for everything we enjoy. At the same time the financial markets of the world are struggling, record numbers of people are losing their homes and the misuse of credit has become a global problem.

As a cop, how’s your financial health? Are you unsettled by all around you? Are you in the middle of some of these problems? How well to you manage the financial resources you have?

Whether or not you’re in financial crisis or not, now may be an excellent time to plan for your financial well being.

Financial health comes from several areas. First how well you acquire money. Next how well you manage and budget what you have and finally how well you get your money working for you in business, investing or other forms of asset development.

For this discussion we will focus on the second or how well you manage and utilize the money you have. CopsAlive’s mission is to help police officers and law enforcement professionals plan for happy, healthy and successful lives on the job and beyond it. For this reason we encourage all of our readers to plan for sound financial health. We speculate that as a whole cops don’t manage their money well (we would like to know your opinion about that so please visit our survey page and take the “Officer’s Personal Threat Assessment Opinions” survey. Click here to access that now).

One resource that is available free or at very low cost to people in the United States is the Consumer Credit Counseling Service or CCCS, which serves many communities around the country in various forms.

They have services that will help most people even if you don’t need their credit counseling advice or their debt management services. Each of their websites provide lots of debt management tools, resources and calculators. For example visit the St. Louis’ Branch website and take the “Financial Health Quiz”
http://www.cccsstl.org/debt_test/cccs_financially_fit.asp or use their “Debt to Income” calculator to see how well you are doing. They also have an excellent article you can read about how to “Create a Budget”.
(http://www.cccsstl.org/savemoney/howCreateBudget.asp). Then use their on-line “Household Budget Calculator” (http://www.cccsstl.org/debt_test/cccs_monthly_budget_calculator.asp)

Additionally, The Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Atlanta Georgia has some great information on their website (http://www.cccsatl.org/) or visit the CCCS site hosted by Money Management Inc.
(http://www.moneymanagement.org/) which has free Credit Education Webcasts at:
http://www.moneymanagement.org/OnlineEducation/

Finally, for financial planning the Atlanta site has an excellent publication called “Road to Financial Health” You can find that free PDF download along with several others at:
(http://www.cccsatl.org/index.asp?_method=view&sc=43&cn=481&md=handbooks).

Also check out an interesting web resource called Quamut.com. They offer helpful resources on a variety of topics and you might check out the one on Personal Finance. (http://www.quamut.com/quamut/personal_finance) which ends with a useful “Personal Financial Checklist”.

Whatever your financial health, CopsAlive knows that if you plan well and take care of yourself and your family first, you will be better able to take care of the people and communities you serve. As they say on the airlines: “Put your oxygen mask on first before you help someone else!”

Photo credit: “Piggy Homocide” by True Scot on www.flickr.com as Creative Commons

Editors Note: The hyperlinks are provided for you convenience and in case they didn’t work we have included the url information as well.