Every time I come up with some brilliant personal finance solution, i do a little fist pump for being so freaking brilliant. I mean, checking my bank account balance online? Everyday? Brilliant. Quick! Someone test my IQ. I think I'm the perfect candidate for Mensa.

Dieting and frugality are a lot alike. After all, when we diet, we eat less and when we live frugally, we live with less. With both, we abstain, we hold back, we do without, we make do. So they are alike, two peas, yes, in that pod called life. Right? Wrong?

I drive a Mercury Sable. A Mercury Sable that I curse each and every day and though I am currently in the middle of Project Purchase a New Vehicle my issue right now isn't so much that I loathe my car it is that last week I went to get gas and spent $55 on good old 87. And after I blacked out and eventually came to, I told everyone I'd ever met in life that I spent FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS on gasoline and threw my hands in the air at the absurdity of it all. I shook my head and wondered what the world was coming to.

Traditional financial lore is that teenagers remain largely impervious to changes in the economy; teens and shopping go together like, well, chocolate and peanut butter. The current economic environment (notice that I am not using the "R" word) really is dire, though, because the news is now reporting that even teenagers are spending less.

My mother is worried about the price of bread. I'm worried about the price of pizza. Plus, I'm still trying to get my head around the whole Bear Stearns buy-out fiasco. Stay with me -- they're related.

Today, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine said “We are in a recession…We have pretty strong indications that we have seen a major, major downshift in the economy. I think we'll find we started in the last quarter of last year." And he should know; he used to be head of Goldman Sachs.

Perhaps I'm jumping ahead of myself here using that word since we haven't officially hit recession yet. But 'precarious' and 'precipice' are the words that are coming to mind right now as in we are standing a little too close to my liking to the very edge. I'm not a person to have a fear of heights but suddenly I'm feeling the vertigo. And it wasn't always this - euphemisms aside - it's not like I have spent years being overly cautious of the economy and worrying about every possible market drop. As one can tell, I was quite the economics major.