Depression Advice

As we enter a depressed economy, good stewardship calls for Christians and non-Christians alike to be wise with their money and possessions.

Obviously, as the economy has boomed in the past few decades - fueled by never-ending optimism based on borrowing and interest rates held artificially low by the Federal Reserve system, as well as a consumer economy in which marketeers have hypnotically convinced us all to spend money like it's going out of style, it's clear that there are adjustments that we will all have to make.

Fortunately, the overarching idea is quite simple: "spend less money than you make." Sometimes, this is called "living within your means." However, I think the title of this article:10 Smartest Ways to Live Beneath Your Means by Jack Zavada - from the Dumb Little Man: Tips for Life blog (from October 10, 2007) is better terminology.

By living beneath your means, you're doing more than merely breaking even. The idea is not just to avoid debt, but to do even better: savings and investment. It is another way of saying to be thrifty. This is something that most people from my generation and younger have never had to do in our lives.

All of the author's suggestion are simple, common sense strategies that we just need to be reminded of. These are the kinds of things our grandparents and great-grandparents who survived the Great Depression learned from experience. They made it, and we can too. But we need to be wise stewards and cannot simply continue "business as usual" - which for many of us means "if I want it now, I buy it now - even if I have to put it on the credit card."

And if any of you find helpful articles for getting through the coming depression, please post them in comments!