recession of 2009 - Stumble Forward

5 Brutal Lessons I Learned From This Recession

Is the recession over? No one knows for sure but one things is true for sure, it’s been a brutal last 12 months for a lot of people. Yes this would include me as well, I make financial mistakes just like everyone else.

However, there are a few things that separate the winners from the losers in situations like this. The winners will learn from their mistakes and apply what they have learned and use that knowledge to prevent those mistakes from happening again.

In this post I am going to share with you the mistakes I made over the last year. At the end of this post feel free to share mistakes you have made and have decided to change for the greater good.

5 Brutal Financial Lessons Learned

You Need Emergency Cash. One of the biggest mistakes I made in this recession is that I didn’t hold back enough cash for all of those emergency situations. Let me tell you money was tight and if I had only had an extra thousand bucks it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad. Luckily, I was able to sell a few things and generate the cash quickly. Having this cash made me sleep a heck of a lot better at night.
Stay Optimistic. When everything is against you it’s easy to have the feeling and sense of pessimism. The key I found is to just keep working at it until you see the result you want. I’ve always been told if you want to be successful at anything you just have to do the right things long enough and you’ll win. I find that advice to hold true.
Minimize Your Debt. In tough times it’s not always easy to keep the debt down. In fact, it feels as if my debt steadily climbed after the recession locked in place. If I could have changed just one of my habits it would be this one. Now I have a plan in place along with goals that I want to achieve. These drive me to pay off my debt and one day be totally debt free.
Cut The Spending. When it comes to spending this has not really changed to much for me, but what has changed was how I spent the money. Instead of buying things that would be great to have I held back and studied my buying decisions. This has resulted in making much better purchases.
Stick To The Plan. If it would have been for my ability to stick to my budget and debt plan none of these issues would have happened in the first place. The problem was I put a general plan together and didn’t focus on a more precise plan of action. Doing this would have left me with better spending habits, less debt, more emergency cash, and most importantly a sense of optimism.

Share Your Mistakes

Share your financial mistakes you’ve encountered during this recession. How did you deal with it? What did you do to overcome the problem?

Chris

How The Recession Of 2009 Will Affect You

A few friends of mine forwarded this video to me. It talks about how much money are government is really spending. Anyways watch the video and leave a comment. I’m interested to hear what you think.

How Government Spending Will Effect You

Obviously with government spending out of control their will be some definite reactions to this. The thing to remember is this will eventually effect you.

In order for the government to come up with this money they need print more money. This in turn will lower the value of the dollar. Why is that you might ask? Because with no physical asset like gold, silver, or platinum to back the value of are money, so the value drops.

This then creates the next problem, inflation. As a result of value dropping this will drive the cost of goods and services up. In fact it is starting to happen right now as I write this post. Just a few weeks ago gas was around $1.80 in my area and is now over $2 a gallon now.

But it gets worse, not only is the United States printing more money but so are a lot of other countries. This will eventually drive us into global inflation.

So over the next couple of years you can expect the prices of goods and services to increase again.

Spending More Money To Fix A Growing Problem

Along with the government spending more money to fix the problems are country is currently facing a trillion dollar debt with no end in site. This will also have a huge effect on are country.

With a debt growing bigger and bigger by the moment the best solution are government has come up with is throwing more money at it. While this may solve problems in the short term in the long term we are delaying the inevitable.

So how will this effect you? Eventually, it will mean higher taxes to payback what we are borrowing.

Spread The Word

If you have read this article and feel spending more money will not solve this problem take some time to send this article to a few friends. If your not quite sure, think about this for a second.

If you want to get out of debt how would you do it? Simple, put a plan together, spend smart, and most importantly save up more money. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out. It looks to me we are doing the exact opposite.

So take some time and send this to a friend or bookmark it and share it with other to get the message out.

Chris