Surviving Economic Collapse

Photo by Jsome1

You know, where grown men lie awake at night pondering about their futures.  The futures where our mundane first world existence all of sudden seems rather precarious.  So there I was, happy as a bee, in the summer of 2008.  The housing boom was at a fever pitch.  I had a great job and a growing small business on the side.The work was steady and well paying, and for all but a few people, the sky was the limit.  Of course all good things come to an end.  Over the next 24 months, the housing bubble went bust, the markets crashed(taking a good chunk of my investments with it), my small business went to the dogs, and even my day job has had several rounds of mass layoffs.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, keep on reading. So just as the work world got progressively worse, my personal life became better and better.  I met the woman of my dreams right around the time my side business crashed and burned.  We got married as wave after wave of forced layoffs were buffeting my day job.  And now, several months into the happy marriage, I have a little baby on the way.   Thus here I am in the middle of the night blogging about how to support a growing family within a era of shrinking paychecks.  I’ve never been much of a whiner.  But the fact of the matter is that the country is changing, and not for the better.  America is becoming progressively poorer.  The middle class and good paying jobs shrink by the year while the government/military/corporate complex gets ever larger.   As this country sinks further into economic depression, there MUST be things that ordinary guys like me can take to get ourselves and our families through this.  This blog will hopefully serve as a journal of some of the concrete steps that I will be taking to ensure the survival( and perhaps even prosperity) of my family in the face of financial collapse and economic depression.