We All Need Our Own Personal Bailout Plan

This year we are hosting Thanksgiving. It has been about 4 years since we have done the grand host; our parents, siblings and their kin all arriving to dine and scare the bejesus out of us. It will be fun but it does remind us that the desire to stay home for Thanksgiving takes too much work. Getting ready goes beyond the shopping and the food; there has to be change in the house. All of the dingy items that have been calling out for replacement now want their due;  we went to Ikea last Saturday and Sunday trying to spruce up for a moderate cost. 

I went into Linens 'n Things to find some "going out of business" bargains and still their prices were so hefty that the bargains were not meaningful enough to me. Yesterday, they shut their doors for good. Circuit City is right behind them and many more retailers, I'm sure, after the holiday shopping season seals their fate one way or the other; survival of the fittest is in full swing. I have to say that I am amazed by the sheer amount of empty brand new strip-mall retail space that was built and unfortunately finished this year; the builder with permits in place, a plot to build and a building to construct had to continue with the plan even as the tide turned against him/her. So many builders were caught in the frenzy of construction, they did not stop to research their audience. So many retailers rushed to build stores to accommodate the legions of shoppers who really were just borrowing cheap money to shop. 

The economy is bloated simply because it is currently built on excess, all of those growth numbers and accompanying statistics were just a figment; anticipation of a rate of continued business that simply was unsustainable by any measure. The downside was completely forgotten and the contingency plan buried under a mountain of cheap money therefore the economy has a heck of a lot of weight to shed; we have to allow for survival of the fittest to define success again. All of the over-expansion in this decade would have been limited if we actually realized that none of us was making any more money yet we were buying bigger houses and more stuff,  and we had remembered the lessons of the generation before us, maintaining a healthy fear of debt. Too many of us were lulled into a level of consumption that it is a comfort zone that we wish not to abandon; we want to lose nothing and we expect to feel no pain.

The reality is we all need our own personal bailout plan; plan that you might lose your job, plan that you might lose your benefits, plan for a rainy day, if you don't have a budget make one now, prepare for a sustained recession because that is where we are right now. We can worry all we want, we can't change what is happening but we certainly can have a plan in place to help ourselves get through it.