Thursday, December 6, 2012

A Survival Guide to the Great Recession

A Survival Guide to the Great Recession 

Hysteria, panic, confusion in the economic causes and responses
I felt called to document a survival guide to the great recession
A parachute pack for the fiscal cliff and a general roadmap
For the average worker to ready for what the iceberg of our arrogance
Has already done to our hull 

One must see that the debt, the greed, the spending in such excess
Has taken nourishment from the mouths of the unborn who are now
Our college graduates and left mono-crop fields unfertilized
The yield of resources was disseminated to the past, vastly depleted in the present
And came to a tipping point in the housing sector of the economy in 2008 

And for those still blind to the reality of choice…
The dominoes of houses are now approaching health care and then student loans
Our only hope is lowering overall system delivery costs and dissolving the stalactite of consolidated wealth aggregated on the upper portion of our common cave
Not casting unprofitable humans into a black pit
continuing to be shit on by fattened blind bats 

Greed and selfishness have damned us; no introverted contemplation
So much loudness, so much sparkle and now the fade gurgling into the tide
An over-fished ocean begs to regrow reefs
Millennia of life have been undone in blinked decades of industrial dredging

So I suggest this survival guide….. 

·         Drink tap water (not diet soda, not beer, not bottled) Drink tap water for lunch and dinner you will be healthier and realize that if economics was correlated to the choice of reason, the least and most expensive options would be transposed

·         Cook your own food in large batches whenever possible. (Abandon fast food and most out-of-home dinning at all costs.  McDonald’s is banned henceforth.)  Focus on sustainable nutrition as if this were famine.  The efficacy of one’s commitment to planning what is input into the cellular grid of one’s body will provide greater taste, nutrition at a lower expense.  Eat leftovers.  Make sandwiches for the week on Sunday nights and appreciate how that food enters one’s home.  One can acquire a bottle of spice that will last the winter for the price of a “value meal” and savor the titillation on ones tongue in exponential amount for the same expenditure.

·         Maintain a standard functional wardrobe.  Avoid duplication.

·         Never pay interest on a credit card.  If you are, kill it and never use it until you are whole as a fiscal being.  The interest rates on credit cards are over twenty-percent; home mortgage interest is often less than four.  There is no fiscal arrangement more akin to a Faustian bargain.

·         Leave your house at a slightly uncomfortable temperature.  Wear a jacket or sweater inside.  Wear less in summer; buy a plug-in fan for the room you inhabit.  The discomfort is a beautiful recognition of reality.

·         No cable, no satellite, acquire a digital antenna and avoid any kind of monthly fee.

·         No data plan for a phone unless it is your only web access.  Limit plans to necessity.

·         Cancel Christmas.  Simplify and become acquainted with your existential self via a route not detoured through commerce.

·         Over your life, attack your mortgage like the plague.  Never buy more house than you need.  Unfortunately if you are renting, the plague of someone else’s mortgage is attacking you.  To believe this issue does not apply to you is a grave fiscal psychosis.

·         Mow your own grass.  If you are paying for a gym membership and do not mow your own grass you are toying with a vile form of insanity.

·         If you are investing, avoid the fallacies of stocks and return, examine transaction fees and know this; debt is the grand evil of commerce.  Debt holds power over a man like a puppet string to offer lottery tickets of potential equity.   

For the average person I suggest acquiring the debt of the fiscal behemoths.  Acquire their bonds and get the money back that they use to profiteer of our consumer spending ocean.  To buy their stocks and extract their pittance of dividends is to ignore this reality, what happens when the preponderance of those born by 1950 turn 70 in 2020? 

They will exit the workforce and begin to draw on their 401k’s and IRA’s and march on the Medicare system with increased healthcare costs in an unending horde.  What Generation Xer’s have the money to buy stocks?  How many numerical buyers and sellers will be left in the population?  What happens with a continent of sellers to the price of equity securities?   

Generation Xer’s, I implore you; do not buy their stocks now.  Wait.  Wait, time is on your side.  Wait until those who have ruined this fiscal landscape are most desperate and then buy extract revenge on a generation as you may hear the devil tongue of war on my lips, know this.  Boomers will be at war with Gen Xer’s in every manner of healthcare taxation to fund the machines, the drugs and the nostrums to sustain the voting block.   

This nation, as it is now, is in a silent rarely-acknowledged standoff.  You can find yourself devoured or as survivor.  I have always suggested the solution is in the synthesis, but preparing for a fiscal apocalypse is also suggested in the event our tend of greedy selfishness perpetuates.  

·         Examine every repetitive monthly bill.  There are three tiers of primary objectives

o   Tier One
§  Interest- home, vehicle, credit cards
§  Taxes- mandatory, property, income
§  Insurance – home, vehicle, health
o   Tier Two – food, housing, education
o   Tier Three - Entertainment – television, film, music, books, alcohol, sex 

In Tier one, we must mitigate expense, preserving the threshold we must expend to function in a secure environment.  In tier two, we have an increased level of choice than in tier one and can leverage our level of luxury for the reality of our present.  In tier three every single one of these variables is completely optional to survive. 

If we can create a personal pan to dissect one’s fiscal choices according to these tiers one is most apt to survive the grand recession with a level of recognition of empowerment rather than victimhood. 

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