While it may be early by about 6 months or so to step into the market, I have begun to selectively purchase relatively high dividend-paying Canadian bank stock.

Very little - so far. During the good times my wife and I saved hard, rather than spending cheap borrowed money. We paid off the mortgage and put any extra cash in a building society account. Now we feel relatively sheltered from the storm. Once upon a time, people were brought up thinking debt was a bad thing that should not be taken on lightly. Some of us still think that way, and we’ve been proved right. Sorry to sound smug.

This economic upheaval will have a domino effect to real consumer business sector in the near future and I have to be more carefull to grant credit facility to customers and have to think about new marketing strategy to sell my product with min risk. Be watch to the people who like taking advantage.

I don’t post in places like this at all, but after reading what some of you had said I have to say a few words. Some may agree and some will not.

Some of you posted about not eating out anymore, we have not ate out for over 4 years. We make it ourself. Tastes better and better than most any eat out place.
Some has posted washing their own car- Come on now if you have to hire someone to wash your car you are either lazy or you have more money than brains.
Again cutting your own grass read statement above. Go out and mow your own dang yard.
When a person buys a house you SHOULD be able to do most of your own work, cleaning gutters, painting and so on goes with the house up keep. Again read statment above.

If you want to do things RIGHT and save money. Grow your own fruit- veggies in that yard you waste gas on to mow. We have a garden that is 110 x 25 and we grow EVERYTHING we need for more than a year at a time. We also give some to older folks to. We also have about 1 year of food ahead. So we can live for about one year without planting again. We heat our house with wood, work out of my shop right here at home.
If you do some searchs on the net you will find several and I do mean several things you can do to save money. Like homemade washing cloths soap, for 10.00 you can buy enough products to make this soap and not buy it again for 2-5 years depending on how many loads you do a week.

We have very little debt. What we buy at the stores is ONLY what we can’t grow in our garden. You guys and gals can eat all that food that is or will be ran through radiation, full of salaminila and so on. Just like anything that has soybeans in it, some soybeans have roundup IN THE BEANS and it stays in them beans. So go out and by more of that processed food with some of them soybeans.

Almost every day we get on the net to see what we can do to save money by making it ourselves or growing it. We may not have a lot of money but I will say one thing - I bet we eat better food and have more fun than most of you FOR A LOT LESS. We live in town too. How many of you can live real good on 1000.00 and less per month. I bet not one person posted above. This is what is wrong with 90% of the people living in the U.S.A. - When you get money people get lazy get more stuff buy more cars, bigger house and so on. Just to keep up with the Jones and the Smiths. Which to me is very stupid or again you have more money than brains.
This is a statment from Randy J above and EVERYONE should go by it. - Our goal? To go back to a much simpler life. Reuse, recycle and rely on nothing but cash. No frills.
Can’t agree more, people has got lazy and out of touch.

I was laid off a couple of months ago. But I got another job that I actually find much more rewarding. Sales are excellent. My savings haven’t been affected at all. I moved from equities and longterm bonds into cash positions some time ago. Not only that but I did really well each year that the market declined. I think the natural mechanisms that balance the markets have been damaged to some extent by the separation between risk and return. People used to buy on the dips - anticipating gains. But there was a pernicious level of market manipulation against average investors. The last few weeks have demonstrated massive worldwide state-sponsored market manipulation. If governments had kept out of the markets in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this ridiculous scenario. I disagree fundamentally that this problem is mind over matter. There are tangible reasons - good reasons - for the markets to contract. Some of us for instance are getting too old to return to the markets. We need the cash. I would just ease back on the expectations for those who are young and looking for investment opportunities.

A lot. My credit card had expired, and for that i won’t buy clothes, electronics machines, travel and heath/education.

Oddly enough, even though my stock portfolio has literally been cut in half, I’m not really afraid. The market has been LONG overdue for this type of adjustment. It’s been overinflated since Clinton for heavens sake. We just bought a house and are remodeling right now. There are great deals on everything out there :o) We aren’t wealthy people by any stretch of the imagination. We just aren’t panicking like everyone else. Honestly, those people who were talked into buying WAY beyond their means… “oooohhhh, my dream home that I can’t afford”… well, I have no pity on them. Not to sound too harsh but as a single girl about 4 years ago I had three different Mortgage companies wanting to give me over $800K for a house and some dirt here in the San Fernando Valley. The real estate agent I was working with at the time was showing me property WAY out of my price range, let alone debt comfort level. I hung onto my little nest egg and continued to rent until two months ago. My advice folks? Sit tight. Don’t panic. Pay your bills and if you can’t pay them in full, call the companies you owe money too and negotiate with them. They are VERY happy to take anything right now. We have been fortunate enough not to have been put in that situation, but if it were to happen to us, that’s exactly what we would do… but then, we don’t live beyond our means. That’s not saying we aren’t living very comfortably, but we don’t have a second home or new cars; heck I paid off my Jeep three years ago (a 2000) and keep it serviced and it runs just fine. The media isn’t helping either AND the majority of people who are feeling the real Wall Street crunch (which is the Red Herring in my opinion) aren’t the big investors. They are people who shouldn’t be investing the the Stock Market to begin with. If you are worried about losing money, don’t invest it in the first place. Good luck everyone! In the immortal words of a one Miss Betty Davis, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

We are~ eating out less, delaying capital purchasing, planning less and shorter vacations, reducing gifts at holiday time, wearing older cloths and not replenishing wardrobe, washing my own car, cutting our own lawn, raking our own leaves, cleaning our own gutters, painting ourselves instead of hiring a painter, consuming more leftovers, making sure dishwasher and wash is full before doing and worrying about our retiremnets, our children and our financial stabilty!

I Was affected before the crisis. Thanks to rising gas costs taking the cost of everything else up. We always had a “week to week” budget and this year has completely strained everything we had. I just lost my truck because I couldn’t afford gas anymore to get to and from work and still afford groceries. bought a $300 vehicle that’s better on gas. The grocery bills have seemingly tripled and we will be filing chapter 13 and trying to keep our home which is falling into 3 months behind on our mortgage. 5 years ago I was happy with my job and where I was at. Now my employer has continued to figure out ways to stem our pay from going up and yet I can barely afford to go to work! Of course now that we’re losing everything maybe we’ll have a little money….Yeah, right

We are taking our $400,000.00 out of Wachovia and AIG and will be putting money into CD’s and Treasuries from now on. We are not paying anymore CEO salaries. We are old and retired and they are entirely to greedy.