I have been watching to economy with some interest these days, being one of the poor masses. What I have discovered is, just as I have said in the past, that things will turn around sooner rather than later. This is just my interpretation of what I see and hear in my little corner of the world. I wrote this to answer a few questions about what I see, feel and hear.

YES, we have been hit by having our, my wife and myself, work hours cut making our income less by a good chunk. To react to this I am always looking for ways to to increase our income or cut our family cost. At poverty (or near) level income it hard to find places to cut but every little bit helps and the trick is to look in places that are over looked.

The interesting thing about our current economy is that it has a kick in the head effect that will be the hardest thing to overcome. Let me explain the kick in the head effect for thous that have never been kicked.

You open a letter from your credit card company and it starts with: Due to the hard economic times we are going to increase your interest rate by an ungodly amount and if you don’t like it cut up your card and pay us off or declare bankruptcy we don’t care! Thanks for paying us every month for the last five or so years.

Here is another one: Due to the high cost of fuel we are going to increase the cost of your garbage service and it will NEVER go down if the cost of fuel goes down. Thanks for paying us for years and we do know that you are paying the same for fuel as we do, but we don’t care about your cost, just ours.

This is my personal favorite: At the grocery store you see that you cant afford the good looking produce so you look at the… well not so nice looking produce, you know the things I am talking about it looks like it belongs in a farmers compost heap but it is proudly displayed, fly s and all. Now just a minute it is the same cost as the good stuff! So you grab some Ramen noodles and leave in a hurry before someone that you know sees that you are trying to feed your family on next to nothing.

Now that I have covered the kick in the head effect let me tell you about the up side in my world: Summer is just around the corner and we can grow some of our own food, that will help. We are almost making enough to pay all the bills, what little savings we have is covering the rest. Hummm thats about it for the good side, just surviving is the best we can do.

Just a quick recap on where I was going with all of this.
1.Income is down
2.Costs are going up (kick in the head effect)
3.Summer is coming and things look better in the sunlight
4.Surviving is as good as it gets, for now

When we ALL do the best we can to make things better they will GET BETTER in spite of the doom and gloom economic forecasters. We went out to dinner! What have you done to stimulate the economy?