Here are some areas of life that require some preparation in the even of  an economic depression:

• Wealth To Carry You Into The Next 6-12 Months:  Do you have enough in savings to cover mortgage or rent for the next 6 months and beyond?  Is there enough to help you keep up with your utilities and other important bills?  Chances are that you don’t have a savings account with this sort of funding.  Start creating that wealth as soon as possible.  Should anything cause you to lose your job, you want to be covered in those areas while you seek other employment.
• Investments That Create Residual Income: Your current job may only be helping you to cover your current cost of living and not leave you with enough to stash away into savings. However, there are savings accounts that will accrue interest as you make small deposits each month.  Check with your bank’s website and see what they have to offer.  Maybe you can afford anything between $25 and $50 a month to put into that account.
• Health Is Survival: Having great health opens up the many options you have when you have to seek other forms of employment.  Naturally, some people have health issues that can’t simply be remedied with a little exercise and better eating.  But for the most part, we can all put in the effort to keep up with our good health so that we’re strong enough for any new task that may come our way.  Also, if you run into any health coverage issues, you want to be sure that you don’t need to be on medications for things that you can prevent.
• Mental and Emotional Balance:  The worst thing you can do to yourself is slip into a depression when external forces cause a change in your life.  You must have the ability to adapt.  You must keep a mental and emotional balance that allows you to see the countless possibilities in your life so that you’re not shut in by notions that are detrimental to your success.  Great health, strong mind, balanced emotions, they all will carry you through an economic hardship.  Imagine that you have to go into a job interview to get yourself back in the game.  Are you going to show up stressed out and crying?  Hope not!  You’ve gotta be tip top inside and out because new opportunities want to come your way and you need your mind and heart ready to see them.
• Stock Up The Pantry:  How is your supply of non-perishables?  Take a quick inventory of your cabinets and pantry and see if there’s enough there to help you out in case you have a month where you can’t run out and buy as many fresh groceries.  Bottled water, canned goods, pastas, cereals, maybe even soy milk in cartons will be extremely helpful additions to your supplies.  Just as you would need to be prepared for a natural disaster, you must be prepared for any other unexpected turn of events.

But when you listen to news on NPR, you get to hear the grittier tales of economic hardship.  Companies begin to downsize and people who have depended on their jobs for decades are struggling to start all over again.  Many of them share, “I’m too old to find a new job. No one will hire me.”  Unfortunately, these people find that the most undesirable places will be the ones most likely to hire them.

Students are certainly feeling the “financial freakouts” of their academic institutions.  In California, for example, hundreds of new teachers were laid off and this caused an increase in classroom size.  What this means is that teachers used to have a roster of no more than 25 students.  Now they can hardly accommodate the 37 kids enrolled into each period.  And usually the classrooms are not equipped with that many seats.  Student activities are being canceled because the funds don’t exist to reserve banquet halls, buy uniforms, or purchase supplies.

College students are finding it more and more difficult to get into the classes they need due to courses being cut and the implementation of furlough days.  Those classrooms are also being crowded by young adults hoping the professor will add them to the roster despite every seat in class being occupied.

The hardest part of an economy that is struggling is the effect it has on homeowners.  Those who lost their jobs and were no longer able to pay their mortgages soon packed up and moved in with family or into smaller, more affordable housing. 

In these times, we can count on a list of small but powerful strategies to get us through the hard times.  No matter how old we are or our level of expertise, there are things we need to know about what to do with our wealth so that it grows without us having to work too hard.

For many years now, people have turned to network marketing as a way of creating a second (or even third) source of income.  For some, it provides a steady stream of extra cash that can cover activities such as movies, travel, and other sources of entertainment.  For many, it’s a flow of income that takes care of the great necessities of life: bills, investments, and mortgages.

Are we in a Depression?  As of right now it looks like it’s more of  a slump.  And if we do ever enter into one, hopefull it won’t be as grim as the stock market crash of the 1930’s.  Our consumerism gets us through and so far, that hasn’t slowed where it counts.

Fear is what causes a Depression.  When people are afraid to invest and support businesses, those establishments decline.  But to knock out the fear, you can be educated on your best choices and your most effective strategies for growing your wealth.

As John D. Rockefeller said, “These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again.”  The slumps don’t last forever, not in your personal life, and not in society.  No matter how grim the news paints it, trust that there is always a way to create great wealth for you and your loved ones to survive any shift in the economy.

What do you think about where we and where we are headed?