Excellent list you have hear. The frugal live for recessions and this is our time to enjoy.

@ Curt

Thanks. I’m probably not the best frugal-ite among personal finance bloggers but it certainly is a great time to gobble up assets right now. Just depends on your particular tastes.

@ Christian 2.0

Thanks for commenting. I’m feeling ambivalent about the stimulus package as well. I feel it’s a social engineering package disguised as a infrastructure project, but there are definitely good projects in there as well. Anything that builds wind turbines and solar panels are great, but giving a few million for a minor league hall of fame is wasteful at best.

Theoretically, it’s bad if all Americans begin to save at once. At that point, you can’t adequately support the industries that support consumerism — retail, restaurants, shipping, travel, etc. There was a good article on this very topic on MSN Money this morning.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/SuperModels/how-savers-could-doom-the-economy.aspx

Matt,
Great post. Regarding your comment #4, I always get a kick out of articles that suggest that increased household saving now will make things worse in the aggregate. Wasn’t excessive household spending (via cheap household credit) a principal cause of the mess? Yet by finally reigning it in, we’re somehow less patriotic?

@ Beyond Paycheck

You’re intuition is spot on. I find it humorous, but also reckless, when people say things “like savers will doom the American economy”.

I saw an interview with a Disney exec who headed up Chinese operations and he said one of the main goals was to convince the Chinese people to become spenders not savers. Some people just can’t understand there is an agenda pushed by Corporate America to make people loose with their cash.

I don’t buy the “less patriotic” argument one bit. Everyone should save 10% of their salary, and if businesses existed because they relied on that 10% of spendthrift behavior, then too bad for them.

I’m FAR from an “inventor” although I have had a few IDEAS in my past…With this recession, headfing for depression, I have truly put my mind to the grindstone, as they say. I know I’m not alone in the need to find shoirtcuts that save time, money and especially the environment. I have one of those ideas and am working on obtaining a PATENT, even as we speak. Bobby T

@ Bobby T

Thanks for commenting. If you’re going the patent route, I would suggest you hire an intellectual property attorney (aka – patent lawyer) to file your paperwork.

I have a college bud that works at the Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) and he’s said multiple times that today’s paperwork is so complex that an experienced patent attorney can find multiple loopholes to sidestep your patent if not written properly.

Best of luck with the new invention.

I loved this. One other thing–if you live in an area that had skyrocketing housing tax assessments during the real estate boom, suddenly your assessment levels off and you know your mortgage payment will remain the same for another year. At least, that’s what happened to us.

@ Patience

Glad you liked it! I would imagine most people would welcome stagnant or lower real estate taxes — except state governments, so that’s an excellent addition to the list.

Did your county/city do this automatically or did you have to file some paperwork?

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This recession is awesome… I just paid some worthless piece of crap $25.00 to cut my grass instead of the usual $150.00. I told the maid & she offerd to cut the grass for
$20.00 to make up a portion of her decrease in salery due to these tuff times. My neighbor lost his home after defaulting on his mortgauge payments,so I bought that place for 40,000 less than what he paid, and now I’m renting it to him for $30.00 less per month then what his mortgauge payment was. This is GREAT !!! I feel like I died and gone to heaven. Is anybody else having as much fun with this recession as I am?

This was one of my favorite reads!!! I love it…good stuff.

Great post Matt! And now, just like that, we are back to the raging good times of old.

Have you seen Wall St. bonus figures? They’re back to 2007 highs in terms of revenues, with 15% less people to pay. In other words, big bucks are back!

Should be a job market frenzy in 2010.

I’ve seen some of the numbers, but I’m curious if the Pay Czar will step in and do some damage.

I’m probably in the minority by saying I think Wall Street needs a serious downsizing in the compensation area, but it would be really nice to see a consistent uptick in finance sector employment (or any other sector for that matter). Let’s just hope next time it’s not a boom and bust scenario like it’s been for the last few years.

Good to know others are flourishing in these tough times. I’m not an expert, but it seems they might be continuing for a longer amount of time than anyone suspected.

Great post man. I just came across your site super randomly and the recession post on your popular post list caught my attention. I just started blogging and I completely agree with you 100%. The reason I decided to get into blogging and to stop going to school where I’d ultimately probably end up working a 9-5 was because I saw the mistakes my parents made. Then they want to go around and tell me the same advice of what to do with my life even through our family is in a rut now because of their decisions. Just didn’t make sense to me. Anyways great post and I’ll definitely be checking back later. OH and if you have time check out my blog and let me know what you think. I just started so any positive feedback would be dope.

Cheers

-Chris

Thanks Chris. Funny how some people give advice, yet they fail to realize just how similar their advice related to their own situation, and even more funny, how poorly that advice worked out.

As they say, the worst vice is often advice.

I’ll check in with ya from time to time at your blog.

Haha, I am laughing at how some of these perdictions came off as wrong. Gas was easily over $2.50 a few months ago and food prices have done nothing but go higher.

Ha ha… I’m laughing b/c you can’t read the date on the post. You know, when there actually was a recession.

@Don,

If you can take advantage of the economic situation without exploiting others, then more power to you. But your examples suggest otherwise. Shame on you for using these “tuff times” as a pretext for cutting your maid’s salary as you scorn her all the way to the bank. Your mortgage payments are probably at least $200 less than what your neighbor had been paying and you passed on only $30 of the savings. Pretty stingy.

See, the difference between the 1% and 99% is not greed, but that the 1% have the resources to make a spectacular splash. If you are pointing at the 1%, then remember, three fingers are pointing back at you. I truly hope you will take a more socially responsible approach to your finances.