Bad News

Contribution by Saul Martin

It seems like you can’t turn on the television or open a newspaper these days without reading more bad news. The housing market has imploded, the stock market is completely unpredictable, and the people we normally look to for answers don’t have any answers to give us. It’s a little bit overwhelming at times, but we all have to do our best to just muddle through and hope to come out on the other side at some point. My family is making a concerted effort to save money wherever we can. We are living much more frugally than we were before the downturn, and in a lot of ways it’s been very good for us. We are instilling the value of saving money in our children, and we’re hopeful that they’ll carry this value with them as they get older. We’re teaching them to buy generic options when they’re available, and to buy things on sale, and to cut costs by bringing their lunch, etc. We’ve also started examining ways to save money on the necessities such as energy. We have to heat our home, obviously, but we can do it as cheaply as possible. We called texas electric service and were able to switch to a lower cost natural gas provider, and we started saving money immediately. It was the easiest change we’ve made so far.