The value of housing has dropped significantly in many areas. The stock markets around the world have plunged. Many people have found that their retirement savings have vaporised.

Now I won’t go into suggestions about the importance of knowing how much money you have coming in and being spent. I will assume you know about the benefits of having a budget and spending less than you have coming in. If you don’t you will very quickly find out its necessary!

Instead I’ll talk a little about the markets because for years we have been indoctrinated into the understanding that the markets keep on going up. And my wife has just been reading a book written in 1998 which assumed it was easy to find investments that would return 10% per annum on an ongoing basis.

Now what do you do if you find you don’t currently have enough money coming in? Firstly reduce expenses. Secondly look for another form of income. Oh yeah – big deal – anyone can work that out.

I’d like to make just a couple of suggestions. First beware those who are trying to suggest you can make a regular and stable income from trading stocks, options or the Forex. I’ve been trading for 12 years and taught trading for 8 years to a range of types of people, and I can tell you this: it is not as simple as those trying to get you involved would lead you to believe. Can it be done? Yes, of course. But there is a learning curve and it can be both steep and expensive. If you don’t have money to spare now is not the time to lose what little you have. That is just my opinion.

Now that I’ve suggested what not to do, what can you do? We can’t actually tell you as everyone’s situation is different, so I’ll outline a little of what we have done.

• Kept expenses right down, paying off the credit card each month
• Grow our own vegetables. We garden here on pure sand and so it takes a lot of horse manure to keep the plants fed.
• Cook all food from basic raw ingredients
• When we went vegetarian our shopping costs dropped by 40%, which rather surprised me
• Budget to keep on learning. We have set up at least 6 different websites over the last years as we have endeavoured to learn how to make money on the internet. As learning goes it isn’t horrendously expensive – tens of dollars here, a few hundred there and the occasional thousand. Compare that with the cost of going to university and it is cheap. You only need persistence. And along the way you find out which bits of internet marketing you really don’t want to do. Eventually you will stumble across a particularly good way of making money on the internet that really suits your personality. Then you go for it.
• If all else fails we intend to rent our spare rooms. We really don’t want to have to do it but we will if we must.