Friday, December 5, 2008

College not as useful during a depression

What I'm trying to get at here is that having a trade like a doctor, lawyer, Nurse, Plumber, Electrician, Carpenter, farmer etc. might be useful to your survival during an extreme recession or depression. However, it is important to note that college educated people without a necessary trade for survival were homeless right alongside the uneducated. So, in a recession a necessary trade is the most useful.

People will always need Doctors and nurses, especially the rich who can still afford them. People will always need carpenters to repair their houses and roofs and electricians to repair their electrical problems and plumbers to repair their sinks and bathtubs and bathrooms. But the average degree during a depression including junior bankers, stockbrokers, salespeople of every kind often are jobless during these times. Do the research. I grew up with relatives who made it through the great depression so I heard all about it much more than I ever wanted to. However, now I'm grateful for every thing they told me. I learned about it all as a child in the 1950s and teenager and young man in the 1960s. Everything they said is now useful including the part about when banks fail and being sure to take your money out or put it in a safety deposit box in a bank or home safe or even burying it in your yard before the bank fails. So far our government is able to cover the losses so many banks haven't failed. But how long will that last? It is very important to be observant and to try to keep enough cash easily available to last at least 2 months or more. In some situations it might be useful to have 6 months to 1 year of money available. Another problem is that sometime in the spring or summer after all the other currencies except maybe the Indian Rupee and the Chinese Yuan have crashed the dollar may crash too. The reason for this is most of the world is based upon the dollar so people right now are scrambling to convert their currencies into dollars which artificially drives up the dollar. However, after all these currencies crash then the dollar will likely crash too. Then watch out. I'm not really sure what to convert to at this time. You should do some research and then maybe you will know and can tell the rest of us.

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