Who is Playing Us?

We're being played. That much is obvious to many of us. The question is who is playing us? Wall Street, the media, politicians of all stripes, other forces...who? I think they all are to one degree or another and it's sickening. The economic crisis only emphasizes how little control we have over some major areas in our lives. Or does it?

We could all live debt free and keep our money under our mattresses or in insured savings accounts. Obviously living debt free and within our means is the way to go and what we should also expect (or at least I expect) our government to do but realistically this is not the situation for many Americans, my family included, and our government.

How do we change? How do we dig ourselves out?

Getting out of debt is something that has been very much on my mind of late. If the market were in better shape I think we would seriously consider selling our home and paying off all debt and then reassessing before deciding what to do about purchasing a new home and where. But the market sucks here (when we moved in there were two or three houses, including ours, on the market; now there are at least 30 [more if you count the empty units in the new ecovillage]- this is a town of 2500) and I'll be honest, we're very happy with our son's school and he's been settling in really well. We would both be reluctant to disrupt that unless it were truly necessary. It is unlikely we could afford another home in our town for anything less than what we pay for a mortgage now.

We keep doing what we can to pay down debt and avoid new debt but it's difficult. There's no wiggle room in our budget anymore. Okay that's not true. We could cancel the cable and get back a bit there and cancel my cell phone. That would bring a little bit back as well. I've been trimming what we buy at the store and farm pretty extensively but with the rising costs it's only balancing out to what my food budget was (we never increased it to keep pace with price increases and I pull my gas money partially from that budget as well).

We could take out a home equity loan and roll all the debt into one payment. It's very tempting. It would be a much smaller payment than what we pay for each debt seperate every month but it would mean adding a debt burden with higher interest than some of what we're paying currently. The tempting part of this is that we'd be able to save pretty aggressively and build up our savings cushion again (and quickly).

I don't know what the right answer is.

In a way I feel like our struggle mirrors the national struggle (though on a far smaller scale of course!). But no one is offering to bail us out. We're not asking the government to bail us out. I feel really conflicted about all of this. Clearly something needs to be done to save us all. Our retirement funds are tanking and consumers are getting hit from all sides. No doubt we'll continue to bear the brunt of it all. Yes the wealthy will lose money but I doubt many will lose everything. But how many millions of regular folks are there who are losing their nest eggs? How many will lose their jobs and be pushed over the brink to bankrupcy as a result?

What is the responsible solution? What is a fair solution?