How to Survive the Financial Crisis

There are signs all around us that the world economic crisis is worsening, and this could also affect the US economic recovery, which continues to be fragile. For example, the University of Michigan reported that its confidence index, a key economic indicator, fell dramatically to 74.5 in December from 82.7 in November. Meanwhile, a recent survey revealed that some 40% of Americans regularly live from paycheck to paycheck. It is clear that hard economic times are ahead as the world economic crisis continues to intensify. Here are some ways that you can survive hard economic times.

Reduce the amount of debt that you have. Most households have at least some credit card debt, as well as other kinds of debt such as mortgages and car loans. These debts could easily spiral out of control if you lose your job or even have to suffer a pay cut. You can reduce your debt by paying more than the minimum amount every month and paying down more than you usually do. This requires that you reduce your monthly expenses to free up more money for debt payments. Here, you will have to sit down and make a list of your monthly expenses to see where you can cut down. You might be surprised at how many ways you can cut back your expenses without having to sacrifice your quality of life.

Look for ways to augment your income. The best way to do this is to build a small home business that you can take care of in your spare time. For example, you can enroll to be an affiliate marketer and market a vendor's products on your website or blog. You will be given a special link to the merchant's site, and whenever a visitor to your site clicks on it and makes a purchase, you will earn a small commission. In order to effectively do this, you will have to drive traffic to your site and then place interesting and unique content on it that will encourage visitors to buy the products you're promoting.

Avoid getting into new debt. Once you've paid down a lot of your loans, stay debt-free so that you will not be burdened again. One way that you can do this is to cut up your credit cards once you've paid off the balances on them, and avoid availing of new credit cards, even if they're offered to you on a pre-approved basis. Another is to manage your credit more wisely. There are many credit management strategies that are available from free PDF books download that you will not have to spend a penny on.