Personal Finances Stabilize

There’s definitely good news here in Glimmerland. Like the U.S. economy, which according to many recent reports from government and private analysts is stabilizing, personal finances in this country also appear to be nearing a bottom.

You may have lost your job. But if you can’t find another one, that simply means your job prospects haven’t gotten worse. They have bottomed out. Stabilized.

Lost your home to foreclosure? There’s now an amazing opportunity to move into a FEMA trailer that for some reason is renting at a very modest monthly rate.

Health insurance often disappears when a job is lost. But applications for Medicaid are still being accepted. Financially hard-pressed states who pay half the program’s costs may hit you with an avalanche of paperwork and a long administrative wait to get into the program—if you’re accepted at all. But since they were doing this anyway before the bottom fell out of the economy, the situation can rightfully be called stable.

In a definite sign of improvement, debt collection calls have fallen off dramatically. You can’t get blood from a stone. Talk about a glimmer!

Everything is cheaper now because we’ve finally whipped inflation. We all know this because all the experts assert its true. Of course the cost of bread and milk products and prescription drugs are still way up from a year ago, but why focus on luxuries so few people need. Just put some low price gas in the old clunker and drive downtown to scarf up bargains. With luck, maybe you won’t even get a parking ticket, whose cost naturally is not computed when compiling inflation numbers.

Some things we can all agree are real signs of economic progress. The guys at Goldman Sachs are reported to be expecting record bonuses this quarter. It was also reported just today that the Citi folks might be getting a 50 percent base salary raise to compensate for the nasty government’s restrictions on their own bonuses. Sure. We still might have some personal financial problems as we near our personal bottoms. But as long as the Wall Street crowd is doing well, its a green shoot that brightens the lives of us all.