Chapter One


All Eyes on the Road Ahead


Exhale. The eye of the financial hurricane has passed. The storm that hit in the summer of 2008 and continued to batter the global economy and your personal finances through 2009 is slowly—ever so slowly—receding. The worst is over. You survived. We survived.

Now comes the really hard work: rebuilding.

IRAs, 401(k)s and 529 college savings plans must be rebuilt in the wake of the devastating bear market.

Budgets have to be put in place that account for the new world order in which the penalties for having credit card debt and no emergency savings are unthinkable. You know as well as I do: You must find a way to get rid of the debt and build your savings.

Your approach to homeownership must be rebuilt to reflect this simple truth: A home is not a liquid investment that will always rise in value. It is shelter, first and foremost. It can also be a terrific asset, but only if you approach it with clear-eyed expectations.

Most important, your sense of security must be rebuilt. There’s the not so small issue of our collective national bill for what has happened; the current $1.4 trillion federal deficit is expected to rise to $9 trillion by 2019. But on a more personal note you are grappling with the realization that your pre-crash way of life is over. What worked—or more correctly, what you thought worked—is gone, leaving you without your bearings in these new times.

Now that we have weathered the worst of the storm, you’re onto the next challenge: Where do we go from here?

Toward Lasting Security

When I wrote the original Action Plan for 2009, it was with a laser focus on...