If you are spending more money each month than you bring in, make changes this month in ways too numerous to count.
Figure out how to live with one car--or no car at all, using bikes and public transportation and your own two feet.
Relearn how to do things for yourself--fix things, build things, create things of your own devising and be proud when they do not look like things you would have chosen in a store. Begin to realize that "professional" is often another word for "corporate." Be proud of the nuances of objects that are hand-made.
Live and contribute to and celebrate your community. Support its local businesses and manufacturers, craftsmen, tradesmen and farmers. You can't do everything for yourself, but when you have to spend money with others, try to keep that money within your community.
Reexamine every insurance company with whom you do business. Choose those companies that seem aware of the need to change how they do business to address current global realities. There is green car and home insurance. There are insurance companies that cover alternative health approaches. Find them. Do business with them.
When we become hypnotized by the countless glistening messages that promise us happiness if we will only buy more things, we are truly fools. Our expenditures keep us enslaved to an economic system careening out of control. All we have to do is step away from this game that brings anxiety, not happiness.
But if we are a little better off, if we have a retirement account, for example, or a stock portfolio, or investments of some kind, we can reinvent our country's concept of patriotism. We can pay the 10% early withdrawal fee, we can pay the taxes, and we can take the money we have left after those "costs' and apply them to investments that will actually help us.
Look at it this way. If extreme weather and its costs continue to plague our planet, and to ravage the bottom lines of corporations and governments, how likely is it that our retirement "savings' will be there for us to spend in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years? When corporations continue to expand as if oil supplies are not dwindling, how long will it be before Wall Street crashes again? When we fear the "penalties' and leave our retirement funds in existing corporate structures, we fund Wall Street, we fund business as usual, and participate in creating our own demise.
With the money you pull out of your retirement account or investment portfolio, you could:
Pay off your home mortgage?
Install a solar array on your roof?
Improve a vegetable garden and put up a small greenhouse?
Significantly improve your home's insulation, windows, and doors?
Invest in a local business?
Help out one or more people in your community who are not in as good a position as you are?
Or if cashing out your retirement account, in whole or in part, is a course you just can't take, find an investment counselor who will truly invest your money according to your ethical principles. In that way you can contribute to the social good and provide for your retirement.
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