My husband has a great job in a stable industry, but he's 63. Two years ago, we thought by this year he'd be officially retired -- doing a little consulting, but taking the winter off so we could spend the cold months somewhere warm. I have a home-based business that has always offered flexibility. Together, we were looking forward to a more leisurely life.

The economic slowdown has made us rethink our plans. My husband continues to work at his old job -- usually 50 or 60 hours a week -- and I'm not slowing down either because we and those who depend on us need what we earn.

We're not alone in this. A survey conducted for AARP found that nearly 20 percent of the people in our age group have postponed retirement. In most ways we're lucky. Overall, 66 percent of people older than 55 are having trouble paying for essential items such as food, gas and medicine. Fortunately, we don't have those troubles.

But we do worry about our grown children who have found this tough economy a drag on independence. Our two oldest children are economically solid citizens. They got their careers off the ground before the economy soured. But our younger ones face bigger challenges.

The short answer to the question, should I worry about the market meltdown? Yes. And, duh.

The long answer: In many ways, I'm lucky. Having been mired in debt since graduating from college in 1992 and embarking on the rewarding (but not necessarily lucrative) profession of writing, I haven't had much to lose in the 401K and investments department. And even if I did have a hefty 401K and numerous investments, I'm 38 years old. I think it's safe to say that any Generation X'er or young Baby Boomer shouldn't worry too much about how their savings has been affected. I know that in my case, even if I wanted to retire at age 65--and being a writer, I'm kind of hoping to be at my computer until I keel over at the age of 106-- that's 27 years away. In some ways, that's a lifetime, although, in other ways, it's just around the corner. My point is, the stock market is going to have a lot more ups and downs and bubbles and bursts in the next 27 years.

So in the long-term, do I think someone my age should worry? No.

But in the short term, I'm glad I'm content with the house I bought in 2000, shortly before getting married and about 18 months before becoming a father, because we're not going to be moving any time soon, if, um, ever. I don't have enough saved for a downpayment on a new mortgage, and my credit history isn't going to inspire any mortgage bankers to fight over me. Meanwhile, with my old Saturn having finally keeled over a few weeks ago, I need a new car and already understand that if I'm going buy one, I'm going to either have to save up the purchase price--or accept the fact that the interest rate offered by many lenders is going to be on par with what you'd expect from a loan shark.

Yeah, in the short term, I'm concerned. Maybe even worried.

WalletPop bloggers Bruce Watson and Tracy Coenan have expressed diametrically opposed views about Sheriff Tom Dart of Cook County, Illinois's refusal to evict tenants who had paid their rent in good faith to landlords who had allowed the building to fall into foreclosure. The Sheriff apparently feels that the law in this case is punishing the wrong people.

I can see both sides of the argument, and my opinion is somewhere in between. Laws are not divine decrees, but reflect the consensus of those governed. They change as society changes, and we often play fast and loose with those that, by consensus, no longer reflect our desires. The speed limit is just one example.

Sometimes public attitude changes more quickly than the laws can reflect, throwing us into that gray area that Sheriff Dart is struggling with. Do you disregard one law, and risk inviting similar disregard for other laws? Enforce a law that runs counter to the best interests of the governed, and risk public rebellion?

In this case, I look at the situation and ask, does anyone win by enforcing the eviction notices on rent-paying tenants? Certainly, the tenants lose. I think the eventual property owner loses, too. A property already housing loyal rent paying tenants is a more valuable commodity than one without, in a non-rent-controlled economy. And empty buildings are an invitation to arsonists and copper thieves. If enough people are evicted, public anger could also spark some ugly public demonstrations. Watts is not all that far in our past.

The answer here could be a temporary moratorium on evictions foreclosures for tenants who are current on their rent. The county could set up an escrow account into which continued rent payments are made, to be distributed to the eventual property owners. This would shelter the sheriff from charges of non-performance of duty, allow tenants time to relocate, if necessary, and maintain the value of the foreclosed property until it is sold.

I share Tracy's concern that the Sheriff is making decisions that should come from the courts and the politicians, but perhaps his decision is the impetus needed to inspire some creative problem-solving.We could sure use more of that.

Employers everywhere are tightening their belts in response to the current financial crisis. A good deal of employers are already past cutting travel and other expenses and are looking at payroll to keep costs in check. This complicates matters for any employee who is up for a raise right now, myself included. Thankfully CNN has a list of six benefits to barter for if a pay hike is out of the question.

The benefits compiled in partnership with Careerbuilder.com include the following:

• Time off
• Relaxed dress code
• Education opportunities
• Going green bonuses
• Flexible schedules
• Wellness benefits

I found this list to be quite useful since the timing on my negotiation for a raise is what can be referred to as unfortunate to say the least, and I may have to settle for perks rather than cash. While I am a big fan of using perks such as the ability to work from home, flexible schedules and a relaxed dress code to retain employees during good economic times they are a poor substitute for cash when expenses are rising. Have you tried paying your mortgage in casual Fridays? The banks aren't that desperate....yet.

Sadly with the bailout having little positive effect on the stock market it looks like employees looking for compensation will have to make do with perks rather than payment for the time being. Then again if you work for AIG, a recipient of government funding, the perks may be worth it!

I once asked Walter Jon Williams, the science fiction writer, for advice about becoming a professional fiction writer. His first suggestion? Marry a civil service employee. Every writer needs a stable foundation. Luckily, I have that covered.

My supposed retirement funds are spread across multiple 401Ks, IRAs, and pension funds. Following the commonly held wisdom that the market will, in the long run, outpace more staid investments, I've stayed in, watching my mutual funds dwindle and my retirement drift further into the future. Frankly, I don't mind all that much, since I like to work and plan to do so for many years to come.

I do, however, mind on my wife's behalf. She's been a social worker for her entire career, never earning much, but providing us with the insurance umbrella that has allowed me to take on chancy career options. If health care weren't so expensive, she could well anticipate retiring in a couple of years. As it stands now, however, she'll have to work until she's eligible for Medicare; even then, since she's a year older, we'll have to deal with a year when I'm not covered.

In the short run, the impact of the meltdown won't hamstring us. However, if the market continues to bleed, much of our flexibility will disappear, including the option of early retirement. If it bleeds enough, tax revenue shortfalls on the local, state and national level could threaten funding for social welfare programs such as the one for which my wife works.

When civil servants start to lose their jobs, we'll all be crying in our Metamucil.

Read how the financial crisis is affecting other WalletPop bloggers.

As if one trip to a luxury spa resort wasn't enough for American International Group (AIG) following its taxpayer-funded bailout, the company had plans to do it all over again.

50 AIG managers were scheduled to do a deluxe retreat at the Ritz-Carlton resort in Half Moon Bay. The company said it was going to host 150 top-producing agents for educational purposes.

The cost of this "educational opportunity?" Ritz Carlton rooms go for $300 to $1,200 a night, plus high costs for meals, drinks, and entertainment. If the earlier trip is any indication, this whole extravaganza could cost the company around $500,000.

Outrage from taxpayers has led management to cancel this outing, and lawmakers are relieved. Some defended the trips as standard fare for high-level producers for insurance companies. The independent agents win these trips by selling a lot of insurance products. Yet it seems excessive in light of the taxpayer assistance required by AIG.

With taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars of loans made to AIG to help keep them in business, the company needs to find another way to give incentives to the sales force. Standard industry practice or not, these trips don't go over well during a time when belts are being tightened by the little guys. The cancellation of the trip is good news for now. Let's see what AIG comes up with next.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

The steep downturn in the markets has hit senior citizens the hardest. Many of them have seen the value of their portfolios plummet, at a time when they need their money the most.

An elderly widow I will call Mary is one victim. Her husband died a few years ago, leaving Mary, in her early eighties, with a nest egg sufficient to meet her needs for the rest of her life

Shortly after his death, her trusted "investment professional" invested most of her portfolio in two financial stocks. In less than two years, the portfolio lost over $150,000.

The news is not all bad. The brokerage firm made over $50,000 in commissions by excessively trading the balance of her portfolio.

Mary has now entered a nursing home. Her retirement funds are nearly gone. She risks becoming a ward of the state.

It is easy to blame the markets. They did fall in value. But that is precisely how markets are supposed to work. The foundation of all returns is risk. Markets go up and down, usually in cycles.

Mary's problem was the perfect storm of an inappropriately risky asset allocation and an incompetent or greedy broker. She could not afford any meaningful market risk. Her portfolio should have had an allocation of no more than 20% invested in a broadly diversified stock market index fund with the balance of 80% in a low cost index fund benchmarked to the Lehman Bros. Aggregate Bond Index.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Most of it should be focused on poor asset allocation and broker misconduct, not on the markets.

Read how the financial crisis is affecting other WalletPop bloggers.

Dan Solin is a Registered Investment Advisor and the author of The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books 2006) and The Smartest 401(k) Book You'll Ever Read (Perigee Books 2008).

The U.S. economy is in meltdown mode. Or maybe it's more like a lockdown, since the credit markets are essentially frozen. Job losses are on the rise. The real estate bubble has burst. Home foreclosures continue to mount. Gas prices remain high. People are feeling wary and uncertain. About the only thing I am sure of is more uncertainty.

Teetering at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation and thrown in with the GenXers, a group that has little, if any reasonant identity, I feel a bit strange. Born in 1964, I don't identify with either generation and never had any expectations that Social Security, pensions or 401ks would be there for me anyway. I lived through the long gas lines of the mid-1970s, the Reagan years, the recession of the 1990s and the tech bubble. When the market softened post-9/11, many of my friends were laid off from their jobs in publishing, finance, public relations and other fields. At the time, I felt incredibly lucky to have been spared. I still feel lucky.

Here's why: Somehow, I managed to buy my first home less than two years ago in New York City. I secured a mortgage fairly easily when loans were much easier to come by. I bought a tiny sliver of the American dream. I had a full-time job that enabled me to do this, I'd saved money for years and had a little pixie dust to help me out.

Things have changed a bit: I'm a freelancer, i.e., I am self-employed. That means I pay for my own health insurance, pay quarterly taxes to the federal government and to the state where I reside and finance my own retirement account. Most of my career, I was fortunate to have full-time staff jobs where benefits were offered, but the last job I had was at a startup that offered no health insurance. The one before that offered health insurance but the employer didn't contribute to it and there was no 401 k or pension plan. I still felt fortunate.

When it comes to dealing with the personal impact of economic forces, I'm a little out of touch. For most of the last ten years, I lived in the comforting, semi-socialistic embrace of academia, which means that I was able to pretend that ups and downs in the market didn't really matter to me. As an instructor at a state-funded university, I enjoyed a great health care plan, free schooling, discounted books, free public transportation, and a pretty decent retirement fund. Of course, I wasn't paid all that much, but the birth of my daughter cost us less than $500, including all prenatal and postnatal care, so I couldn't really complain.

A little over a year ago, I moved to New York and, in January of this year, I began working as a freelance writer. While this has gone fairly well so far, I'm still in the "building my brand" stage of growth, which is a nice way of saying that I'm probably making only a little bit more than the average McDonald's employee. Luckily, my wife has found great jobs in the New York office employee milieu, and has more than picked up the slack from my decreased income. She is currently working for an engineering firm that designs environmentally-sustainable building systems. Her company is in great shape, and has a full slate of ambitious, lucrative projects on the table. If the New York real estate market continues to do even moderately well, then their next few years should witness record earnings and growth.

Unfortunately, the American building industry greatly relies on credit. While New York floor space is at a premium, new buildings are built on credit, renovations are made on credit, materials are purchased on credit, and contractors are paid on credit. If credit dries up, so will the building jobs and so will the salaries, including my wife's.

Last night, I put her on a plane to Dubai, where she is going to a building conference as a representative of her company. A year ago, many New York architectural and engineering firms were turning down Dubai contracts; today, they're courting them. I don't know if my wife's firm is going to open an office in Dubai, but I do know that she is a hell of a saleswoman and there are a lot of people in the UAE with money to spend on new buildings. At the moment, there's a pretty good chance that I'll be celebrating my next birthday on the shores of the Persian Gulf!

Read how the financial crisis is affecting other WalletPop bloggers.

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. He tans up really nicely and will probably look totally hot in a keffiyah.

You've probably seen the headlines or news, especially if you watch CNN.

CNN recently released a poll, in which it surveyed 1,000 Americans. About 60% of respondents believe that it's very likely, or at least somewhat likely, that the nation will have another depression.

I'm sure it's a good survey, and I don't quibble with CNN polling people to see what their attitudes are toward the economy. That's a hallmark of journalism, checking with the mindset of the public.

The U.S. government passed a $700 billion economic bailout package in an effort to stabilize the flailing banking sector. So far, it hasn't worked as hoped and the financial crisis has deepened since the law was approved. That's the bad news.

The good news is that there is a lot more than help for just banks in the 451-page legislation. Lawmakers added hundreds of other "sweeteners" to make the bill more popular with the public. See if you can benefit from any of the following provisions:

More insurance for bank deposits: Now your bank deposits are protected up to $250,000 for each account. Formerly, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) backed your deposits up to $100,000. The increase is temporary, but is likely to be extended.

AMT Reform: Fewer taxpayers are going to get hit with the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, a parallel tax code that was originally intended to make sure wealthy people paid their fair share of taxes, but which has increasingly slammed middle-income earners. Basically, unless you make more than $100,000 for single taxpayers or $175,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly, you shouldn't have to worry about the AMT due to the change.

It's been scary reading the headlines. It's been scarier reading my family's investment reports from Fidelity. A nice little nest egg that my husband's parents diligently built up through the course of his lifetime has lost 20% of its value in 2008 alone. Thankfully, we own our apartment and are mortgage-free so we are, in some ways, better off than most these days. Just two years ago, we too had an adjustable mortgage but luckily paid that off before the seven-year deadline. I also paid off my college loans before I married, and we try to live within our means. I still wear my pregnancy jeans three years after my daughter's birth because they're in good shape.

But that doesn't mean we don't worry about the future. My husband and I both work in print journalism, which, if you read the stories, is a dying industry. I haven't had a cost of living raise in six years. We are also raising our daughter in Manhattan, one of the most expensive cities in the world. With more and more families staying in the Big Apple, competition for spots at good public schools is tough and will only get tougher when she reaches kindergarten age. And the idea of private school is frankly nightmare-inducing. We're talking some $30,000 a year.

So what to do? My brother's friend, a financial adviser in New York State, says people like us, those in their late 30s with two modest incomes and little debt, should sit tight and ride things out. In fact, he says that now is the time to invest in mutual funds and bond funds that provide quarterly dividends. These dividends can be used to buy more shares at today's basement prices. When the market rebounds and share prices go up, we will have made money. He also recommends participating in our employers' 401K plans, opening or putting money into our IRAs and setting up an education fund for our daughter. "Buy low, sell high, those are the basics," he adds. "Pulling your money out now means you'll suffer losses. And too often, people wait too long to get back into the market and lose out on the gains when the market does come back."

It seems that many of our congresscritters took advantage of the public outcry for a quick passage to pack a bunch of pork into the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It seems ridiculous, but members of Congress took advantage of a bill meant to save the economy to fund questionable programs in their home states. While many contend that the pork was needed to get enough votes for the bill to pass, you'd think the threat of martial law would have given senators enough reason to pass the bill without the added fat.

Taxpayers for Common Sense compiled a list of the Top 10 pieces of pork stuck into the bailout bill, the most ludicrous listed below.

1. Tax break for manufacturers of wooden arrows used by children -- Cost $2 million
2. 7 year tax extension for Race car Tracks -- Cost $100 million
3. Tax incentives for film and TV production companies -- Cost $478 million

These are just a few of the crazier examples of pork attached to the bailout bill, the rest of the list encompassing billions of dollars in expenditures is sure to turn your stomach.

Not all pork has to be bad, there are many other extras added into the bailout bill which in my opinion fall under the bacon category, as in pork that tastes good!

Even though I don't have nearly as much to lose in my retirement account as my elders, the sad state of our economy has still had an effect on my life plans, but not all for the worse. I share many of the same concerns as they do regarding the strength of our economy and the overall health of our financial institutions but by virtue of my youth I see fewer immediate downsides and a silver lining inside the gloomy forecast.

Since we didn't get caught up in the fever of home ownership that swept America recently, my wife and I aren't in the position to lose our home because of the rising interest rates that many others were hit with. Even though we dodged the subprime bullet, one of my biggest concerns is that when we are ready to purchase a home in the near future we won't be able to get a mortgage with favorable terms thanks to constricting credit.

As far as retirement goes, I'm still socking away as much as I can in the hope that I make out well when the upswing happens, but I'm worried about being called upon some day to finance the retirement of my older coworkers as well as the remnants of the bailout package. Speaking of employment; I'm not losing sleep over my livelihood as a result of the current crisis because two of my three jobs are in higher education, an industry which I think will fare better than others.

While I am concerned that it may be harder to get a mortgage in the near future, the current housing slump means that we may be able to purchase a house sooner than we had anticipated. With sinking housing prices and several forms of government incentives, it's likely that we'll be able to purchase a home that fits both our needs and wants without overextending our reach.

All things considered, I'm concerned but not distressed by the current financial crisis. At 25 I have plenty of time to build my retirement savings and have multiple sources of income, none of which are attached to the banking industry. I have my worries about the financial well being of my older family members, the overall health of the economy, and the leadership of the country; but I am confident in myself and my generation's ability to cope with the current situation.

Mortgage backed derivatives. Credit default swaps. LIBOR. Leverage. The credit crisis now unfolding in sickening shades of desperation is complex, and difficult for even adults to understand (politicians in particular, apparently). But what do kids think? I asked my 11-year-old daughter Anna what she thought of the current situation.

Do you understand what's going on in the financial markets today?
No, but it sounds really scary. Ms. Harper, my teacher, says the banks crashed or something. And the prices of houses got too high and now nobody's buying anything.

Does it worry you?
Mom says we're going to be hurt down the road, so I'm kind of scared.

Why?
I'm scared what the effect is. I'm scared Mom might lose her job. And I'm scared because America is getting really bad. It's in debt and we're in a war. It's like the world is getting really bad.

What's the worst that could happen to you?
We wouldn't really have enough money for stuff. Food, stuff, clothes, and we'd have to get all our money from Daddy, and then he'd lose his job. And then we'd live on the streets or something. And I'm not just saying that to sound immature.

What do you think they should do about it?
Not spend so much money on this war in Iraq. Spend more money on hospitals and stuff. Maybe lower the prices of houses. And food. Mom's all like, "$4.50 for a bag of chips!?"

Do you think all of this will affect you when you're a grown up?
If it passes, I'll just say to my kids, when I was young, there was like another Great Depression, but then we got over it. But it colleges are too expensive then I'll have to go to a cheaper college or do something else. I'd learn a trade.