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Tips for Living with Very Little Money

It is during times like these that I find renewed cause to be thankful for the road my life has taken. I grew up in a rural farming environment of meager means and little changed as I grew older. Hard work for little pay was the norm and I had to learn to get by on the proverbial shoestring. That was a time when the American dream was coming into full bloom and virtually anyone could climb the ladder to middleclass and beyond with relative ease. It seems, however, that I was always too distracted with life to pursue a course in fame and fortune.

Obviously we have a right to think that life and the pursuit of financial ease just naturally follow one another in the grand scheme of things, but for some reason it seems that some folk never quite get these two eggs together in the same basket. Some folk seem destined to chase rainbows, butterflies, bumblebees and visions on a distant horizon; you know, all those little things in life that are free. These are folks for whom the old adage, "the best things in life are free" holds particular meaning, a point which brings me to the most relevant tip I can think of for living with very little money: an extreme, complete psychological makeover.

For a variety of reasons America became known around the world as the land of financial opportunity; the "promised land that flowed with milk and honey." Now that the opportunity icon of the world is limping along on broken dreams, the most regrettable thing about it all is the scores of folk who have gotten caught up in financial disaster. There simply are no easy answers and that vision on the horizon seems to have crashed and burned. Furthermore, almost anyone is more qualified than I am at suggesting tips for financial cost cutting, but learning to live life to its fullest and enjoy doing so on far less than dreamed of and sought after is quite another matter altogether.

What I am suggesting is that there has never been a better time in recent history for the average citizen to pause and reevaluate life's priorities. This is a time of golden opportunities that usually go unnoticed. Once a revised budget is laid out, credit debt is negotiated and settled, grocery coupons are cut and collected and the dust begins to clear, the real work of learning to live life without many of the frills and thrills, bells and whistles begins to crystallize. For many folk this proposition is cause for great depression. Many folk have come to define

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