Don't Panic - Be Resolute

Daughter One and Three along with partner Lakeview Coffee all had posts today about the economic situation and what were people thinking, doing, and what could happen if...

I am not older than dirt, but I am old enough to have experienced -

• Two gasoline crises where we had to wait in lines for up to an hour just to fill our tank of gas (right here in the USA)
• A year when the prime interest rate was OVER 20% - think about that - think about all your loans based on 20% or more interest rates.
• An almost 10 year period where interest rates never dropped below 8%
• An recession so bad that everyone predicted that Ohio, Michigan and the rest of the Mid-West would have to be shut down never to return
• Black Monday 1987 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 22.6% of its value in one day!
• The recessions of 74, 80-82, 89-92
• The bubble bursts of LBO's in the late 80's, housing in California in the early 90's, two REIT busts in 74 and the early 90's, oil and gas in the mid-80's when Houston looked like a ghost town, and the dot.com bust of 2000

Also interspersed with all that I also fit in getting fired with three kids under the age of 5 and a wife who was not working at the time and a business failure where I had leveraged just about everything I had.

I can tell you with great authority -

Good times follow bad times follow good times follow bad times...if it's up it will go down...if it's down it will go up.

Everyone has a choice. They can mentally get caught up with every wave and disturbance that occurs or they can understand that though they are not the master of the world around them, they are the master of their own resoluteness.

In the end when things are tough those who are resolute and who can stay calm and who are determined to make the best of whatever situation, tend to ride out the storms.