This unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times will help you avoid the potentially risky limitations of conventional investment perspectives and help you design an investment strategy that works for you and your household. The next 20 years will not be a simple extension of the previous 20 years. Everything that is currently seen as permanent--the Savior State, the financialized economy, cheap energy-- is visibly unsustainable. Status Quo personal finance strategies--"buy and hold" and global diversification--are doomed by their reliance on increasingly unstable global markets and a myopic focus on the rearview mirror, for the recent past is no longer an accurate guide to the future. Uniquely troubled times require an unconventional understanding and "tool kit" of investment strategies. This comprehensive guide offers practical ideas for everyone, from those seeking to protect 401Ks or IRAs to entrepreneurs to those with more time than money to invest in their future. This book offers a broad spectrum of strategies for investing your human, social and financial capital in low-risk, decentralized, diversified assets that increase resiliency and self-reliance. Topics include systemic risk, the spectrum of potential investments, gold, hedging, relative value, hybrid work, income streams, ecosystems of local enterprise and the essential tools of lower-risk investing.

With the soaring cost of higher education, has the value a college degree been turned upside down. College tuition and fees are up 1000% since 1980. Half of all recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed, revealing a deep disconnect between higher education and the job market. It is no surprise everyone is asking: Where is the return on investment? Is the assumption that higher education returns greater prosperity no longer true? And if this is the case, how does this impact you, your children and grandchildren? We must thoroughly understand the twin revolutions now fundamentally changing our world: The true cost of higher education and an economy that seems to re-shape itself minute to minute. The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy clearly describes the underlying dynamics at work - and, more importantly, lays out a new low-cost model for higher education: how digital technology is enabling a revolution in higher education that dramatically lowers costs while expanding the opportunities for students of all ages. "The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy" provides clarity and optimism in a period of the greatest change our educational systems and society have seen. "The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy" offers everyone the tools needed to prosper in the Emerging Economy.

You hear it everywhere: the days of good jobs, great careers - even with a college degree - are over and dead. That the economy has become so mystifyingly controlled, convoluted and convulsive that a lifetime career has become a fantasy pursuit for chumps. In this bewildering environment, how do you get direction, and more importantly, move forward? In Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy, respected financial blogger Charles Smith (oftwominds.com) turns the conventional wisdom on its head. This book delivers the insight and positive action plan to get you employed. Just starting out? Laid off? Trying to restart you career? Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy arms you with the knowledge you need. Are you a parent, grandparent, friend or counselor helping others sort education and career options? Get a Job, Build a Real Career, and Defy a Bewildering Economy assays the current economic maelstrom to give you a fresh, invigorating perspective - and the competitive edge - to understand how to get a job, and build the career you want. This book is designed to tilt the odds in your favor, whether you are a high school or college student, a recent college graduate pondering graduate school or someone re-entering the workforce after a layoff.

Things are falling apart-that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Readers of my blog oftwominds.com asked me to explain why in a clear, comprehensive way, and then present solutions. This book is my answer. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand. We will cover the five core reasons why things are falling apart: 1. Debt and financialization 2. Crony capitalism and the elimination of accountability 3. Diminishing returns 4. Centralization 5. Technological, financial and demographic changes in our economy Increasingly complex and costly systems weakened by diminishing returns collapse under their own weight and are replaced by systems that are simpler, faster, better and affordable. If we cling to the old ways, our system will disintegrate. If we want sustainable prosperity rather than collapse, we must embrace a new model of finance, government and community that is Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable. We are not powerless. Not accepting responsibility and being powerless are two sides of the same coin: once we accept responsibility, we become powerful.

Crossing swords on the cyber-battlefield of online auctions, curmudgeons Alexia and Ross each win rare collectibles the other needs to escape financial doom. Each recruits a young neighbor (Kylie and Robin) to coax the key collectible from the other. Their schemes go awry and the resulting complications push all four to the brink of financial and romantic ruin. Set in San Francisco, this is a deliciously distracting romantic romp.

An introduction to Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation

We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on financialization has already doomed it. We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State's fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another. The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution. In the shared imagination, the word conjures up images of violent overthrow of a political order. In this book, revolution describes a blossoming of understanding so profound that it leads to the peaceful transformation of our social order, economy and culture. Our distance from concentrations of wealth and power does not render us powerless; we become powerful when we renounce the lies and complicity that enable the Status Quo's doomed dominance. History is not fixed; it is in our hands. We cannot await a remote future transition to transform our lives. Revolution begins with our internal understanding and reaches fruition in our coherently directed daily actions in the lived-in world. It's easy to confuse faith and political ideology. We resist changing our understanding, as we experience this transition as instability. But changing our minds does not require changing our faith; rather, the firmness of our faith-in our Creator, in truth, in our ability to help others and prevail-is the bedrock that gives us the discipline and resolve to confront the brutally unwelcome facts of our circumstances and make coherent plans accordingly.

This indispensable guide to the next twenty years of global turmoil and transformation weaves the full spectrum of disciplines--history, political economy, ecology, energy, marketing, investing, health, and the psychology of happiness--into a uniquely comprehensive understanding that offers every thinking person practical principles for not just surviving but prospering in the difficult decades ahead.

Verona Uyeki is in a romantic pickle she never expected; three men claim to love her, but she only loves one. Two want to marry her, but not the one she is mad for. Beset by family pressures and precarious finances, Verona must respond by Sunday to a suitor's sudden ultimatum. On the weekend she must decide between the three, her first love pays her a surprise visit in San Francisco. What a young woman from Hawaii remembers, and discovers about herself, is also unexpected....

After his last one-night stand--a new baby and a crushing mortgage came hand in hand-- the last thing Hollywood has-been Hayward West expected was to fall in love. But as 19-year old Valentina, fresh from a border crossing, wolfed down four tamales in a row, he was wildly, uncontrollably, passionately in love. She needed $25,000 to save her father, and he needed $250,000 to stave off bankruptcy. There was a way to raise the cash and win the woman he desired, but it required a marriage--a marriage of many things...

Not everyone who served in the Desert War returned home untroubled. When all the other cures for a wounded soul have failed, then action may be the only cure left. An exploration of faith, fate, loss and destiny, and the unforeseen powers of self-change.

"Standard Model" marketing is in crisis, as it is mal-adapted to the global era of extended turmoil we are entering. This is a primer on how to build new, enduring ties to customers and stakeholders in the coming era of crisis by leveraging the largely misunderstood power of weblogs and New Media--"The Power Yet to Come." The world is entering an extended era of disruption caused by the intersection of four mutually reinforcing cycles: 1. Peak oil, or the depletion cycle/end-game of the global economy's complete dependence on inexpensive, readily available petroleum/fossil fuels. 2. The cycle of credit expansion and contraction (approximately 60-70 years), which is now beginning the transition from unsustainable credit expansion (bubble) to renunciation of debt (credit collapse) and global depression. 3. The generational cycle (4 generations or approximately 80 years) of American history which leads to nation-changing social, political and economic upheaval. 4. The 100+ year cycle of price inflation and stagnation of wages' purchasing-power. This short book explains how enterprises of all sizes and scales can use the critical leverage points offered by weblogs and New Media to construct a new sustainable business model based on trust and knowledge rather than "branding."

Garrett Trask needed a job, badly--and this weird one would do. If only he knew ....