Ominous October Leading Way to Better November?

October has been a terrible month for many people – financially speaking. Even so, when I went to the grocery store and Wal-mart before Halloween, spending seemed to be in full swing, as everyone was out buying, buying buying – which is what we need consumers (us) to do in order to get this economy back into full swing and make the US the biggest and best economy in the world again. We also need for the US dollar to regain it’s strength as one of the strongest national currencies, and get ahead of the Euro at least a little.

I’d definitely feel better about that one, considering I hire out some of my work to Europe, and my American money only buys about half of what it did before our dollar crashed! Enough about me though. Sentiment in October was very brutal, and most people admitted in polls that they feared for their jobs, and that if the American economy didn’t get back on track, there would be massive layoffs and repositioning of companies due to consumer spending being down and a general feeling of malaise about buying and spending.

I’m in the same boat. I work for an insurance company (that’s my day job lol), and I’m definitely not immune to any layoffs that the company may decide they need to do. My department is already trying to not rehire when anyone leaves the company, and are trying to spread their work to other people instead, which is saving them money. A lot of companies right now are trying to figure out how to cut costs, and unfortunately one of the ways they do that is to cut their workforce, which is unfortunate.

Many companies took huge hits, as did invidividuals, in the stock market in October, where the Dow Jones industrial average dropped precipitously and had everyone panic selling and cashing out, getting into safer investments or converting into cash. This means that companies lost a lot of money, since a lot of companies not only rely on revenue from the service of items that they sell, but they also make a lot of money through investments, and they’ve lost out too.

We also have the fact that people who are close to retirement or are actually in retirement and living off their growth of their funds, lots a lot of money as well since they had their money in the stock market.