No couple goes into marriage thinking they will be the ones who won’t make it. Certainly, at your wedding, you thought you were promising a love that would last a lifetime. Now, for reasons you may not fully understand, that dream seems shattered.

As you try to understand the pain and determine what to do, divorce may look like an appealing way out. “After all,” you might reason, “life is full of second chances. Perhaps I simply married the wrong person, and Mr. or Mrs. Right is still out there somewhere.” You may think you were too young when you married, or that you never really loved your spouse. You just convinced yourself it would be better than being alone. Or maybe you are just tired of the arguing, tired of the lack of communication, tired of the coldness in your relationship. Perhaps you simply want out — period. Or maybe you are hoping against hope that your marriage can be salvaged.

Before you bail out of your marriage, look at what you’ll be diving into. Most people are not prepared for the challenges of post-divorce life.

How would divorce affect me?

Sherry and Rob tried to spare their children the details of their breakup. Their marital problems were further complicated by Rob’s affair with the secretary at the church he was pastoring. Without a college education, Sherry was forced to move back in with her parents, where she continues to live 12 years later. At one point, she attempted to recover the $100,000 in child support Rob hadn’t paid over time but was only able to get $18,500 — barely enough to pay a few of the bills that had been piling up.

Read on

19 huge concerns about the US economy

This is a long story, but you should read it , it is a wake up call and
scary.

CHANGES ARE COMING —-

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to
them. But, ready or not,
here they come…

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office.
They are so deeply  in financial trouble that there is probably no way to
sustain  it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the
minimum  revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail
every day is junk  mail and bills.

2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with
checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to
process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the
eventual  demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post
office.  If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by
mail, the post office  would absolutely go out of business.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn’t read the newspaper.
They certainly don’t subscribe to a daily delivered print edition.  That
may  go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper
online,  get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and
e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an
alliance. They  have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone
companies to develop a  model for paid subscription services.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold
in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about
downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly
changed my mind  when I discovered that I could get albums for half the
price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will
happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview
chapter before you buy.  And the price is less than half that of a real
book. And think of the  convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on
the screen instead of the book, you  find that you are lost in the story,
can’t wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you’re holding a
gadget instead of a book.

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of
local calls, you don’t need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because
they’ve always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra
service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the
same cell provider for no charge against your minutes

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music
industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading.
It’s the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the
people  who would like to hear it.  Greed and corruption is the problem. The
record  labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing.
Over 40% of the  music purchased today is “catalog items,” meaning
traditional music that the  public is familiar with. Older established
artists. This is also true on the live  concert circuit. To explore this
fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out  the book, “Appetite for
Self-Destruction” by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, “Before the
Music Dies.”

7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just
because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from
their  computers. And they’re playing games and doing lots of other things
that take up the  time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows
have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable
rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and
30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It’s time for the cable
companies to be put out of our misery.  Let the people choose what they want
to watch online and through Netflix.

8. The “Things” That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to
own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future.
They  may simply reside in “the cloud.” Today your computer has a hard drive
and you  store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is
on a CD or  DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be.  But all of
that is changing.   Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their
latest “cloud services.”  That means that when you turn on a computer, the
Internet will be built into the operating system.  So, Windows, Google, and
the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it
will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something,
it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay  a monthly subscription fee
to the cloud provider.  In this virtual world, you can access your music or
your books, or your  whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That’s the
good news.  But, will you  actually own any of this “stuff” or will it all
be able
to disappear at any moment in  a big “Poof?” Will most of the things in our
lives be disposable and  whimsical?  It makes you want to run to the closet
and pull out that photo album, grab a  book from the shelf, or open up a CD
case and pull out the insert.

9. Privacy.  If there ever was a concept that we can look back on
nostalgically, it would be privacy.  That’s gone. It’s been gone for a long
time anyway.  There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and
even built into  your computer and cell phone.  But you can be sure that
24/7, “They” know who you  are and where you are, right down to the GPS
coordinates, and the Google Street View.  If you buy something, your habit
is put into a zillion profiles, and  your ads will change to reflect those
habits.  And “They” will try to get you to  buy something else.  Again and
again.   All we will have that can’t be changed are Memories.

19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial”
nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and
lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them,
but the  pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.
It was America   that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.  It
was America that  showed the world how to mass produce everything from
automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American
manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.

But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America . Tens of
thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone.
Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time
period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in
sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest
export is today? Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we
ship out to  the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on
whatever the rest of  the world wants to sell to us. The United States has
become bloated and spoiled  and our economy is now just a shadow of what it
once was. Once upon a time  America could literally out produce the rest of
the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do
consume more than anyone else in the  world. If the deindustrialization of
America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are
we going to be leaving to our children?

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if
the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a
staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to
be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of
the world  in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the
current state  of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single
month America   goes into more debt and every single month America gets
poorer.

So what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for
every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not
have  any idea what is going on around them.

For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to
them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to
awaken  them from their slumber.

The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that
will blow your mind….

#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.
About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were
still  in operation.

#2 Dell Inc., one of America ’s largest manufacturers of computers, has
announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an
investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S.
manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem , North Carolina in November.
Approximately 900  jobs will be lost.

#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were sold worldwide. So how many of them
were manufactured inside the United States ? Zero.

#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if
the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate,
the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.

#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18
percent compared to the same time period a year ago.

#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing
jobs since October 2000.

#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign
affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to
10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at
American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In
2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that
produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul , Minnesota . Approximately 750 good
paying  middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers
in Minnesota   does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing
strategy.

#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in
manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in
manufacturing was in 1941.

#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP.
Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.

#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing
jobs since the year 2000.

#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita
broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.

#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually
lower  in 2010 than it was in 1975.

#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different
products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.

#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every
$1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States .

#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be
three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living
in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor
Americans  in the 51 years that records have been kept.

So how many tens of thousands more factories do we need to lose before we do
something about it?

How many millions more Americans are going to become unemployed before we
all admit that we have a very, very serious problem on our hands?

How many more trillions of dollars are going to leave the country before we
realize that we are losing wealth at a pace that is killing our economy?

How many once great manufacturing cities are going to become rotting war
zones like Detroit before we understand that we are committing national
economic suicide?

The deindustrialization of America is a national crisis. It needs to be
treated like one.