Image via Wikipedia

Right now, you want to be in CASH. Saving cash, stashing cash.  i’ve moved my cash from a large national bank to a smaller, local bank with ZERO exposure to anything Wall Street and a higher reliability rating.  You can find out how your bank stacks up at Bankrate’s Safe & Sound Ratings. More bank closings are coming though, some say numbering in the hundreds.

Now that the FDIC is insuring deposits up to $250,000 (temporarily, through December 31, 2009), it’s feeling a little safer out there, but still – could the Feds handle a run on banks?  If you’re concerned about safety, keeping your cash in a savings account that pays .025% isn’t all that much better than keeping it under your mattress.  And who wants to be standing in line when they close the doors?

Some financial talking heads like Jim Cramer are saying keep anything you need for the next five years in CASH.  My suggestion is, keep anything you bring in in the next two years in cash too!  Unless you like gambling, what would be the point of putting your money into the market right now?  The market hasn’t hit bottom yet, and having cash when it does look like it’s finally pulling up is the best position to be in.

We’ll be posting ways to find as much cash as you can as fast as you can, by tweaking your budget, saving, and making more money.

• Calculating Your Bank’s Health

I can’t believe there are so many talking heads – notably, on CNN (Gerri Willis), but also Fox Business (Dave Ramsey), CNBC and others – still telling us to keep putting our money away in a retirement fund, because if you’re retiring in 10+ years, you want to keep averaging your investments… OK, so let me get this straight: The S&P 500 has had its worst DECADE on record, and it’s likely to keep going down or flat for the next 2-5 years, and you should keep putting money there??  When a huge portion of the index is financial companies?

This is why Jim Cramer has for a long time said to ONLY put into a 401(K) enough to get a match if you have one, otherwise  GO ELSEWHERE. I recommend a self-directed ROTH account, where you can invest in individual bond funds, stocks, commodity ETFs etc.  Whatever you think of Cramer, at least he’s telling people to be cautious and not to just keep blindly throwing money down the short-term drain.

Robert Kiyosaki also makes sense: he dislikes defined benefit plans for the precise reason that (1) people don’t know enough about investing to avoid danger (like, emailing or calling in to the cable news shows for advice about how to invest???)  and (2) you have NO CONTROL over your money and how it works for you!  If the market underperforms for 10 years, and you only have variations of the S&P 500 to invest in through your employer’s 401(K) plan, you can’t avoid a bad market.  How does that help anyone financially?

I am going to post a page with links to the people telling you to invest in the market, because in a year or two from now, I want to review their advice… so stay tuned…