Harvard economist Martin Feldstein says the economic expansion that began when the recession officially ended in 2009 is as bad as he’s ever seen.

Many economists have said the economy is stuck in an extended downturn as opposed to recovering from a recession. Traditionally, recessions are followed by marked recoveries, but that hasn’t been the case today.

“I’m not quite sure what a depression is,” Feldstein tells the Wall Street Journal.

Either the economy is turning down, in which case you’re receding, you’re in a recession, or the economy has reached bottom and is starting up, and then you’re in an expansion,” said Feldstein, a former White House chief economist under Ronald Reagan.

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Often life doesn’t go in the direction we want it to. Does that mean our lives are doomed and we can’t achieve the success we dream of? Let’s be realistic: Everybody fails. Consider the following.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” Disney went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim, California, on the grounds that it would only attract “riffraff.”

Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “nonproductive.” As an inventor, Edison made more than 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb. When a reporter asked him how it felt to fail 1,000 times, Edison said that he didn’t fail all those times, but that the light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4 years old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “subnormal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” He was expelled from school.

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The number of home owners who were put on notice for defaulting on their mortgage payments dropped last month to the lowest level since 2006, RealtyTrac reports.

Meanwhile, foreclosure filings for the eighth straight month also were down as filings fell 33 percent in May compared to a year earlier and 2 percent month-over-month. Also, lenders took back fewer homes in May, the second straight month of declines. And bank repossessions were down in May too — down nearly 30 percent over the last 12 months.

Is this a sign of a recovery in real estate, which has been bogged down by a high number of foreclosures over the last several years?

Experts are still cautious. Lingering delays in banks’ foreclosure process may be the culprit for the declining numbers, they say, and not an overall improving picture of the number of home owners facing foreclosure.

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First, real estate. The price of homes started sliding again, even as the number of homes moving remains near historic lows. Fewer people are buying, and those who are buying need smaller loans for cheaper homes.

Unemployment and — just as significantly — underemployment have consumers sitting on their hands. No one unsure of their future income stream is making large purchases, or starting large ventures. And, even as the official jobless rate creeps downward, many economists believe the under- and unemployed number is over 20% of the workforce.

None of those people will be committing to a large loan.

Meanwhile, interest rates are about as low as they can get. Mortgage rates, for instance, are well under 5%. That means that the loans that are going out are earning less for banks — and aren’t replacing the revenue lost as older loans come off the books.

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Think a gallon of gas is expensive?

Compare the cost of gasoline with some of these common everyday items.   All these examples do NOT imply that gasoline is cheap; they just illustrate how outrageous some prices are.  You may be really shocked by the last one!

This makes one think, and also puts things into perspective.  Just a little humor to help ease the pain of your next trip to the pump…

• Lipton Ice Tea 16 oz $1.19 = $9.52 per gallon.
• Ocean Spray 16 oz $1.25 = $10.00 per gallon.
• Gatorade 20 oz $1.59 = $10.17 per gallon.
• Diet Snapple 16 oz $1.29 = $10.32 per gallon.
• Whiteout 7 oz $1.39 = 25.42 per gallon.
• Brake Fluid 12 oz $3.15 = $33.60 per gallon.
• Scope 1.5 oz $0.99 = $84.48 per gallon.
• Pepto Bismol 4 oz $3.85 = $123.20 per gallon.
• Vick’s Nyquil 6 oz $8.35 = $178.13 per gallon.

And this is the REAL KICKER…

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I just had to share this with you:

10 Ways To Know If You Drink Too Much Coffee

• You answer the door before people knock.
• You ski uphill.
• You just completed another sweater and you don’t know how to knit.
• You grind your coffee beans in your mouth.
• You can take a picture of yourself from ten feet away without using the timer.
• You can type sixty words per minute… with your feet.
• You walk twenty miles on your treadmill before you realize it’s not plugged in.
• Starbucks owns the mortgage on your house.
• You’re offended when people use the word “brew” to mean beer.
• You have a picture of your coffee mug on your coffee mug.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go grab a cup of Jo!

There are four rules of time. The first is that time is perishable. This means that it cannot be saved. In fact, time can only be spent. Because time is perishable, the only thing you can do with it is to spend it differently, to reallocate your time away from activities of low value and toward activities of higher value. But once it is gone, it is gone forever.

Time Is Indispensable The second rule of time is that time is indispensable. All work requires time. No matter what it is you want to do in life, even looking out a window or sleeping in for a few extra minutes, it requires a certain amount of time. And according to the 10/90 Rule, the 10% of time that you take to plan your activities carefully in advance will save you 90% of the effort involved in achieving your goals later. The very act of thinking through and planning your work in advance will dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes you to do the actual job.

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Warren Buffett is worth $45 billion. That wealth isn’t only a factor of savvy investing and good business – the “Oracle of Omaha” is also known as a penny pincher. Buffett still lives in the same Omaha, Neb., home he bought in 1958 for $31,500.

Follow his frugal formula, and you too may wind up with a lot more money than you ever dreamed.

Benefit from the following five tips to build wealth and success.

1. Live Below Your Means. Being wealthy isn’t just a product of your salary or investment prowess; it’s learning how to save.

“We can make a lot of money, you can make a little bit of money, but the second you spend all the money is when people get into trouble. Saving is the key to preserving your wealth,” says Ed Butowsky, managing partner of Chapwood Capital Investment Management, a firm that manages money for wealthy individuals.

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More buyers are paying cash for real estate. About 28 percent of sales were all-cash transactions last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. In October 2008, the rate was 14 percent for comparison.

Indeed, cash buyers made up more than half of all transactions in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area alone last year, and about 42 percent were cash buyers in Phoenix in 2010–which marked a triple rate increase compared to 2008.

The more depressed the housing market, the higher the percentage of a cash deal, economists note.

Cash buyers can often get a 5 percent to 10 percent discount on the asking price of a home than a buyer using a mortgage because sellers often prefer cash deals since they close more quickly and it prevents a bank from changing its mind, says real estate pro Mohammed Siddiq in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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The Law of Investing – investigate before you invest. This is one of the most important of all the laws of money. You should spend at least as much time studying a particular investment as you do earning the money to put into that particular investment.

Check Every Detail Never let yourself be rushed into parting with money. You have worked too hard to earn it and taken too long to accumulate it. Investigate every aspect of the investment well before you make any commitment. Ask for full and complete disclosure of every detail. Demand honest, accurate and adequate information on any investment of any kind. If you have any doubt or misgivings at all, you will probably be better off keeping your money in the bank or in a money market investment account than you would be speculating or taking the risk of losing it.

Money is Easy to Lose The first corollary of the Law of Investing is: “The only thing easy about money is losing it.” It is hard to make money in a competitive market but losing it is one of the easiest things you can ever do. A Japanese proverb says, “Making money is like digging with a nail, while losing money is like pouring water on the sand.”

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There are two great principles for achieving financial success. The first principle is what we call the law of attraction. The law of attraction says that you are a living magnet. It says that your thoughts create a force field of energy that radiates out from you and attracts back into your life people and circumstances in harmony with them. Any thought you have, combined with an emotion, positive or negative, radiates out from you and attracts back into your life the people, circumstances, ideas, and opportunities consistent with it.

How to Attract the Success You Desire

Many people feel that this is perhaps the most important of all mental laws. It says that if you have a very clear idea in your mind of your desired goal, to become wealthy, and you can hold that idea in your mind on a continuing basis, you will inevitably draw into your life the resources that you need in order to achieve it.

Every person who has become wealthy or successful has become wealthy and successful as a result of holding the idea of wealth and success in their mind long enough and hard enough, until they drew into their lives the resources they needed to accomplish it.

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Perhaps the greatest challenge you will ever face in life is the conquest of fear and the development of courage. Fear is, and always has been, the greatest enemy of mankind. When Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was saying that the emotion of fear, rather than the realty of what we fear, is what causes us anxiety, stress, and unhappiness.

When you develop the habit of courage and unshakeable self-confidence, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for you. Just imagine-what would you dare to dream or be or do if you weren’t afraid of anything in the whole world?

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Nothing too fancy or hard to understand here… from the Just-released Case-Shiller index, it’s clear that the housing double dip is here.

The chart (below) depicts the annual returns of the U.S. National, the 10-City Composite and the 20-City Composite Home Price Indices. The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, which covers all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a 1.5% decline in the third quarter of 2010 over the third quarter of 2009. In September, the 10-City and 20-City Composites recorded annual returns of +1.6% and +0.6%, respectively.

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One of your major goals in life should be financial independence. You must aim to reach the point where you have enough money so that you never have to worry about money again. The good news is that financial independence is easier to achieve today than it has ever been before.

The Law of Abundance

We live in an abundant universe in which there is sufficient money for all who really want it and are willing to obey the laws governing its acquisition. People become wealthy because they decide to become wealthy. People are poor because they have not yet decided to become rich.

The world is full of thousands of people who have had far more difficulties to overcome than you could ever imagine, and they’ve gone on to be successful anyway. So can you.

The Law of Exchange

Money is the medium through which people exchange their labor in the production of goods and services for the goods and services of others. The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution. To increase the amount of money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in.

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According to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, national home prices jumped 3.6% in the past year. Prices also climbed 4.4% in the second quarter compared with a 2.8% plunge in the first quarter.   “While the numbers are upbeat, other more recent data on home sales and mortgages point to fewer gains ahead,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s.

Home prices across the country could be substantially lower a year from now, according to Pat Newport, an analyst with IHS Global Insight. “It’s now apparent that the demand for housing is a lot weaker than anyone thought,” he said.  That has resulted in a glut of inventory, which a slew of bank repossessions of foreclosed properties is only making worse.

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