Every little bit that you can save is vitally important. It has always been the case and will always be the case, but it is even more magnified now in the economic downturn that America and the rest of the world are in. With so much uncertainty surrounding the future of the employment picture, the stock market, and the economy as a whole it is clearly up to the consumer to make every bit of their savings go a long ways. Many are finding it hard to pay the bills each month and hard to stay in their home, and in the coming months only more people will find this same problem.

It is so frustrating for me when I hear someone say, “Well it’s only a few dollars.” The truth is it may only be a few dollars this time, but if you save $8 or $10 consistently it will add up much quicker than you would have ever thought. The current economic picture is not one in which anyone should turn their back to any kind of savings that is available to them.

Maybe you have always been the type that thinks every little bit counts and saves every little penny that you can save. If you have been then that is great, keep up the good work! If you have been one that thinks that taking some extra time to save a little money isn’t worth it and you’ll just simply go with convenience over saving money, then you need to think twice about how you view things. In a perfect world savings and convenience go hand in hand, but this quite obviously isn’t always a perfect world. If you haven’t done it before now is the time to start putting into practice the theory that every little bit counts, because it truly does.

No doubt the economic times are as bad as almost anyone alive has ever seen them right now. Pessimism is growing among Americans as well as citizens across about the state of the American and the Global economies. In recent weeks there has been much more talk of turning back toward the Great Depression norm of stashing cash under the mattress because it is the safest place for it. The reality is, even though the economic picture looks terrible putting your hard earned cash under the mattress isn’t the great idea it may seem to you at first.

During the Great Depression many people put cash under their mattress because there were no guarantees in our financial system. There was no FDIC guarantee of up to $250,000 per institution as there is now. In the depressionary period of the early 1930′s if your bank went under, you were out of luck, which left a whole lot of people hurting severely. You can’t blame folks during that time period for putting their cash under the mattress, but today’s period isn’t the same. In fact, most experts believe putting cash underneath the mattress has now become one of the least safe places for your cash since many robbers target this area right away.

Today if you are putting cash under the mattress you are losing out on an opportunity cost basis based on the fact that you could be getting some kind of return for your money from simple very safe things such as Certificates of Deposit, Treasury Bonds, or Money Market Accounts. While the interest earned may not seem terribly impressive at first, it adds up over time, and in a tough economic environment every little bit that you can save up is extremely important over the long run. Keeping your money safe is tantamount, which is exactly why now is not the time to just stash the cash under the mattress.

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