The world used to be such a simple place. Everyone had cars, gas was cheap and no-one thought twice about driving everywhere. Suburbs became exurbs and journey lengths expanded. Public transport wilted, and people added extra pounds of body weight as walking dropped out of favor. Now, the world has changed. Gas prices peaked at more than $4 a gallon and, although they dropped down again, the recession has taken money out of household budgets. People no longer spend freely on driving. There’s no public transport in the exurbs so people are cut off from their work and the local amenities without a car. Even if people do start walking again, they live too far out of the nearest towns and cities. The choice has become simple. Life without a car for most is impossible so people keep their old car going longer or they get into rental cars.

The strategies break down as follows. Sharing cars as a way of getting children to school and parents to work has been around for a while. All it requires is some give and take about when people are going to make their journeys and travel suddenly becomes cheaper with shared costs. Except, whoever is doing the driving needs to be sure their policy covers paying passengers. Some insurers take a narrow view that paying passengers turn the deal into a business like a taxi. This is a trap to force car sharers to pay more to insure. Always shop around to get the best cover to ensure that everyone in the car is covered for their medical costs should there be a traffic accident. The more interesting developments are coming in the car rental business. Instead of the classic temporary holiday or full-time business uses, there is now a new car pooling system. Cars are stored in garages around cities. When you want to use a car, you go online and make a booking. The system tells you where the nearest car is to be found. You pick it up and drop it off at the nominated garage, paying only for the hours you have the car in your possession. The guys who work out statistics reckon that the average person spends about $8,000 a year on car ownership. That’s the purchase price, any sales tax and loan interest, the loss of value as the car ages, the cost of car insurance, maintenance and repair, and so on. Most car pooling schemes charge around $15 an hour with the cost of gas and insurance included (with you paying the cost of getting to and from the nominated garage).

Except you need to be careful about the terms of the car insurance included in the package. The rental company is interested in protecting the capital value in the cars so, before you sign up, check the cover for personal injuries. It may be worth paying an extra few dollars to top up the cover for medical expenses and loss of earnings. That said, if you give up your own car, there are big cash savings so long as the auto insurance cover is adequate. And, no desk agents giving you a hard sell every time you pick up the car!

Ambition is a wonderful thing when it pays off. How many times have we watched a slugger walk up to the plate, look the pitcher in the eye, and lift an arm to point where the ball is going to land somewhere in the next state, only to strike out? Well, the new President has just stepped up to the plate. We have the TARP bailout plan carried over from the last Administration. The new Stimulus Package has been passed. Now comes the budget. Anyone doing the math will find the number of zeros adding on to the deficit reaching epidemic proportions. It seems the country is proposing to plunge even deeper into debt when it’s already in a recession, fighting two wars – one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan – and facing a meltdown in the banking and car industries. Unemployment is at historic highs and, if the trend continues, the amount of tax collected will fall. Yet, the President is proposing major reform of the health care service. Is he biting off more than he can chew?

According to the latest figures, there are around 306 million people in the US and nearly 15%, that’s about 45 million, do not have any kind of medical insurance. What do they do? Well, when they fall ill, they crowd into the emergency rooms and seek help from the underfunded public hospital system. There are two results. The first is that people wait too long before they go to hospital and, when they get there, receive an inadequate level of care. The second is that it places a serious financial burden on everyone. The emergency room in a conventional hospital has to cover its costs but, when the uninsured patients have no money, the only option is to increase the charges to the insured patients. This burden has been particularly hard on the employers’ health plans and, to offset the increased premiums, employers have been passing some of the cost on to their employees – a forced pay cut. The public hospitals must beg for increased funding from local, state and federal bodies where budgets are already in deficit.

There is a new mood in government to do something about health insurance. In effect, the ideal plan would be to move to a single-payer plan which is the norm in the rest of the world, but that would upset too many vested interests. So the current plan is to go for a major safety net for all currently uninsured. There is already a plan for uninsured children. The Administration is proposing an element in the new budget to move all uninsured adults on to a national plan. If this can pass through into law, which is not certain given the opposition of the Republican party, it will provide a bolt hole for all currently insured. If the premiums on private health insurance continue to rise, more will move on to the national plan which, over time, could produce a single-payer system in the US. Now that would be an interesting social experiment.

With the price of gas constantly rising, more people driving hummers are finding visits to fill the tank an expensive business. It’s tempting to think of trading in the guzzler and buying a hybrid. A Toyota Prius, for example, will give you not less than 45 miles per gallon – drive it carefully and you’ll do a lot better.

Better still some of the hybrids qualify for a federal tax incentive. The government may talk big about drilling for oil but encouraging people to buy fuel-efficient cars is really good first step to reducing America’s dependence of foreign oil. Check out your own state. Many are also offering a range of incentives to reduce tolls, the cost of parking, and so on. When you add up the savings on gas and in taxes and charges, a hybrid can look a good deal. Auto insurance dealers are encouraging the trend with discounts of up to 10%, although the actual discount depends on the type of hybrid you buy. As with all auto insurance, you need to shop around and get as many online quotes as possible before buying.

But before you begin looking round the showrooms, take a deep breath. That Hummer is losing its value fast. The secondhand market has collapsed because only a very few buyers want to take on those gas costs. You’ll get only a fraction of its value if you trade it in now. So that new hybrid suddenly got a lot more expensive. You’ll need a much bigger loan which may be difficult to get at a good rate of interest because of the credit crunch. Once you add in the loss of capital tied up in your Hummer and the increase in borrowing costs, your payback period just got so much longer.

What about Payback period? If you’re buying to make a saving, this is the time it takes for you to realize the saving. In this case, you are probably better holding on to the Hummer. The premiums will fall because the replacement costs are lower on a comprehensive policy. Traffic accidents are less dangerous in something built like a Sherman Tank. Some of the smaller hybrids crumple up in an accident. So don’t despair on the auto insurance front. It really may made better economic sense to keep the guzzler than change to a hybrid.

When you’re sitting at home worrying about the mounting pile of bills to pay, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Fact is, just as you’re in a new world of hurt, there are other people hurting as well. In this case, the people are the inventors in the insurance industry. They all bought shares in these big corporations when the prices were high, never thinking that the world could suddenly turn sour. Although it’s a mutual insurance company, let’s take State Farm as an example of what’s happening across the industry. This is one of the biggest insurance companies in the US and it’s just turned in an operating loss of $542 million for 2008. Its net worth just dropped a whole 16%. Now, you have to understand this company did not get caught up in mortgages of any prime. There were no securitised thises or derivative thats. This company has just been caught in the general collapse of stock exchange values.

To understand, we need to look at how insurance companies work. They charge most policy holders with a vehicle or a home a monthly premium. This brings in a small mountain of cash every month. That money is invested until it’s needed to pay out on claims. Some goes into fixed-income products. The rest goes into shares. As you may have noticed, the Dow and other stock exchange indexes have been in free-fall. The result is that State Farm has lost the capital value of the investments and, in many cases, no longer receives any income as interest or dividends. This might have been manageable except for this little thing called global warming that no-one believes causes hurricanes and other weather catastrophes. The last two years have seen an big increase in weather-damage claims.

Should this make you worry? Well, look at it this way. The car insurance industry is suddenly making a loss. Shareholders in general and the policy holders in State Farm are not happy. Senior officers of the companies want their bonuses. The for-profit companies are tempted to raise the premiums across the board to get their earnings back into profit. Except with a recession threatening to turn into a depression, that’s not going to work. Make the policies unaffordable and people stop buying. That’s why State Farms just dropped its car insurance rates in Georgia by an average of 1.5%. For the record, this means the current premiums are 12% lower than five years ago. Since State Farms insures around one quarter of all vehicles on Georgia’s roads, this is a good deal. So the next time you’re shopping round for auto insurance policy, you may be pleasantly surprised that the premium rates from an increasing number of insurers have fallen in other states. The next bill may not be quite as painful as you fear.

Life has been good to everyone growing up over the last twenty years. There’s an expectation you can get whatever you want. So when your kids went through the admission process for your local college, they probably looked at the question about health insurance and ticked the box that said your family plan continued cover. They never gave it a second thought. Melanie was such a student.

“I remember asking my Dad and he said, so long as I was in school full-time and under 25, I was OK.” But it turned out Dad hadn’t read the small print. The policy had a term requiring the children to leave their parent’s policy when they graduated from high school. The company had a special policy for health insurance for college students.

“So there I was trying out for the cheerleaders. Going for a big move, I slipped and fell awkwardly. Twisted my knee real bad. Not being like the girl in Heroes, that meant an ambulance to the emergency room. Called my Dad on the way. He came over only expecting health problems. Turns out, he had to pay for all the treatment on his credit card.“

Melanie’s knee made a full recovery, but the family’s still feeling the pain of the unexpected debt. The moral of this story? Always check your existing policy. Most of the colleges and universities either have their own medical insurance policies or can point you in the right direction if your children are going to be without cover. Don’t be taken by surprise. Shop around for medical insurance on the internet. There are many economical policies aimed at the student market both for university and doctoral courses that can take some of the worry off your shoulders when they leave the nest and go live on campus.