Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

What would you do if you were in danger of losing your home? If you had to come up with $2,500 right now, could you do it?

That was the situation faced by Angela Logan. Her home was facing foreclosure and she had to come up with $2,500 a month for three months straight to avoid homelessness. Faced with dwindling income and no emergency savings, Angela turned to what she knew best: she baked cakes. At $40 a pop, she figured if she sold 100 cakes she could save her house...and it worked.

There is a lesson to be learned from Angela: desperate times call for desperate measures. What is the talent you could fall back on to earn quick cash if you really, REALLY needed to do it? I faced a similar situation myself about 7 years ago. I had been evicted, my family faced homelessness and I had no money, no savings and no job. On a leap of faith, I took a job halfway across the country in a city and a state I had never been to before. I didn't know anyone, and I didn't have a home waiting for me. I drove cross-country in two days, arrived in town with a couple hundred dollars in my pocket from an unemployment check and moved into a roach-infested apartment in a really crummy area of the city.

I'm much better off these days. In fact, I earn more money now than I ever have at any point in my life. But back then, seven years ago, I did what I had to do. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

About four years ago, my wife had to stop working. She became disabled and very ill. Unfortunately, she earned more money than I did a the time, and we lost all of her income. I was working at my dream job, but it didn't pay well. I certainly couldn't support my family on what I was earning at the time. I walked away from a career I had built over a period of 20 years, and started a new career doing something completely different, but which paid much better. I'm happy in my "new' career, but I did what I had to do. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

We all face hard choices at times. Sometimes we are forced into certain situations, such as when I had to move to a strange city. Other times, we turn to a "big idea" which utilizes our talents and can help generate some much-needed cash, such as baking cakes to pay a mortgage.

If you needed to...really needed to...do you have a "big idea" you could fall back upon, like Angela? Could you move away from friends and family to take a job in an unfamiliar city? The time to ask yourself those questions is before you actually need to consider taking such actions.