Consumers will thus be smarter, savvier. They will also take a longer-term perspective. The goal will not be to get rich quick, but to pursue financial management strategies to accumulate assets over the long term. They will also emerge from this current downturn with increased confidence that they understand how to better manage their money.

It will be the time of the “cautious consumer”. Being thrifty will be “cool”. People will brag to their neighbors about what they didn’t buy. None of these attitudes are really new or innovative. They simply represent re-learning, on a national basis, values our ancestors believed in for generations.

Consumers will also be increasingly wary of opinions and advice from people who claim to be experts on the real estate market. In general there will be increasing distrust of financial “gurus”, the people who claim to have all the answers or the secret formulas to achieving great wealth. A number of these seminar-giving and newsletter-selling individuals turned out to only have found the secret to making more money for themselves. Americans will make it their responsibility to learn more about personal finance and take control of their finances rather than relying on the opinions of others.

Certain “old fashioned” virtues will come back. The concept of repairing things rather than buying new ones, for example. They might keep a car an extra year or two more than they would have prior to the recession. Consumers will pay much closer attention to how much they are spending. Household budgeting will be a tool that more and more consumers employ to make sure they never experience financial difficulties again. Spending wisely will be what excites shoppers, not the former thrill of buying on impulse. All this current attention to saving money and being careful to only spend on necessities will become a way of life for many people, even after the economic pressures lessen. The painful lessons learned during these difficult times will not be lessons easily lost.

Houses will be viewed as more or less permanent assets, not treated like stock shares that can be traded frequently in the hopes of a quick profit. Along those lines, consumers will be increasingly wary of gimmicks or incentives offered by financial institutions. Americans have learned that banks are in the business of trying to get the average consumer to pay as much interest as possible, not in the business of helping them. All the individuals who took out home equity lines of credit—and made their payments on time–only to see those lines cut off when the value of their homes dropped, can attest to that.

By Brian Hill
Never forget that in all major financial downturns, when the turnaround comes, gains can be dramatic. The stock market can soar. Consumer confidence can snap back. The battered real estate market can resume an upward climb. It may take time, a number of years, but Americans will rebuild their balance sheets, and then have the satisfaction of remembering how they weathered this unprecedented financial storm.