Some of the people hit worst by the Recession are those where certain financial "events" hit them this year - consider, for example, someone coming up to retirement age who cannot work on for health reasons - but the value of their pension fund has been trashed by the stock market changes in the last 9 months. Could you survive on 60% of what you planned to? On a much smaller scale, but having personal financial impact, the lease of my company car expires in April 2009. So I got a quote from my lease company to replace the car with a brand new one of the same spec, and the new lease was 20% more expensive than the current one - due presumably to them marking down the likely end-of-lease resale figure. Ouch, particularly when my limits are in terms of the lease price not the value of the car itself.
So I looked at other options. Cars from other similar manufacturers such as Mercedes are out, because the lease company is owned by BMW and they tweak the lease prices to buy market share. Cars from a bit further down market were not ticking my boxes. Talking to a friendly BMW dealer 100 miles away, they priced up a private lease on a pre-registered heavily-discounted new car, and still could not beat the price I was offered for a new list-price car.
Then the light-bulb moment! Extend the current lease. Fortunately I am well within the pre-agreed mileage I set when my current car was new, and I now work from home so I could extend the three year lease to four years without extending the mileage. The answer - I keep my car an extra year, and the lease price is down by 10%. Then, when I come to replace it the new model will be out, I can hope that the economy will have stabilised etc, but at least I can plan ahead with a lower lease price until April 2010.
