An endangered species: middle class America.

COUNTRYSIDE: You may not think of yourself as endangered. Wake up! Rapidly the middle class is disappearing from the American landscape. The division between wealthy and poor is getting bigger all the time and the middle class is falling in the crack or actually just adding to the poor population.

Athletes, entertainers, and CEOs of big corporations are earning astronomical salaries. They live like kings--or gods, as some of them perceive themselves.

More and more jobs are exported overseas or industrialized and taken over by machines. Fuel keeps going up and more and more people have to travel farther and farther from home to find decent employment. If you move closer to populated areas with better jobs, you will have a higher cost of living, in most cases.

In our area, the freeze on electric rates recently ran out. We saw our electric rates triple overnight. People with electric bills of $200 now have bills of $600. A local daycare that had been in business for over 20 years saw their electric bill go from around $700 to over $2,100. They closed less than two months later.

Charitable organizations are asked to help more and more, but their resources are stretched. The people who contribute to them have less to give and the charities have the same cost increases as the rest of us.

My husband and I moved to this area 4-1/2 years ago for a job that was too good to pass up. He intended to retire from there in about 10 years. The job lasted three years. He was let go after a large layoff and an injury. If you think a company won't fire you over an injury, think again. This is a large company that does it all of the time. There are many lawyers in our area that live off of lawsuits filed against this company. The owner is very wealthy with many connections. Most people never collect much on a workers compensation claim or a questionable discharge against this company. Most settle for what they are offered. In the last 15 months, my husband has worked four months at one job, and 3-1/2 weeks at another. The first company got in trouble and let go of the higher paid employees, and the second company lost its contract and pulled out of town overnight.

My husband has 12 ASE certifications and 25 years of diesel repair experience, including owning our own business for five years, appliance repair experience, and several years in various positions in the coal-mining field, which is the reason that we moved back to this area. There are few jobs available, and the companies want to hire younger people with little experience, who will work for low wages. Don't get me wrong, my husband would take a lower paying job if necessary, but a company is reluctant to offer an older experienced person a job with low pay because they don't expect the person to stay if something better comes along. They are right.

Thankfully, we got over "keeping up with the Joneses" years ago, and live simply. We have very little debt and have no problem with wearing yard sale clothing, driving used vehicles, and living cheaply.

We do most of our own repair work. We completely remodeled the interior of our house ourselves. We paid as we went.

If we as middle class are to survive we are going to have to get very financially savvy. We are going to have to start to live as people did years ago. When I was growing up in rural west Tennessee, almost everyone had a garden and a few chickens. Even the "rich" kids' folks had gardens. In the summer, we ate mostly what came from the garden. We had meat about once a week. We had dessert once a week. We had a soda on Saturday when we went to town to get what few groceries we bought. It wasn't a giant guzzler; it was a bottle that held 12 ounces. Entertainment was playing outside with sticks, weeds, frogs, or whatever. We went fishing and visited relatives. A treat was to drive about eight miles to the dairy bar and get an ice cream cone.

Most of us could save a ton of money if we were to get in shape. My husband and I could lose a small person between us, and still have plenty of meat on our bones. We're not huge, just out of shape, like most middle-aged people. Losing weight would cut back on prescription drug costs. My husband's blood pressure would normalize and we could quit buying those drugs. It is also much easier to find small clothing at yard sales and on sale in stores than larger sizes, simply because the stores carry more of the smaller sizes. Stores mistakenly think that any female who is over a size seven should (and does) wear feed sacks--therefore they stock very little of what I care to wear.

Hopefully, no one reading this still buys new cars. Everyone knows by now that new vehicles take a drastic nosedive in value the minute you have signed the papers and driven off the lot. Also, a word of caution. When the Daewoo came out some years ago, our pastor's wife had one and they raved about it. My husband really liked it, so we bought a new one (2001). A few months later the company went bankrupt. The car has done a fair job, but not as well as we had hoped. The parts are very hard to get, we had to drive 50 miles to get warranty work done, and its value plummeted. The last two new cars that we bought, prior to the Daewoo, were Geo Metros. One we bought in 1989 and the other in 1991. We got over 200,000 miles on each, and the parts were plentiful. Last year when my husband's small truck was beyond repair and we had to get another one, we bought a used truck. We found one that we liked, put a deposit down on it, and the dealer agreed to hold it for a month while we worked very hard to raise the rest of the money to pay it off. We paid no finance charges, and had no bank to deal with. We have put very little money into that truck, have put over 50,000 miles on it, a new set of tires, and a new grill, after we hit two deer at the same time. We ordered an aftermarket grill over the Internet for about half of what the local Chevrolet dealer wanted. My husband did the work and changed it out himself. We carry only liability and uninsured motorist insurance on all of our vehicles, because we don't owe money on any of them and don't answer to a finance company or bank, so we save a bundle on insurance premiums.

If you like movies, wait until the DVD comes out. Most of the nicer theaters in this area charge around $7.50 for adults to see a movie during the prime viewing time. Sodas are $3.50 and a bag of popcorn is around $3. If you take a couple of kids, buy soda and popcorn, you are going to drop $50, at the very least. We buy DVDs as opposed to renting them. We only buy the ones that we are pretty sure we will like to watch more than once. We have two small kids who recently came to live with us, and they like to see things over and over. We don't have cable or satellite, and we watch very little tv. I make popcorn on the stove instead of the microwave version, once I found out how much better it tasted and how much cheaper it is to make. We buy a two-liter bottles of soda and we have movie night much cheaper.

The two little girls had no summer shorts. It takes very little fabric to make kids' clothes and not a great deal of skill. I admit I worked in garment factories for 20 years and would still be if there were any around, so sewing is easy for me, but it really is easy to learn to make simple clothes. Sewing machines can be bought at yard sales for as little as $5 (I bought a nice one). I buy fabric at Wal-Mart when they have marked it way down. You can also use adult clothing to make children's clothes. I used a pair of jeans that had the backside ripped out beyond repair, and made each girl a pair of jean shorts.

Get creative. Don't think, "What can I buy new?" Think: "How can I reuse that?"

Take every tax deduction that you possibly can. Almost everyone we know uses the short tax form and does not itemize. If you can fill out the long form, do so. It saves us a bundle in taxes. We have a very smart tax accountant who stays informed of all the latest laws. I try to as well, as much as I can. I keep almost all receipts for the year in a file cabinet in their own folder. When the year is over, I move the old folders to one folder, each category stapled or paper clipped together, and put them in the bottom file drawer. It's a little trouble, but it has saved us money. I knew that I didn't have enough in medical bills to take a deduction this year, but with all the mileage that my husband used to go to physical therapy for four months, we had enough. It all adds up: job hunting mileage, charity work, charitable contributions--keep track. "A penny saved is a penny earned."

The middle class must smarten up if we plan on surviving. The time to put to use the things that we have learned from publications such as Countryside, the things we have learned ourselves and from others, is now.--Virginia Weathers, Ridgway, Illinois