You told me you're concerned about your future.

Not to worry−every person who has a brain is concerned about his or her future.

Fortunately you live in the most exciting time in the history of the world. Many things you worry about today will be solved within a few years.

This was not always true. Your grandparents were probably born before plastic was invented.

It took many generations to figure out something as simple as "drink clean water or you will perish."

It took thousands of years for someone to invent a water wheel and create a simple form of power.

Look at the way we use power today. We rely on fossil fuels for much of our energy. That's dumb (because it's a non-renewable resource) but in the few hundred years we have been doing it we've come up with dozens of substitutes.

The most plentiful element in our universe is probably hydrogen. There's quite a bit of it in water. There's quite a bit of water on the earth. Hydrogen is what fuels the sun.

When you burn hydrogen you get water. Plus a lot of energy. No other byproducts or pollutants. Zero.

Within a few years we will have power stations the size of breadboxes that will fuel villages. So don't worry about running out of energy.

If we don't harness hydrogen we will have all sorts of other alternative and clean fuels. America's energy demand is going to be met because we have fantastic technology and ways to implement it.

Those self-sustaining energy villages will contain lots of people. Some will be village idiots. Best to stay away from those. But then you've dated a few and understand this.

One of your biggest challenges will be earning enough to live on. Not only do you have to earn something but you will need to squirrel away something for a rainy day. So you have to understand the momentary system.

It's simple. 1 + 1 = 2. Or even more simple. 1 = 1.

I'm not kidding about this. One dollar plus one dollar equals two dollars. It is that simple and that elegant. Never forget it. 1=1.

If someone offers to invest your money using anything more complex that the above formula, run! Run as fast as your long legs can carry you.

As a matter of fact, if anyone offers to take your money and show you how to invest it, you ought to run. It's yours, you earned it. You need to be in charge of investing it.

The present banking crisis, the financial meltdown and the real estate debacle is based on the fact that 1 + 1 = equals something other than 2.

Let me give you an example. Let us say you own a bank. You get a thousand people to each put $100 dollars in it. What are your cash reserves? Pretty simple. $100,000.00.

In other words 100 x 1,000 = 100,000. Let's figure it out. Get rid of the zeros. 1 x 1 = 1 or 1 = 1.

So what went wrong? The bankers talked the government into the notion that 1 = 10. In other words, if they had a dollar in their bank, they could loan ten dollars.

Where did the other nine dollars come from? Out of thin air. Welcome to the world of fractional banking, the biggest Ponzi scheme going.

See, fractional banking meant that you could lend much more money than you had on deposit.

You just needed a fraction of the money you had on deposit to loan out 3 or 5 or 10 or 100 times of what you had in your vault.

This worked pretty well for awhile. Then the bankers hooked up with the stock brokers and the venture capitalists and lo and behold; if you had one dollar, you could loan a thousand dollars.

Where did the $999 come from? They made it up. It's pure horse feathers.

Now at this point you might ask yourself − how could we let this continue? Mr. Greed. The problem was that the banks were anxious to loan $999 for every dollar they had because they could charge interest on the money they loaned.

Say they charged ten per cent, that meant they would make almost $100 a year at ten per cent. Not bad because they only had one dollar to begin with. And what went horribly wrong was that people who couldn't afford to pay interest were given loans.

They defaulted on their loans and the banks took back the collateral that the loans were based on.

For example, in the case of a house, if the owner couldn't pay the mortgage then the bank took the house and threw the owner out into the street. Now the bank was stuck with a house that had been valued at say, a million dollars.

But the price of the house had fallen and even at a lower price there were few people around who had enough money to buy the house.

While this was going on the government was manipulating the currency. What is currency? It's an IOU. Let's say you have ten cows and I have a car. Let us say that we want to trade. We trade and agree that each cow is worth one tenth of a car.

We shake hands and it's a done deal. This is the barter system and it has been going on since mankind learned to count.

Now I have ten cows, each worth 1/10th the price of a car. So I take one of the cows and decide to trade it for some hats that your mother makes. Let's say I can get 100 hats for one cow but I only need one hat. Let us say your mother really wants the cow.

Okay, I give her the cow; she gives me a hat and her promise that when I want I can get the other 99 hats. Maybe the hats are not made yet, maybe I don't know where to store them. All I know is that I have a hat and an IOU for 99 more. Remember each cow is worth 100 hats.

So far so good.

Now let us say that someone sees my IOU for 99 hats and he makes a copy of that IOU. That copy is only worth the price of the paper it is printed on unless the counterfeiter can convince someone that the copy is really worth 99 hats. And if he can find someone who wants to trade the hats for one cow then the worthless paper is worth a cow.

The person who faked your mother's IOU for 99 hats trades it to a guy who has a bike. The guy who had the bike takes his IOU to get his 99 hats.

He gets to your mother's home at the same time I do. There is a big fight. But let's say that the fake IOU is so good you can't tell it from the real IOU. So we have 198 IOUs for 99 hats.

The guy with the fake IOU and I end up with about fifty hats each. What has happened here is that by making some fake IOUs, a thief has diluted the value of my original note or currency.

This is tragic because I got half of what I was owed and worse, a car isn't worth ten cows anymore. A car worth ten cows is now worth, not 1,000 hats, but 2,000 hats. And half the hats don't exist. So maybe we say the car is really worth 20 cows, but there are only ten cows around. It's a real mess.

There was a time when currency was much more stable in this country.

At one time an ounce of gold was worth $30 USA dollars. The government said we needed more money in circulation so we went off the gold standard. We made it illegal for Americans to own gold.

This way the government was able to print trillions of dollars worth of money or currency and we created a society with lots of cash. Only the government could own gold.

By the way, what is an ounce of gold worth? Well, it takes a very healthy man working as hard as he can one day to produce an ounce of gold. And that's a long, long day.

Of course he has to know where the gold is and have permission to mine it. That basic value has not changed much. Today you need about 800 USA dollars to buy an ounce of gold.

Even so those dollars are not worth much. But we pretend they are and as long as we can convince the world that the dollar (which is worth almost nothing), is really worth something, the dollar has some value.

People are not falling for this much longer so pretty soon as they lose faith in the dollar it will take more and more of them to buy an ounce of gold.

You will see gold go to $5000 an ounce.

When I was your age I could buy a loaf of bread for fifty cents. Now it's three bucks. You don't get more bread for six times the money. You just need more USA dollars to buy the bread.

Welcome to 2009. All the chickens have come home to roost. Our money is worth nothing. Or soon will be. The banks can't find any more qualified customers to lend their money to. It's not a perfect storm.

It's an imperfect storm of financial chaos. Don't worry about owing someone a million dollars because in the not too distant future you will be able to buy a huge wheelbarrow of hundred dollars bills for a few loaves of bread.

Which brings us back to 1 + 1 = 2. The government printed fake money. They called it reserve notes. Before that it was backed by gold and silver. You could take a dollar to the mint and get gold or silver for it. No more.

The dollars are not backed by anything. The best you can do is take five single dollars to the mint and receive a single five dollar reserve note. We are screwed big time.

The money Kate and I saved and all of the money that is in our pension soon will be worth nothing because of spiraling inflation. Ditto for our Social Security.

Now how fast is this going to happen?

It's happening now with the collapse of major companies.

Forbes indicates the following companies won't be around for long: Gap, Eddie Bauer, Pacific Sunwear, Sears, Kmart, Zales, Pep Boys & Local stores may be closing for Timberland, Sprint, Nextel, Starbucks, Ann Taylor, Mrs. Field's Cookies and Applebee's.

Microsoft is laying off thousands of workers, its stock is falling.

And this is just the beginning.

So what will be worth something? Anything that is Real Property. A house. A car. A cell phone. A hunk of cheese. A loaf of bread. And gold. If you grow food you can sell it for money or trade it for a car part. Back to the old barter system.

Welcome to the Dark Ages of financing − the bankers sold us out; as did Wall Street, as did Washington, as did most stock brokers on the planet. Of course many people lived on credit, borrowing against their appreciating homes, thinking the market would go up forever.

That has never happened and never will. The market is in free fall.

In my next note I will tell you some ways to end up with part of the cheese.

Final note: These are going to be challenging years; but you're going to be okay.

The most important people in your life are your family. They will be the ones you can depend on.

Treasure them and be there for them when they need you. You are going to need each other more than you ever dreamed you would.

Did you know that half the people in the world live on one dollar a day or less? Now thanks to what has happened to the American dollar, the dollar these people live on is worth 25 cents.

They will starve to death. You will see it on TV.

There are some ways to survive.  Here is one for you.