TouringPlans.com - Website of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World
VRBO.com - Vacation rentals by owner
Prosper.com - Peer-to-peer lending site
FreeComicBookDay.com - Free comic books at participating shops on May 3
SpiritAir.com - Join the $9 Fare Club

When you look back our nation's growth, the thing that has made us unique is our free market and entrepreneurial spirit. People come to America to start companies because we've been a beacon of opportunity. Our free enterprise system is unique in the Western world because half of all employment is with small firms.

Clark was recently speaking to a woman who used to be a burned-out corporate lawyer. She always loved making draperies and eventually quit her day job to do it fulltime. Now she has 6 employees in her basement -- probably against zoning laws -- and she makes more money than she did as a corporate lawyer.

The healthcare question has become the single greatest impediment to our nation's legacy of entrepreneurship. Would be entrepreneurs can not leave the firms they work for without fear of losing their employer-provided healthcare.

Simply put, our healthcare system is broken. The University of Minnesota finds that what we pay for healthcare is up 30% in 4 years! Meanwhile, the average family premium is $11K/year. It's gotten so bad that the University of Texas nonprofit medical system has actually turned dying people away because they're afraid they won't be paid.

Clark doesn't do politics on his show, but he believes that John McCain has come out with a common sense proposal to address the healthcare question. McCain is seeking to eliminate the corporate healthcare deduction. The 2 Democratic candidates, meanwhile, seek more government intervention in healthcare. McCain's plan would be similar to giving out vouchers for families to buy healthcare in the free market.

He's on the right track, Clark believes, though his proposal is like Swiss cheese and needs to be filled in. Standardized policies are necessary so that we can buy identical coverage from state to state and insurer to insurer. So far, the McCain plan is the only one that Clark sees helping out the small business entrepreneur. And that's crucial for the future success of our economy.

We're getting a large increase in the number of calls about student loans. The lending market is essentially frozen because of the fallout from the mortgage crisis. Are you still trying to figure out how to pay for college this fall? Clark has 2 important pieces of information to share with you.

There's emergency legislation working way its through Congress that will allow the federal government to be the "bank" for educational loans for this fall. Clark has full faith that this legislation will be pushed through in time for school.

Yet federal loans may not cover a tuition bill in its entirety. You can try to get a private loan, but very few private lenders are disbursing funds. So where do you turn? Try the peer-to-peer online lending sites where you can borrow directly from other people and cut the banks out of the equation.

Here's how they work: A borrower posts the amount they need to borrow; their credit rating; their debt-to-income ratio; and how much interest they're willing pay. Multiple lenders can then log on and each lend just a fraction of the money to limit their individual risk. Prosper.com is one of the most popular sites for this sort of thing. Clark also has a list of other P2P lending sites available.

As people are being financially squeezed, the rate of delinquencies on auto loans, credit cards and HELOCs is rising dramatically. Of course, it goes without saying that the collection agency biz is a huge one. It's also the latest thing to be outsourced, according to The New York Times. Collection agency calls are being sent offshore to countries such as India.

As kind of a corollary to this, you may notice that you'll start receiving collection calls out of the blue if you have old debts. Collectors are looking at the tax rebate checks as money to be tapped immediately on past due debts.

If you do get the call, what are your rights? You have the right to tell them in writing not to bug you. Use Clark's drop dead letter to help. If they don't comply, you can take legal action against them.

There is one exception to this rule. Banks are allowed to use their own in-house employees to act as collectors. They must, however, stop short of threatening you with physical harm.

Collectors are also allowed to call about a debt even if it's very old. In many states, these "zombie" debt calls present a double danger. If you pay them even as little as $1, they can turn around a file suit on the debt to get a judgment against you. Even if it's 25 years old! So watch out…

Finally, Clark always wants you to honor your debts. If you can't do it right now, wait until you get back on your feet financially and then do it.

CLARKONOMICS: The economy has gone nowhere in the past 6 months. We'll leave it to the politicians to argue about the recession vs. no recession question. What's certain is that we're in a consumer recession as people deal with record levels of debt.

This is a time when you need to cool your spending. The Federal Reserve is "cooling down" as well. They made a small token cut in the interest rate today, but the vote was not unanimous. Clark thinks that's very telling.

Real relief won't come until we work out our excess of consumer debt and the excess in the housing market. The share of the U.S. economy that we as consumers constitute has been up around 70% for the last few years. Historically, it had been in the low 60s. So how did we manage to defy gravity? It was all done on borrowed money. The pain we're feeling now is the pain of crashing back down to the Earth.

Clark's advice? Clean up your own personal balance sheet. We're overleveraged, which is a fancy way of saying that we owe everybody too much money. The sad thing is that we weren't borrowing to finance a factory to make goods and generate more money. We were borrowing for lifestyle. We were borrowing to have money to go the mall. So it was really a false sense of prosperity. We need to get back to real prosperity.

Christa is a work in progress in this respect. For 10 years, she's heard Clark's advice on smart spending and ignored it. Fortunately, she's been much better about taking his advice on saving for retirement. But now she's turned over a new financial leaf. Her blog details the efforts she's making to take better care of what she already has -- instead of buying new things. Check it out!