Business Empire Magazine provides how to's and articles for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs

When economic conditions get bad workers have no job security. They are lucky just to have a job, much less a good job.

The employment office in our local area routinely tells older workers they have nothing they can even interview for and that they will have to "make your own job". Many people who have been laid off had jobs in manufacturing, or accounting jobs, call center jobs, customer service jobs, financial jobs or tech support jobs that no longer exist in this country.

You have few alternatives but to get going on some new career now! The last thing you want to do is to try to develop a new skill when you are 50 to 55 years old (as we did). Who would have thought some old fogies like us could be in search engine optimization. We hit page one on the search engines regularly.

Starting a business of any kind is intimidating but many of us have no other options.

Just like older workers in our area, many people without options have no choice but to start a completely new career from scratch.

Worse still, they have very little money to invest.

It's a waste of time and energy to point the finger at the people who heartlessly created this problem. Yes, Wall Street and Congress not only did not protect American jobs, they also actively created incentives for companies to send jobs overseas and still do.

But the real issue is they will not take care of people who are unemployed. They won't make your house payment or feed you and yours if you lose your job.

So prepare to take care of yourself. Start your new career now. Figure out what you can do that people will pay you to do. Just a hint, decorating or house flipping won't work.

As soon as you get a notion about what you would like to do start getting educated and fast. Try some of the trades. When people need things fixed they will hire someone more readily than if their problem is less essential. Medical careers are good, too, but many hospitals are already flirting with financial meltdowns trying to provide medical care for all illegals and funding the E room option that those of us who are unemployed must use. Still a moral society must provide medical care.

The more difficult something is to do, the less likely it is that you can be dumped, so go for stuff that isn't too easy. It was a 10,000 hour learning curve for us to do what we do now, all self taught.

Then look for essentials you and your family will need to provide for yourselves. One of the first is your own, personally paid health insurance separate from your current employer. If you get laid off you lose it anyway sooner or later. Go ahead and take your fate into your own hands. Get insurance independent of an employer that you can take with you wherever you go.

Also reduce all your expenses as much as you can. Ironically, the largest expense many people have is interest on loans. Stop buying nonessentials and pay off all credit cards. It's just making financial types richer. They don't deserve to get richer while the rest of us struggle.

There are new rules for all of us. The financial meltdown the country is experiencing is directly attributable to some really inept lawmaking and banking. But we can do little to control those people. We can only work on what we can control. Be tough. "You can do it." as Christopher Lowell used to say. The big difference is that what we are facing now is about more important stuff than decor.