I have never been smart about money. My sister and I say it’s a personal rebellion to our father’s thrifty nature. But in my case I think it was because I never made enough money to do much more than spend it. That all sounds so foolish now and my hope is that our children will manage their fiscal future differently.

Although they can’t do much at this point, because there are student loans and there are difficult mortgage payments and credit card debt. But it’s too bad to hit retirement age and not have a nest egg with a little more yolk in it.

Like many working people my husband and I never had much socked away. Mostly we just had our paychecks.

We have friends who made bundles in the dotcom era, some who are wizards in the stock market and a few backwoods types who did well in the weed market. And a couple who simply inherited astounding wealth. I’ve tried to not be envious of the relatively well-off, knowing that will surely set up a bad karma detour on my own road to riches.

I didn’t really aspire to be a rich person. As long as I made an okay salary and I had a pension plan and there was a little bit in a 401k and there would always be social security and of course, we owned our goldmine, that is, our little piece of fail-safe real estate in fantasy-priced Wine Country.

What is so disappointing is that while I was never very smart about money, I counted on others to be exceptionally smart. I’m talking about the big money brains. Who stand in front of the NASDAQ board on TV to say that things are good or bad or about to change, but not to worry because they understand this stuff. And so we don’t have to.

So when they paled under their makeup and looked like nervous accountants packing up to leave town and said things like this should never have happened and muttered words like impending catastrophe…..Well, you knew we were all in trouble.

Hope that the solution is more than putting lipstick on a piggy bank.

After 9/11 there was much talk about our enemies, the people who wanted to wreck our way of life. But it turned out we are capable of doing it ourselves.

Some of those smart people we expected to take care of the economy did not. They were more reckless than a no-money-down homeowner with multiple credit cards going on a Christmas shopping binge. Squandered their equity. Nothing in savings.

Now they want to be bailed out and we are told that for the economic health of the country- maybe for the sake of the whole world’s stability - we have no choice but to help bail them out. And hope that the solution is more than putting lipstick on a piggy bank.

We little guys wouldn’t be bailed out. We would be told it was our fault that we didn’t save for a rainy day. Or that we didn’t save enough. Or too bad that we saved in an unsecured financial institution. And put our faith in our equity.

Some of us could have been smarter about our money and that’s a regret. But you know, even if we had, we still might be in a scary, shaky place not of our making.

Because it turns out that the big guys with all that money and power turned out to be simply greedy and not very smart at all.

Listen to the Got Billions? Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM