I wanted to end this year’s blogging activities with a few words of thanks and a random thoughts. First and foremost, a thank you for all of you readers for reading, subscribing and commenting.  This blog tripled its subscribers over the year. Thus, thank you to all of you for spreading the word.

A separate thanks to the personal finance blogsphere for linking into my blog or allowing me to guest post and share my comments on your posts. The community is intelligent, supportive and insightful. I hope I can continue to contribute and reinforce these qualities in the new year.

I wanted to end this year’s blog with a thought about 2009. I do some volunteering. Last week,  I was speaking to another volunteer and the topic of interest rates came up and a comment was made along the lines of “let’s see what Obama can do to help us when he gets into office in January…” I was immediately struck by two thoughts: (i) everyone sure is putting a lot on the shoulders of one man; and (ii) when did we abdicate our fate away so easily that we are relying on someone else to help us? Yes, you and I do not have the power to lower interest rates or pass bailouts but there seems to be a resigned indifference that we can no longer make an impact on our lives and we are relying on others to do it for us.

What has struck me about the last several panicky months is how many people have thrown up their hands and basically said “well, its out of my control. Someone else has to make my life better via a bailout, a tax cut, a stimulus…” On some macro-level, this is true. None of us are in the position to pass billion dollar budgets or order banks and car companies to do this and that.

But what about the smaller things? We seem happy to abdicate our financial fate to financial advisors who may or may not care about your best interests. Believe in all the marketing hype and buy what they are selling- whether we need it or not. Not take an active approach in how our schools operate, what our elected officials do and what our service providers are getting away with. We, collectively, seem to believe its all beyond us now and we have no say in how our families should live nor, more importantly, are we fighting for it.

Let me leave you with this thought though… in 2008, it all blew up good because we did not so much give our trust to people who mismanaged it as we let them walk over us years beforehand. And we continue to allow people to walk all over us:  we allow the same industry that put the world in this mess in charge of bailing it out.  Its tantamount to letting that a terrible school teacher tutor your kids at night to fix the mess they created during the day. Would you ever hire that person as the tutor?

I once interned for a city councillor who use to say “think globally, act locally.” I always took that to mean think big, act small. There are many small things we can do with our lives to take control of it. Educating ourselves is one. Being accountable to ourselves and our community and making other act accountable is another. These are not world shattering, history alterning moves but these are things that we can mentally comprehend and wrap our minds around.

So for 2009, I wish that we all take charge of our lives in some small and meaningful way whether in personal finance, relationships, work or, just generally, life.

Have a happy and safe holiday.