Getting back to even? What happened to making yourself and your family filthy rich? Could I possibly be aiming any lower? Have things really gotten so bad that you should drop all your hopes and dreams and just struggle to stay solvent?

Absolutely not. But before you can get ahead, you have to get back to even, and in difficult times that's the hardest and most important goal of all. For the last eighteen months we've watched in excruciating horror as first our homes and then our stocks have plummeted in value. Make no mistake, the stock market crashed in the second half of 2008, and this was a crash to rival anything we've seen since the Great Depression. It was the worst year for stocks since 1931. In 2008, Americans lost more than a quarter of their retirement savings in 401(k) and IRA plans, and millions more saw their retirement funds cut in half. For many of you, it's as though your money simply vanished into thin air. I'm here to show you how to get it back, one dollar at a time.

Ever since the housing bubble went bust and the stock market fell apart like a wet paper bag, we've been deluged with books that promise to help you weather the downturn and get back on your feet. But most of them either offer up the same old tired and often discredited teachings wrapped in a new, panic-filled package -- sell all stocks now and cut up those nasty credit cards -- or are full of advice that could have saved you a lot of pain if the books had been written two years ago. Wonderful timing. That's not what you'll find in this book. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but you need foresight if you're trying to rebuild your savings, and especially if you're trying to claw your way back from the ground up.

I can teach you how to protect your money in a downturn. I know how to avoid a stock market crash and even how to take advantage of one. I was entirely in cash for the crash of 1987, and in fact that's actually what put me on the map professionally in the early days of running my hedge fund and allowed me to pulverize the market in the fastest decline from peak to trough in history. I also hope that if you read and followed the advice in my earlier books Real Money, Mad Money, and Stay Mad For Life, you were able to escape the worst of the carnage. But the sad truth is that other than gold, which does well in chaotic times, and U.S. Treasurys, the safest of securities, every single asset class from stocks to corporate municipal and mortgage bonds to commodities has just been hammered. Stocks took an especially severe beating that they've only just begun to recover from. In 2008, the two most important bellwether indices that track the health of the overall market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the much broader Standard and Poor's 500, fell by 33.8 percent and 38.49 percent, respectively. The damage has already been done, the money's been lost, and none of these new books filled with old boilerplate bromides about investing will help you get it back. Most of what you'll find on the personal finance and investing shelves is authors giving you an ounce of prevention, when what you really need is a pound of cure. But then again, they are just writers who have never managed money, not even in a bull market, let alone the vicious bear that romped through Wall Street, eating up and crushing the defenseless eggs that you thought were safe in your nest.

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