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Here's a New Year's prediction that has a 100-per-cent chance of coming true: People are going to pay way more attention to their personal finances this year.

Yes, we're cutting personal debt and being smarter consumers.

But we're also going to live our financial lives on a new, entirely conscious level.

By this I mean two things: Whether you're a fat cat investor wanting to make sure you're not dealing with another Bernie Madoff (who knew?) or a more modest saver who nonetheless feels personally chastened by the larger economic mess, everyone will be looking much more avidly at the fine print. We'll be asking pointed questions we might have skipped before, so bankers, investment dealers, financial planners and charity fundraisers be warned: Vagueness is passé. You had better be able to thoroughly explain or even defend your products.

The second way we'll show our new heightened consciousness about financial matters will be in the social arena, where the conversation about money is rapidly changing.

It started with dinner table discussions late last year about bailouts and bankruptcies and proceeded to those trite but true "recessionista" and belt-tightening tales. ("Yes, sadly, I'm giving up my grande mochaccinos.")

It continued into the new year with little in-house seminars, at least in my neck of the woods, on Ponzi schemes. And why Mr. Madoff could be a character out of a Dickens novel.

But now the "money" conversation will settle into something more real and more confessional. We'll be able to say any and all of the following with absolutely no loss of social status: "I can't afford it." (A dinner out.) "Why is this so expensive?" (Anything you or your kids think is needed right away.) "Can't it wait?" (Any upkeep on car or house that a service person suggests.) "I'm trying not to spend that kind of money right now." (To friends, family and associates.) And: "Can we do it cheaper?" (The new perennial question.)

We will, as a bankruptcy trustee friend tells me, hear people admitting frankly they have to "deal with their financial problems now." Not dealing with them will be seen as the height of irresponsibility - kind of like the government's approach.

Over the holidays I reread Jane Austen's novel Persuasion and smiled in recognition at the tale of a silly baronet who had gone into serious debt and now needed to "retrench." Sir Walter Elliot has to hightail it out of his baronial estate and lease it to someone else who can afford its pleasures, but the only way this very vain man will do so is if his lawyer secretly finds someone who will approach him about the privilege of living on the estate. There isn't to be a whisper that he actually needs the money.

Today, however, there's no shame in saying, "Hey, I need to unload this piece of property. Any takers?" There's also, if you can believe the clever Internet commentary, a kind of reverse social status attached to being a big loser these days.

Comedian Joan Rivers begged in an interview in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday to be described as having "lost a bundle with Bernie Madoff," because, she cracked, "that shows that you used to be very rich." And a Wall Street Journal blogger maintained that "perhaps the new competition among the wealthy at the country clubs won't be about how much they just reaped from their leveraged buyout or from their macro hedge fund. It will be how much they could afford to lose." (To which a Manhattan accountant I know responded, acidly, "What are these people smoking?")

But back down on our modest little level, I do think being cost-conscious and somewhat more transparent about our own challenges will take on a moral glow akin to the halo hovering over those who save the environment. Being frugal is the new green. And being conspicuously extravagant will be deemed, at least in the near future, politically incorrect.

So if you're going to take an exotic vacation somewhere, for God's sake, don't brag about it. Go quietly and return saying how "grateful" you feel you could manage it. (People will say, albeit through gritted teeth, "lucky you.")

Socially, it's an opportunity to cut back on habits or traditions that have gotten out of hand. Many women I know participate in an expensive "birthday" routine - not only a celebratory group dinner for each other's birthdays but a present too. Often a friend's birthday can end up costing more than $100. So let's just do a modest dinner and no present. As my sister-in-law said to me a year ago about birthday gifts, "Don't we have everything we need by now?"

I don't know about you, but I'm not reading every single "how it happened" analysis about the current economic mess. I'm concentrating more on figuring out my own strategy. And it's not all gloom and doom. I refuse to hypocritically say I won't buy something new or eat out. I'll just do it carefully and consciously.

While those in the know say it's going to get a lot worse - even here in utopian (by comparison) Canada - that more businesses will fail, that more jobs will be lost and that housing prices will continue to plummet, something beneficial has indeed come out of the guys at the top screwing up: We're all way more on our toes and talking about it - and that's a good thing.