That is flipping crazy. It would be interesting to know what you did wrong that makes you worse off now then you were 4 years ago.
If you back up 4 years to October 2008, we had a financial crisis. The stock market and your portfolio were tumbling. Banks were wondering if they were going to make it. People were actually taking out large sums of money from aTMs because of fears/rumours that the banking systems wouldn't be up.
We were losing 800k jobs per month 4 years ago.
Banks were calling loans all over the country from businesses.
If you are worse off in October 2012 than you were in October 2008, that is YOUR fault.