Money Crashers: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession

Earlier this week, as I was looking at the traffic report for my Money Crashers articles to see which topics seemed to be the most popular with readers, I noticed something interesting: For the past several months, my story on getting help in a financial emergency received far and away more hits than any other. And that was interesting, because the article had first come out two years ago, and it certainly wasn't hugely popular at the time. But around mid-2018, it started creeping up the ranks, from 3% of all site traffic to 4%, then 5%, and now over 7%. Clearly, some time in the past year or so, more and more people have felt the need to know about this.

To me, this looked a lot like a sign that, no matter what the official jobs numbers say, there's definitely some weakness in the economy. And right around the same time, I read a New York Times editorial by Paul Krugman—who was, let us not forget, one of the only economists to see the subprime mortgage crisis coming before it hit—indicating that he thinks so too.

And so I dropped a line to my editor and suggested that the article I'd written last year on how to prepare for a recession, which they'd been sitting on for several months, probably should be published now—because if we waited much longer, it could be too late to do anyone any good.

So here it is: my take on how to weatherize your life to ride out the coming economic storm. It talks about how to:

1. Improve your employability, so you'll be less likely to lose your job and/or better equipped to find a new one
2. Develop extra income streams, which will help you get by if your income declines
3. Increase your emergency savings, so you can survive a period of unemployment if necessary
4. Reduce your expenses, so you won't have to tighten your belt in a hurry later on
5. Pay down debts, so you won't have to struggle to pay them later on
6. Increase your insurance coverage, so a disaster won't bankrupt you
7. Adjust your investments, not to make them "recession-proof" (which is neither possible nor desirable), but to make sure you're not risking more money than you can afford to lose

Read all about it here: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession