How to Survive a Recession: 12 Steps You Should Take to Protect Your Money
Are you recession-ready? Shore up your safety net, improve your job prospects, work on your trouble spots, protect your retirement savings, and more: You need to protect your money now.
Just four months after the current economic expansion officially became the longest in U.S. history, signs of its impending demise seem to be everywhere.
October started off with a report that manufacturing activity contracted for the second time in a row last month, hitting its lowest level since the Great Recession—a result that sent stocks tumbling. That followed on the heels of a late-September Conference Board survey showing that confidence among U.S. consumers, who fuel two-thirds of the country's economy, posted its biggest drop in nine months. Also in September, confidence among the nation's top CEOs, as measured by the Business Roundtable, saw its largest quarter-over-quarter decline in seven years. If that wasn't enough, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development also cut its forecasts for most of the world's major economies, including the U.S., citing trade tensions and a possible no-deal Brexit among the greatest threats to growth.
"The global economy is facing increasingly serious headwinds," said OECD chief economist Laurence Boone. "An urgent response is required."
It shouldn't exactly come as a surprise then that the latest Gallup poll found about half of Americans now believe that a recession in the next year is likely—a more pessimistic reading than the survey found 12 years ago, just two months prior to the start of the Great Recession.
Before you hit the panic button, though, here's another critical fact: Nobody actually knows when the next recession will hit. For one thing, economists as a group are notorious for missing these calls (research last year by the International Monetary Fund found that, out of 153 recessions in 63 countries between 1992 and 2014, only five were predicted in advance by the forecasts reviewed by the IMF). Key indicators are also more mixed than recent headlines suggest. The unemployment rate, for instance, just hit a 50-year low
