Live like you're already poor, reduce all unnecessary spending, adopt an ascetic mindset to support this lifestyle. That way, when a collapse comes you'll be accustomed to living frugally already and you'll have all the money you saved by getting a head start already saved up to get you through rough patches with relative ease.
Now, when I say live like you're poor, I mean do it smart. Don't grocery shop at a gas station, do your necessary purchases in bulk (actually poor people can't or won't, but would be better off if they could.). Don't but the cheapest boots, but rather the best value. But when choosing how many vacations to take, maybe pick camping locally more often than exotic vacations. Eat simple foods, don't order out fancy stuff and get accustomed to such luxuries. Don't automatically buy the latest consumer toy just because it looks fun. Don't move into a nicer apartment just because you got a raise. You get the idea.
At the very least, live like a prudent low-middle-income earner in your country, not like a Bay Area SWE.
Get used to using public transit, if it’s at all an option for you. Going down to being a one-car household instead of two saves us at least 5k EUR per year, even counting the additional cost of two unlimited local transit passes.
Avoid habit-forming conveniences like restaurant delivery, and instead learn how to grocery shop with a list and to cook things you like to eat. If you’re really pressed for time, order your groceries online and pick them up, or get them delivered (that’s an easier thing to back away from if money gets tight than restaurant delivery).
Develop non-consumerist hobbies, where you can get a lot of enjoyment out of little marginal expenditure. I’m partial to fiber arts (free/cheap sheep fleeces I clean with dish soap, then spin and crochet/knit), but there are plenty of relaxing ways to spend time that don’t involve spending much money or being convinced to spend money (like most media consumption - everyone is susceptible to advertising, to some extent)
Painfully I’ve learnt that you want to work in an industry that is largely recession proof.
Focus on industries that sell things that people need and will try to keep buying right down to their last buck.
Food, utilities, insurance. People don’t like sitting in the dark. People need water. People need to eat. People really don’t like living without insurance cover or to let cover lapse.
They don’t need Netflix, Disney+ or Prime. They don’t need Spotify. They don’t need training or e-learning. They don’t need luxury goods. They don’t need new motor vehicles. They don’t need holidays. They don’t need new iPhones or new computers.
Try and move now to an industry that has some security.
Investment wise diversification is key. Just pray that it doesn’t get so bad that banks start to fail.
2008/2009 I was working in healthcare and just got to sit back and watch the drama. People get sick and need their medicine no matter how bad the economy is collapsing.
Broadly agree, but I'd bet on Spotify being safe (unless overtaken by a competitor.) The workers in all the robust industries you mentioned are all listening to Spotify to get through their workdays. This is one of the last things they'll give up, normies need music like they need alcohol (and/or weed.)
I (like I'm sure many others) predicted it in 2007 and hedged against it by getting a 10 year fixed mortgage at then-current rates on the basis that rates would go sky high as they had in earlier recessions in the UK.
They plummeted to next-to-zero, and in addition to the injury I had to endure the insult of the people who hadn't seen it coming gloating about their low standard variable rates.
Ofc I clearly didn't have much real economic understanding but I guess I am saying that beyond normal common financial sense (the lack of which at scale leads to these situations) which you should be using anyway, we don't really know which way the wind is blowing, and what the exact consequences will be.
Prepayment penalties are illegal for the vast majority of loans that consumers can get in the US, which makes it a no-brainer to refinance any time the payment saving exceeds the cost of writing a new loan.
The Trump admin has floated the idea of allowing prepayment penalties in home mortgages, BTW.
Crap, I was wrong. Bill Ackman is trying to convince Bessent to do it. So while it may happen, it isn’t coming from inside the admin.
One argument is that it could allow for lower rates, BTW. (This is true, it very well could).
And also, if it happened it would be for newly issued mortgages. Existing mortgages have language in the contract that you couldn’t just unilaterally change
The same way callable bonds command a higher interest rate than non-callable do. If the bond holder can just decide that tomorrow it’s cheaper for them to pay off the bond vs pay me the coupon on it, it’s worth less to me as a buyer. I lose if interest rates go lower (bond is paid early) or higher (I am now holding a bond worth less than a newly issued one).
If you look through the bond market you will sometimes see bonds issued by the same company or agency both as callable and non-callable, the callable bonds are usually .5-1% lower even when issued on the same date.
Your lender definitely wants to get paid back, but they don’t necessarily want to get paid back right now. Because then they have a pile of money and they need to find something to do with it.
Consumers have a tendency to pay loans back early when the bank doesn’t have any more profitable alternatives. Consumers also have a tendency to NOT pay loans back early when the bank does have more profitable alternatives.
But you know that the first situation is worse for the bank than the second situation. So they do account for this, to a degree, when they give you a loan. In theory they would be willing to give you a lower interest rate if you gave up your prepayment option. In theory. In reality? Who knows.
Sounds right but another big factor is to get some predictability.
Demand for mortgage varies over time, regulations change. It's a long term product, banks like to know with high certainty that when someone signs up it will be X earned over a period, not maybe X minus we don't know over an unknown period.
They are in the business of capital efficiency. Lack of control makes capital less efficient, or at least more expensive to keep efficient.
Overpayments (in the UK) are often not allowed, when they are, the borrower needs to arrange it when the loan is taken, and for a fee.
Refinancing is a right, but the fine prints told borrowers at what penalty.
I remember the opposite, just before we left the ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism). Interest rates hit 15% and one of my colleagues was gloating about how he had just taken on a fixed rate mortgage. A few days later we left and interest rates plummeted.
Skill. Knowledge. At your age, your biggest assert is your future earnings potential. The more employable you are, the better you will make iduring and after a downturn. In fact, the highest skill folks tend to even profit from hiccups in the economy.
Are the ones newer to the workforce just screwed or is there a way out? Kinda sucks that all this went down around 6-7 years into my tenure and it's just been a few years of scraping together freelance + portfolio projects to try and climb out of tbis rut.
(This might sadly be rhetorical given what I hear of '08, but perhaps there are new channels open to take advantage of. Or at least old channels to raise awareness of).
Yes. And here I am nearly 3 yesrs post last full time, 9 years of exexperience, and still looking (feel free to read my struggles in detail below).
What do you recommend applying to? I work in games so I guess I'm playing on hard mode (especially in these times), but the common wisdom of "normal software jobs love taking game programners in" hasn't rung true this time around.
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Life story: Laid off mid 2023. I took a few months off when I got laid off, but the last quarter of 2023 wasn't kind to me.
2024 got me some freelance work, so I wasn't out on the streets, but it was a complete circus of an interview racket. Honestly worse than my first job hunt out of college. Its bad when you feel deep down there was someone better than you, but when you go 5 rounds in with good vibes to hear... Nothing back? That's truly disrespectful. And it sadly wasn't a one off.
Then in 2025 I hit some medical emergencies so I needed to urgently find anything. So I found part time work outside of tech and made due with that as I paid down those debts. That totaled up to a part time freelance gig, a part time job, and a few (failed) attempts at some hustles over 2025 only to end up making maybe a third of what I made back in 2022.
Now it's 2026 and I'll try again next month. My freelance work covers any gaps I would have had, I have a website almost ready with some personal projects to point to, and I'm overall more adjusted to the realities of this current market and will approach accordingly. I'm optimistic, but I know we're still in the thick of the weeds here. So I'll take any leads I can get.
None of that is true. Not one word of this applies anymore. Being highly skilled means you're highly paid, which puts you first in line for cuts. Talent doesn't get you hired, networks do. "Future earning potential" is just nonsense words, you can't eat "future earning potential".
This advice is from half a century ago. The times have moved on.
Nothing provides complete protection, but diversification can help reduce the impact.
The person saying gold and mining stocks may or may not be correct - it's still a risky position. Precious metals could be in a commodity bubble right now (or not). It's had to predict anything with perfect accuracy, which is why diversification matters.
You probably shouldn't be jumping completely in or out of anything because that requires timing, which is also not easy to do. What you can do is change he weights withing your portfolio. For example, reducing your US equity exposure to increase your bond exposure. Or reducing your US growth exposure to increase your US value and Eurozone dividend exposure. It's best to listen to several financial companies reports to weigh what to do.
Your life should have a plan beyond tomorrow or the next hype cycle so that you progress towards your goals independently of the flow of society. This will allow you to navigate those flows instead.
Maximize income and cash flow, when things start to crash, you want to have fresh new money coming in to start buying undervalued oversold assets.
In the meantime, keep investing to avoid eroding the value of your money as the dollar drops in value. It also prepares you for the possibility the crash doesn’t occur for a very long time, long enough to grow your net worth substantially to be better insulated.
Prices of investments will also go down - stocks certainly, although precious metals were traditionally recession proof, we've never had such a bull run on gold/silver in anticipation of recession. My guess is that it won't hold - I've heard that jewelers already refuse to take precious metals at anything near market value.
Yeah, as a SWE I just got sufficient money to pay my expenses AND have some to invest quite recently (about 2/1 months ago), but I basically froze the money instead of investing because everything seems overvalued and about to fall (even silver and gold).
Be careful, I would not stay 100% invested or 100% uninvested. The market can remain in an Everything bubble for far longer than we expect (see: since 2008). It can be a lot harder psychologically to get back -into- the market when you're totally out because of sunk cost fallacy (thinking, I gotta wait just a little longer and this thing will finally crash).
I would argue that parts of the economy should (hopefully) remain healthy. I mean, AI bubble or not, people need medicine, food, internet access, energy, ... . Invest in that.
Also (not a financial advisor), when a crash occur there is a so called "flight for quality" where people move money they made by cashing out the assets to stable (A+ assets). So look for companies that have solid financials and can weather the storm.
Finally, diversify not only on the industry, but also geographically. EU, Swiss, Asian. I personally stay a bit away from emerging markets stuff as I don't have enough knowledge to make informed decisions (I don't even consider Emerging Market ETFs which should be run by SMEs).
It's difficult to draw many lessons from 2008. The people who suffered most then were over extended home owners. It's still not a good idea to be one of those people but there aren't so many of them now anyway.
A lot of people _need_ the S&P to stay where it is to keep their standard of living stable. If it drops to a rational valuation (say, 2500-3000), there will be a lot of pain.
There's a common consensus in economics that bubbles are really hard to predict, and even some argument that they don't actually really exist. Great paper came out recently called "Bubbled for Farma"[0] which looks at predictability for bubbles and finds some indicators but no sure fire thing.
That sort of rules out an easy or known way to predict and avoid bubbles. That said, it's worth noting our current historic period marked by being post financialisation (taking out a bunch of investment regulation) of markets in the 80s exhibits a lot more economic crashes (the real reason we should car about bubbles) than most of history (although most of history also does not exhibit any economic growth, so be careful what you wish for).
In particular, the period between around 1930-1975 showed extremely high growth with almost no bubbles or market crashes[1].
So my semi-knowledgeable but definitely not expert view is that:
- Bubbles and crashes are not easy to predict, and therefore avoid
- That said, our existing market rules have effects on the number of crashes/bubbles we see (but there's debate around whether you actually would want an economy with less crashes/bubbles if that meant left growth)
[1] You can find this discussed a bunch of places but Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide talks about this very fluently.
Edit: I think your question might actually have just been about personal protection again bubbles, rather than protecting the economy as a whole. In which case, having margin in your spending so you'd be able to live if things were some portion more expensive against your earnings is probably the only sane suggestion.
Where was I giving that advice? Gold and silver mining stocks are extremely low compared to the price of gold and silver buying mining socks right now is buying low.
Was thinking the same, but why would everyone be more interested in gold an silver in a couple of months than they are right now? Sure it beats holding dollars of stocks.
But, keeping both feet on the ground, I'm tempted to think that if the economy collapses I'd not be very interested in buying precious metals. I'd be looking for food, a roof to live under and safety.
You can invest in silver mining stocks, and be concerned about food at the same time. One is for long-term survival. The other is for short term survival. You can think of things like toilet paper and razors as bartering tools or actual new money, and the golden silver investments as objection of the current money you have right now.
My grandfather lives in a great depression in Manhattan. He told me some crazy stories, but you know what most people made it through. I think this time our system is more fragile, but I have no doubt that human survival is much stronger than me think as well as human socialism.
For instance, I am homeless living with schizoaffective disorder and I’m not worried so why should you be?
Where was the news when silver was going up and having the best days it’s had since 1981?
On January 26, 2026, silver experienced its largest one-day jump in 45 years, with front-month futures soaring by 14%. Spot silver prices surged to over $109 per ounce that day, driven by heightened safe-haven demand and industrial usage. The rally continued to push silver prices toward $120 by January 29, 2026.
And regardless, silver is still at an all-time high.
When you start saying that the news is biased against certain commodities or equities, you’ll start to see how the game is played. This is a tactic of JP Morgan.
Volatility is expected. Always remember that. Volatility is expected in fragile economies.
Anyway, for now I'm primarily concerned with paying a debt for what I need (housing). While worrying somewhat about pension, I'm kind of happy I'm not too deep into where to put excess capital.
First World problems.
IMO Paying your debt always seems prudent - whether we'll see huge inflation or even deflation - when you can live in the thing you're paying for.
Mini stocks were traditionally used as way to invest in asset as a security. But currently with all the ETFs that are backed with physical asset itself, I'd choose that way.
Holding asset yourself (gold) causes logistical issues and massive buy/sell split on your side, but it has some advantages too.
Yes, you either marry into extreme wealth or hope that luck doesn't strike you into generational poverty. Anyone saying anything different is lying too you.
> You managed to clone the repo an run your test by yourself, whatever the outcome is this is a plus against the standard model for scientific research.
That's so true, which is kinda funny since one of the cornerstone of scientific thinking is reproducibility.
I think you could build an ETL-ish workflow where you use SQLite for OLTP and DuckDB for OLAP, but I suppose it's very workload dependent, there are several tradeoffs here.
Right. This is what I want, but transparently to the client. It seems fairly straightforward, but I keep looking for an existing implementation of it and haven't found one yet.
Can we even say that Anyblox is a file format? By my understanding of the project it's "just" a decoder for other file formats to solve the MxN problem.
I was initially uninterested in Dioxus because they just used webviews but their native renderer is really interesting now because it has a lot of strengths, using plain HTML and CSS as the markup language so that they don't have to render to a canvas on the web like Flutter, Compose Multiplatform or many other WASM based renderers do, as they can just, well, ship the HTML and CSS directly. But then on mobile and desktop, it will be rendered without a webview, so you get all the benefits of each platform.
