By: Revanche

Preparing for a recession: practicing patience

February 11, 2019

Two pairs of leggings, four dresses with pockets, a new rug, two serving bowls, a toilet brush, coffee filters and a platter, a set of glass bakeware with lids. A tablecloth and garden shovel. What’s the theme here?

Let’s see… I bought all but one of them using gift cards. They are useful. We’ve needed most or all of them for months and we’ve been making do without. We now need to declutter 15 MORE things to justify adding so many things to our cabinets and closets. All true.

The biggest thing they have in common: They don’t erase that lingering uneasy feeling about how we’re going to weather the next recession and what further job cuts at our jobs may do to our nascent retirement plans.

Discussing my post and this barely contained feeling of discomfort last week on Twitter with Mr. SSC, he pointed out: one has to have a plan but also have faith that it’ll change, so embrace flexibility. Yeeeeees, but that requires a bendiness of mentality and I’m not yet that evolved.

In part, the crux of this being ill-at-ease is my own fault, not the recession’s. Not that the recession isn’t a big thing, it is, but the bigger problem is we have a couple huge life decisions we can’t seem to get a grip on. They’d likely have an equally, or more, enormous impact on our lives as the recession or a job loss or change in careers. Our waffling is doing neither of us any good but I’m not ready to get into it because I can’t make out head or tails of how I really feel about it. My inner turmoil on those points remains a roiling mass of fog.

Mr. SSC also shared that he’s a stress shopper and boy howdy do I empathize. I’ve been scrolling Amazon deals in a badly concealed panicked state, on a quest to get everything we need for emergencies as if that’ll solve the massive problem of not knowing the shape of the next five years. Thankfully my personal money history means that I’m just wildly window shopping with abandon, but not buying anything. Good habits FTW?

That conversation brought some of my tail-chasing more into clarity though. There are many more “deals” to vet than there are responsible concrete actions I can take.

I can (and have): set up recurring payments for regular bills.
I can (and have) set up auto transfers for our savings.
I can (and have) worked up the budget allocations for spending and saving for the year.

The rest are unknowns and wait and see. My mind wants me to keep moving (like a shark!) so it latches on to the nearest possible actions and window shopping feels productive. Ish.

I’ve said it before and it’s still true: I struggle with change. You know how I deal with it? I make plans. Because plans make sense. Instead of trusting I can roll with the punches, as I always have before, I so dislike that feeling of making spur of the moment decisions with only 90% of the information that my version of “be flexible” is “make a plan for every possible scenario imaginable, then make ten more plans!” That’s not anxiety inducing at all, nossir.

Piggy and Kitty shared that the economists are forecasting the downturn around the end of 2020. I know that’s just a prediction which can be influenced by quite a lot of factors, the pointless government shutdown for one example, but my planner-drunk brain latched onto that tidbit like they’re the PF Nostradamus. I like having dates and numbers to crunch.

Assuming that’s true, what are we going to do differently?

I have a game plan for most major scenarios. I stick to our saving and investing plans. I finally traded my long underperforming Treasury holdings for more VTSAX.

The biggest things we can do now is to make up our minds on the Unknown Things and stop this self-torment of trying to force something to happen when it’s not the right season for sowing or reaping. I’ve never been good at patiently waiting for things to grow. I’m grab at dynamic processes growth where you let one cycle grow while you pay attention to another – thus my window shopping.

But I do know this better than most: buying things won’t solve this particular set of problems. Buying things will make it easier to dig up those dastardly weeds, serve dinner in an almost civilized manner to guests, and keep me clothed when we travel. Those are good things in and of themselves. But acquiring things won’t make the good, life-altering decisions for me. Worst case scenario, they may be distracting me from making the big decisions with clarity. All the more reason to see myself out of the sale apps and onto more productive paths!

NOTE: Chatting about this separately reminded me that my emotions surrounding the recession are charged for a different reason entirely. For eight years prior to the recession, my family and friends were losing loved ones right and left. We lost someone every year unexpectedly and the recession put a shiny cap of terrible on all of it. The memory of a bad recession is one thing but for me, it comes loaded up with a huge series of significant losses. Thanks to OFG for accidentally unlocking that insight!

:: How do you get yourself to sit quietly with the moments at hand?

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