Ask HN: How can I prepare for hard economic times?

Prepare for failure of government/war? Go be a "prepper" - Ie. have a few months worth of food and water stored. (not that hard in tins/pasta/rice). Get small solar panels for phone charging and a gas/wood camping stove. Download wikipedia.

In both cases, prepare to move countries. Often it's better to just leave than try to survive in subpar conditions. Beware that millions of others may be trying to do the same, and lots of governments don't like millions of refugees. Get yourself a passport for another country and you'll be far more likely to be let in.

In income terms, diversify away from a single source by learning new skills, training up in areas you're a bit rusty in, learning totally new ones.

In savings or investments: diversify where you put them, spread them around so you're not dependent on any one scenario.

In eating: eat more interesting and cheaper things. Become vegetarian, if you aren't already.

In exercise: drop any gym memberships, use things like body weight to train. Run one day, do yoga the next.

In your media consumption: diversify in sources but don't take this as a cue to read more. Read less, much less, but read better. Ignore social media, it's all b&&&&&t. Find one or two sources of media that are reasonably middle line, and read around a topic in a diverse way. Don't get sucked in to anything, least of all the disaster scenario stuff you'll find.

Last but most important: spend all the time you possibly can with your family. Make them your focus, not your income and "future". Be in the now as much as you possibly can. You'll only have this time with your (small) kids for a very, very short period. They'll be flying off soon. Be there for them.

Best of luck.

Budgets are great, if you have steady income. If not, you have to think heuristically rather than algorithmically - how much of my current bank balance has to go to fixed costs like mortgage or rent, food, etc? If the answer is less than 100%, you're already doing better than a lot of people.

Learn to do as much as possible yourself - cook as many meals at home as you can, do your own repairs, make things you need instead of buying them. Invest in tools, because unlike stocks or (God help us) crypto, tools are actually useful in and of themselves. Go find a copy of the old Reader's Digest big yellow DIY home repair manual at a thrift store and keep it.

My rule is, never buy anything new you can get used, never buy anything used you can get for free, never buy anything period you can make, never make anything you can recycle from stuff you already have.

Learn what utilities actually cost in practical terms - how much does it cost to run my AC/heater for an hour? Cook a casserole in the oven? Leave a light on overnight? You'll find yourself actually considering how you use them a lot more. That might sound like Sad grumbling about the heat being turned up above 75°, and maybe it is, but maybe Dad had a point.

The hardest thing to grasp, if you're currently doing well, is how you get locked into survival mode when you're broke. You have to learn how to deal with that, and a lot of people can't. If hard times come, all you will think about is today, and the coming week, and the coming month. There are people who are able to, say, work a low-paying gig 40 hours a week and come home and work on side hustles and entrepreneurial projects - Stephen King working as a teacher and in a laundry and coming home and writing at a tiny desk in his own laundry room. If you're one of those people, you are very fortunate. But the likelihood is that, if you do find yourself in tight financial straits, you will spend your spare time just decompressing from whatever you're doing to try to survive.

Hard times are easier to bear if you've learned to be more self-sufficient and make do without luxuries and do more with less. You've seen that meme from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia about "old poor" vs "new poor"? That's the difference. New poor is constantly shocked by how hard everything suddenly is, even the things that used to be simple. (A Costco card is not very useful if you live in the middle of the city and can't afford a car, for example. You ain't hauling a year's supply of toilet paper home on a bus.)

Old poor knows all this and is not surprised by how much shit the world can throw at you. Old poor knows that the AA folks have the right idea: you need to accept the things you can't do anything about right now, do what you can about the things you can, and know the goddamn difference.

So really, all of this comes down to reframing your strategies for making it from one paycheck to the next, and adjusting your expectations accordingly.

Also, ditch the streaming services and learn to love The Pirate Bay, and I say that as someone who's made much of his living for most of his life off of creating media. :-D Especially if you've got kids - being able to summon Frozen or Encanto on command even if you can't pay the broadband bill until next week is parental magic. Or so I'm told - I never had kids because I grew up like this and I didn't want to make someone else suffer if they don't have to.

Good luck, man, and if you're doing well now, don't ever forget to be thankful for it. It really comes down to luck most of the time, despite what the nerds will tell you. Being smart and working hard isn't enough, or half the undocumented dudes I've ever known working in the orchards and fields would be living like Kardashians, and all the trustafarians whose parents bootstrapped their crappy useless startup and let them live in the guesthouse rent-free would be standing by the freeway on-ramp with signs that read WILL CREATE INNOVATION IN THE LUXURY TRAVEL SECTOR FOR BEER AND A WARM BED.