Back in January I decided to start more regular content creation for YouTube. Last week we passed 3,000 subscribers, and the number continues to grow. Thanks for your support. And judging by your comments, you appreciate the straightforward data driven approach. Our podcast subscriber base is also expanding nicely too.
Since that time, we have built the arguments using data to highlight around the growing pressures from higher levels of debt, sliding home prices sliding and higher interest rates.
Now one question keeps recurring in the community discussion. I see the problem, but what should I do to protect myself in these uncertain times? This is an excellent question, and one I want to take further. Because the answer is, it depends.
It depends on where you believe the economy is headed. It depends whether you are seeking to protect the value of existing assets and savings, are seeking to exploit the uncertainty, or something else.
So in response, I am going to commence today the first in a series of posts which I have called Financial Resilience 101.
Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”.
And we start our journey with a quick recap based on some of the most relevant posts I have already created. If you missed them, now is a good time to catch up.
The first post “Four Potential Finance and Property Scenarios” discusses the range of potential outcomes over the next couple of years, because you will need to decide where to place your bets.
If you are holding to a mild correction and more of the same, you will adopt one set of strategies for resilience, whereas if you are at the other end of the spectrum and looking at global events similar to the GFC a decade ago you will go a different way. Thinking about scenarios is useful if not easy to do. We will update our scenarios again in a future post, but they generally still holding true.
The next post discussed whether now is a good time to buy property “Should I Buy”and here we explored the reasons to buy and not to buy.
Again it partly depends on your view, but also whether you are thinking of property as a place to live or an investment.
The other side of the coin is should I sell now, and we discussed this too in our post “Should I Sell Now?” and we look at the reasons why you might decide to sell, or not.
Again this varies depending on whether you are an owner occupier or a property investor.
Then we went on to explore options beyond property, accepting that things may get shaky. In our post “What Should I Do” we go through the options, from stocks, shares, bonds, commodities and crypto and draw some comparisons with the UK a decade ago via Northern Rock.
Now once you have gone through these sessions you will have a good set of foundations from which to build a Financial Resilience Strategy. Next time we will then go further into what to do next.
And a warning, this is not financial advice, as I cannot take account of individual circumstances, and am not qualified to give such advice. That said, there are some general principles which I think are useful, based on my own experience. And if you find these useful then that is a good outcome. But you will have to make your own decisions.
Two final points, first generally diversification is goodness, as it spreads the risks, and second there are no silver bullets, no simply answers. If there were, I would not be making these videos, I would be going after that solution! Neither Gold, nor Silver nor Crypto are without significant risks. You can easily jump from the frying pan into the fire. Things are decidedly tricky at the moment, so you need to do the work, and make your own choices. No silver (or other metal) bullets here!
