I’m sure everyone has heard from the media that a global recession is looming? With Brexit and our latest Prime Minister causing turbulent times in the UK, it may not come at such as shock like the 2008 financial crash which took many by surprise. This post isn’t about predicting when a recession is going to occur, but more focused on the reaction of Social platforms when the big ‘R’ phrase is mentioned and the general ‘gist’ of what the FIRE community as a whole are going to be doing through a recession.

So first what is my plan?

Keeping things simple, I’m going to just keep calm and carry on. That’s right, be super boring and do what I’ve been doing for the last 15 months. Time in the market compared to timing the market. My investments are mainly contained within global index trackers mainly with Vanguard which invests in over 6,000 in small and large cap stocks weighted proportionately by countries market size. I don’t have the technical know how, time or capability to actively invest and I do not believe I can beat the average market returns, hence why I am going with the flow.

So I’ve been doing a few readings across the FIRE community, particularly on other blogs, LemonFool etc and the majority (I’d say 80%) are adopting the ‘keep calm and carry on‘ rule from what I’ve seen so far. There are some who have pulled some of their active investments, others who have re-balanced and are weighted more heavily towards bonds and others who have gone into more renewal energy (as a specific sector). All in all however, generally speaking the community of FIRE is focusing on the carry on as normal approach.

That is until you read Reddit and introduce oversea’s visitors et al into the mix and you have a totally different story. Here’s an example;

Now it’s difficult to tell via a short piece of text whether the above comment is essentially mocking the ‘market timers’ – Who knows, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this was actually the case and this person has actually sold their stocks years ago and is awaiting the next recession. The media outlets and news sites will continue to churn out ‘recession’ based drivel until we’re all blue in the face. The only issue is that once those ‘recession’ based articles match up with a legitimate drop in the stock markets, panic ensues and it must be truthful, right?!

Here’s just a few examples of articles published in 2016, which in-essence saw excellent global growth across many markets;

The list goes on and on and on and on….

A few Google searches brings up literally thousands of these types of articles and it happens every single year. So why do so many still react so differently?

Anyway – a short post. It helps just reading into ‘recession’ based news articles that most are so hugely blown out of the water and that keeping calm and carrying on is most likely, the best outcome whether a recession occurs or not. Who knows – I wish I had the crystal ball to hand!

What are you plans for the recession / depression / financial crash etc…?