<prompt> Human: I entered the workforce in 2010 after college and managed to get a great career. I have been fortunate enough to be able to save aggressively for retirement, buy a house, and develop a healthy emergency fund. My retirement portfolio and taxable accounts have seen decent growth over the past eight years something like 10-15 return on investment because theyre mostly in stocks theyre all low fee Vanguard index funds, of course!. It seems clear that the next big recession is only a matter of time. For those of you who went into the 2008 recession with a pretty healthy financial situation, did you make it out ok? How badly was your retirement portfolio hit? Is there anything you would do differently -- maybe something made you panic and make a rash financial decision you now regret? Whats the best way to prepare for a recession, whether it be a possible job loss, decline in the value of your home, or decline in the value of your retirement savings?  <response>: I think you hit the nail on the head.Biggest thing to do is to try to stay employed and employable.Also have an emergency fund, if you do lose your job you dont want to have to sell your stocks at the worse time when they are low.If you manage to stay employed keep investing, hell even try to invest more.I was able to stay employed and keep investing. I was pretty young and about 100 in stocks so I lost about 50 in a short time.Recover pretty fast and had great years since then. 