My recession started around this time last year due to some health issues I wasn't aware of, causing the most severe burnout I've ever had, which led to a falling out with my job. So take what I'm saying with a grain of salt:

* Don't count on contracting or remote work as a fallback. I've been trying my luck at it without success. The last time I did it was 5 years ago but it's totally saturated now, with most of the clients going through upwork.com and freelancer.com with 10-50 applications per gig. Go see for yourself under common searches like PHP or React.

* The jobs really will all dry up. Go on something like indeed.com right now and see how many there are. Now imagine the same scenario after everyone has cut their workforce by 10-50% like after the dot bomb in 2000 or the housing bubble popping in 2008. Your selection may change from software developer to driving a delivery truck so it's good to have something you can fall back on. In my case it's moving furniture, but, at 42 I'm getting too old to do it. There will probably always be work in warehouses and restaurants though, like in the old ITT tech commercial.

* Assume that any possessions other than big ticket items like a home or car are only worth 10% of their value. You can get 25% at a pawn shop generally, but not after a recession when everything gets dumped on the market in triplicate. So all of the consumer electronics in your home are probably worth less than $1000 and won’t sustain you for long even if you sell all of them.

* Find your poorest friends or relatives right now and ask them how they get by. This is a good time to learn about donating plasma, collecting unemployment insurance, signing up for food stamps, etc. You’ll be able to make about $300-600 per month through these sorts of tools, but it will take all of your time. The US no longer has an operational social safety net (compared to healthy economies in, say, Europe) so the psychological toll of poverty has a way of locking people into its cycle by paying just barely enough to keep you in a state of slow decline. Best to avoid that by arming yourself with knowledge and knowing your rights.

* Consider getting involved in politics. The problems looming in this next recession are severe and exacerbated by the fact that no real legislation happened to correct the original causes of the 2008 great recession. Expect there to be no cash or credit available. Millions of people will be calling for reforms and there could be ways to help in causes like a new version of Occupy Wall Street. Assume that politicians are asleep at the wheel on this so any help from them will either not come or be too little too late. We’ll have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps again.

This will be the third severe recession I’ve gone through since I graduated from college in 1999. Unfortunately my brain has adapted for survival instead of contributing to society at the level I had hoped for. I’m planning on the next recession lasting at least 3 years, starting around the time of the election. If it starts by summer, then Trump will almost certainly lose, so in the meantime we can count on an influx of capital from the private sector to keep us afloat. But next winter could be quite grim. Try to have enough money on hand to make rent until spring, roughly $3-6,000 for the average American. Note that the bottom half of the country has no savings, so there’s nothing they can really do to hedge against what’s coming.