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Find your PFL®Wondering where to invest during a recession or economic downturn? Whether the recession is looming or already unfolding quietly, this guide reveals 10 smart, resilient investment strategies rooted in permaculture principles, financial stewardship, and personal empowerment. These aren’t your typical Wall Street plays—they’re practical, values-aligned moves for uncertain times.
Some people would say we are already in a recession and the government just hasn't caught up yet to let everyone else know. Curious what you are seeing in your own life/community. I shared some of what I’m seeing in these posts in LinkedIn about The Signs of an Economic Shift and What You Can Do Now and Proactive Strategies for Navigating Economic Shifts.
Whether or not we are in a recession, it's time to consider how you are investing excess resources you do not need to meet your monthly cash flow needs.
Note: Re Excess Resources, the Journey to Financial Liberation, and Stewardship
On the spiral path of the Journey to Financial Liberation, “stewardship” is stage two on the spiral … and this is my recommended plan for wise stewardship of what you have.
If you do not yet have resources to steward, you should be investing in creating an income-generating machine first and foremost. That takes priority. An income-generating machine, built around your unique skills, talents, and gifts, is the first thing to invest in—always. Not passive income investments. Not get-rich-quick schemes.
Priority Investment #1: Income-Generating Machine
A way for you to earn income based on your skills, talents, or gifts that are in alignment with your values. This can be a job or a business built around a service. It can even be a mix of services if you are multi-talented.
Once you can generate what you need, and you begin to have any accumulation at all, it’s time to invest wisely by stewarding what you have well. If you do not steward wisely, Life either doesn’t give you more OR it takes what you have.
Stewarding wisely means investing your time, energy, attention, and money (TEAM resources)—not just your money.
10 Places to Invest Any Excess You Have
Numbered in the order I recommend you invest first, second, third, etc. I wouldn’t invest in crypto or the public stock markets (#9 & #10) until you have your income-generating machine PLUS 1-8 dialed in.
1. Emergency Cash at Home
2. Food + Water Supply
3. Mobile Survival Kit
4. Liquid Funds at a Local Bank
5. Relational Investments
6. Life Insurance + Estate Planning
7. Real Estate or Land
8. Private Investments (Angel + Community)
9. Crypto Assets
10. Public Market Investments (ETFs, Stocks)
Investment #1: Cash at Home for Ease of Trading/Exchange
Keep enough cash at home, in a safe, in small bills in case needed for immediate exchange. So $1s, $5s, $20s, $100s, and silver (easier to transport and exchange than gold). Most people I speak with generally keep between $1k to $20k here, depending on their excess available cash.
Investment #2: Food + Water at Home for 1-3 Months
Keep an emergency supply of non-perishable food at home to feed you and your family for 1-3 months. Investment in a generator, solar power, and water filtration devices would fit into this category as well.
Investment #3: Ability to Go Quickly and Live Independently on Land for 2 Weeks to a Month
Camping gear, including water filtration and the gear needed to rehydrate/cook/source your own food in the woods if needed.
This includes knowing where to go. Scout your local community to know where you could go into the woods and hunker down for 14-30 days if needed.
In this category, I’ve got a Sprinter van, and I’m inviting my son to build in a water filtration system, and put together backpacks for everyone in our family + water filtration devices and freeze dried food and cooking source in everyone’s bag. In the future, I’ll recommend “done for you” versions that you can buy from the internet, but I have not identified my favorite yet.
Investment #4: Liquid Funds at a Local Bank for 1-12 Months of Living Expenses
The amount here is dependent on how quickly you could generate income, if needed - based on your skills and your ability to create something from nothing.
If you can always generate what you need, when you need it, on demand, with no dependence on the outside economy or a boss, you can keep this amount quite low. If you would need more time to learn a skill to offer, or uplevel the value of skills you have, and to learn to sell your services, this amount should be larger to give you more space and time before you need to generate from your own skills or talents.
In any event, keep this amount under the FDIC limits. And, if you have more than FDIC limits, consider multiple bank accounts at different banks. More on this in a future article.
Investment #5: Relational Investments in Your Most Important People
Once you’ve got your financial basics covered, your next investments should be in the humans close to you having their basics covered, and in developing social/relational capital, where needed.
This means investing in the people helping you to raise your kids or care for your aging parents (or who will help you in the future). It means investing in your own kids, if they are grown. It means investing in local farmers growing food in your area. It means investing in your parents & siblings (healing may be needed, which requires investment), and trusted advisors and supporters to help you with everything else you will invest in beyond these first 5 investments.
Human capital is the least appreciated, and yet most valuable investment you can make after the investments you make in yourself.
Investment #6: Life Insurance + Estate Planning
Get the right amount and type of life insurance - ideally with a built-in long-term care rider or ability to access your insurance for long-term care needs + the estate planning to make sure it and your other assets are handled with ease after your death (or in event of your incapacity).
While you COULD use a DIY estate planning solution, I only recommend that if you are still working on maxing out the first 5 of these investment categories.
In that case, yes, have a DIY estate plan in place to cover just the very basic basics. Watch the LIFTed Family Course before you DIY.
But, once you have the first 5 of these handled, get professional support to buy the right type and amount of insurance + to get the right estate plan in place to save your family massive headaches once you start investing in anything else.
Of course, I recommend you work with a Personal Family Lawyer to get this all dialed in. You can watch my free training on what to do next about your estate planning on this page: http://www.personalfamilylawyer.com/resources (at the bottom of the page) and also, get my book “Wear Clean Underwear: A fast, fun, friendly - and Essential - Guide to Legal Planning for Busy Parents” on that page.
If you want full education on legal, insurance, financial and tax matters, I recommend the LIFTed Family Course.
Investment #7: Real Estate/Land
First and foremost, invest in a place you could live, if you had to, whether you live there now or you don’t live there now, and rent it out. Being able to move to my 2-acre farm back in 2011 as I was riding out my own spiritual/financial crisis was a life-changing, game-changing experience for me as I got to live for a year without worrying about money at all, simply by having my own land to live on
Post-bankruptcy, when I was re-building my investment portfolio after, I invested in a Sprinter Van and built that out plus in a condo that my kids or their dad could live in, if needed. Looking back, I wish I had never sold the farm, and instead rented it out, but it also turns out there’s now an entire fracking set up literally across the street from it, so at the same time that’s not the right place for us anyway.
I currently steward land in Alegria Village, an eco-community in Costa Rica, and I should have begun to build on that land right away. I made an error and didn’t, losing many years of rental income, and watching building prices increase year after year.
Currently, I rent the homes I personally live in - both in Boulder, CO and Costa Rica - as the cost of buying a home I’d want to live in right now is far greater than the cost of renting, and I split my rent cost with my businesses as I use the homes for business purposes. I also live in a community, so I only pay a fraction of the rent personally.
I will be building on land here in Costa Rica, as my next big investment.
Investment #8: Private Investments – Angel Investing and Similar
I see private investments as on par with building relational capital. Once you’ve got your real estate, life insurance, and personal family survival to thriving needs met, making investments in the people you are close with, who you believe in, and who are doing great things in the world is most likely to lead to the kind of long-term benefits you really want to see in your own life.
Make these investments through a self-directed IRA (maxed out via contributions to a ROTH IRA first, so that if they sell for millions or billions down the road you don’t pay taxes on the gains) or, if you’ve invested all of your retirement assets already, consider an irrevocable trust
for maximum asset protection.
Investment #9: Crypto
There are a few types of investments in Crypto. As I see it, there’s two main ways to invest in Crypto:
-
Invest to buy and hold (which should almost always involve staking so you earn a form of “interest” on your holdings) OR
-
Invest to trade (including yield farming, which allows you to gain rewards on your trades in exchange for providing liquidity to certain markets)
If these terms are all foreign to you, just buy some of the blue chip crypto assets, like BTC, ETH, SOL to start and then branch into some of the “Alt-Coins” as you learn.
Investment #10: Public Market Investments
Many would disagree with me for putting public market investments last on the list, but they are the investments that are most out of your control. If you are going to invest in the public stock markets, you are probably best off to invest via a low-cost ETF, such as the SPY500 via Vanguard. Or to invest in individual stocks of companies you know, trust and love to use yourself.
It may seem as if there aren't a lot of great places to invest right now, if you are only looking in the traditional places - like real estate (the bubble will pop and prices will come down at some point) or the public markets (it can't always go up, and we've been in an upcycle for a long time now). But, my guess is that you haven’t been looking at investing the way I’ve laid out here. These principles are rooted in Permaculture, and explored further with tools for you to apply these principles in your own life in “The Enough Course”, a creation of the Eyes Wide Open Collective.
It may seem as if there aren't a lot of great places to invest right now if you are only looking in traditional places like real estate (the bubble will pop) or the public markets (we’ve been in an upcycle for a long time). But my guess is that you haven’t been looking at investing the way I’ve laid out here.
These principles are rooted in permaculture and explored further with tools in The Enough Course, a creation of the Eyes Wide Open Collective.
Final Notes on Financial Liberation
1. Generation First
The first stage of the spiral is “generation”, or knowing how to generate what you need in alignment with your values. If you aren’t yet generating what you need, invest in yourself first—whether that’s through learning new skills, increasing the value of your current skills, or building a business.
2. The Caveat
This list assumes you’ve already fully invested in building a valuable service or product that allows you to earn what you need in alignment with your values. If you haven’t, do that first! Whether as a business owner or an intrapreneur, your income source should be within your control at all times. If all else fails, you should always be able to provide a service or sell a product people want and need.
Disclaimer
This is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. I’m just a gal who graduated first in her class from Georgetown Law in 1999 as a Law & Econ Fellow, worked at Charlie Munger’s firm, built multiple 7 & 8-figure businesses, went bankrupt once, and has some ideas about money, investing, and a “dis-ease” called money dysmorphia—plus the medicine for it, which I call the Journey to Financial Liberation.