Your plan for economic disruption.

[smoothmoniker]

I'm feeling a little odd about this recession. We've been immune to the effects so far, and we're positioned to stay immune for a while.

We looked at buying a home a several years back, and weren't willing to do the insane mortgages that buying in LA required. As a result, we have no crazy mortgage, and we're not locked into a property that's losing value by the day.

About a year and a half ago, we started looking at buying again, in earnest. As a result, we moved a huge chunk of our down payment money out of the stock market and into regular old savings, expecting to need quick access to it, and unwilling to risk losing it in case of a crash.

Because we were actively in the housing market, we felt the first rumblings of the tightening credit crunch, and extrapolated out that if mortgages started seizing up, the housing market market and other credit-dependent industries would start getting bad. We moved our remaining investments into bear-market stocks and funds.

I'm not saying all that to sound smug. I'm saying it because it's shifted my mindset about the recession. If things get kind of bad, or every pretty bad, we'll be OK for a while. We could live off of savings for about 12 months at our current level of expenses, and up to 2 years if we went into bunker mode. A lot of that is hold-over from the mindset of my early professional career, when jobs were few and far between, and we saved every penny to cover the months where I wasn't making much.

Because my family is isolated from the "pretty bad" scenario, I've be obsessing over the "worst case" scenario. I've been consumed by thoughts of what it would take for the economy to collapse to the point where I'm begging on a street corner, or my kids go to bed crying from hunger.

It's made me realize that there's little I wouldn't do to prevent that from happening. Having a family changes your perspective. There was I time when I would have scoffed at "selling out" and doing something other than music for a living.

Now, if I suddenly woke up and there were no more work for me in the music industry, if my university started axing faculty and I were kicked out, I would do anything to put food on the table and to keep a roof over the heads of my wife and kids. Anything. Stand on a corner dancing and holding a sign advertising sub sandwiches? Sure. Work the night-shift on a janitorial crew? OK. Day laborer? If I could get my Spanish back up to par. Begging? Yes.

My dignity comes from seeing my kids warm and fed. Anything that I have to do to accomplish that borrows its dignity from their well-being.