How to Increase Your Financial Resilience

Executive Summary

• Treat your household as a business enterprise; the rules for financial resilience are the same
• The 5 Rules of Financial Resilience
• Eliminating vulnerabilities
• Focusing on value creating and income diversification
• The number of options for increasing your financial resilience is much larger than you likely expect. Your challenge is first truly understanding this, and then having the courage to see a few of them through.

If you have not yet read Don’t Worry, Be Resilient available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we sought to understand what financial resilience means, and found that reliance on debt for consumption and on speculation for collateral, and an inflexible, high cost basis were the characteristics of fragile finances for households, enterprises, and nations.

In Part II, we ask the question, what are the characteristics of a financially resilient household? What strategies can we pursue to increase the resilience of our own households?