The ATA Chronicle - January/February 2020 - 20

WATCH YOUR BACK FOR A RECESSION continued

Recessions are also a great time to beef up your own career skills.

With the caveat that I'm not a
financial advisor, here's an example. I
aim for about a $10,000 cushion in my
business savings account; much less
than a year of living expenses. However,
I feel that it's sufficient for my situation.
My husband and I paid off our mortgage
a number of years ago and are now
completely debt-free, and our house has
approximately doubled in value since
we bought it in 2004-that opens up
the option of taking a pretty large home
equity loan if we needed cash. We have
a decent amount of long-term savings in
retirement accounts, but because of our
big push to go debt-free (which we both
agree was worth doing), we probably
have less liquid cash than many twoincome families do. However, we have
a lot of financial flexibility if we need it:
we have one kid who will go to college
next year (all the money for that is in a
529 account), and thus will no longer
live with us full-time. If we did some
improvements to our house, we could
rent it for probably $2,500 a month.
I already have a job where I can work
from anywhere. My husband has an
in-house job but works in information
technology, so theoretically he could
find a remote job.
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The ATA Chronicle | January/February 2020

And let's say that we: a) needed to cut
our living expenses, and b) wanted to go
on an adventure. We could do something
out-of-the-box like move to Thailand for
a year, where one can rent a quite nice
one-bedroom apartment for, let's say,
$1,000 a month, while simultaneously
renting our own house out for a lot more
than that. Realistically, we both love
traveling, and we could probably find
a place in a really inexpensive country
where we could even live without
working if we rented our house out. That
opens up a lot of options.
On the flip side, if you have a big
mortgage, car loans, credit card debt,
student debt, a spouse who is not
employed, your elderly mom in the
garage apartment, and three kids in
elementary school, you've got a very
different situation. That's a pretty big
ship to reroute if the economy goes
sour. In that case, you might aim
for more like 75-100K in savings.
Everyone's mileage varies, but hopefully
those examples help.

business sector equally, or perhaps even
at all. For example, the dot-com bubble
really only affected tech companies. At
the time of the 2008 recession, I was
doing a lot of legal translation. Business
volume during that time: never better!
Some sectors of the translation industry
make money "coming and going" so
to speak, and are probably relatively
immune to a recession.
But you want to look at your current
client base and identify clients where
you might be classified as "the fat" if
that client had to "trim the fat." Reuven
uses the example of teaching in-person
training courses. He anticipates that if
there's a recession, his smaller clients
may stop hiring in-person trainers
altogether (so he's developed more
robust online offerings), or they may
bring trainers in for shorter courses.
In our profession, I would be looking
at clients who are hiring a translator
because they want to, not because they
have to. If you're translating a client's
blog because they think it's fun to have
it in multiple languages, that might be
an expense they would look to cut if
needed. If you translate for architecture
or construction companies, they could
be some of the first to be hit by an
economic downturn.

Some sectors of the translation
industry make money "coming
and going" so to speak, and
are probably relatively immune to
a recession.

So, first, take a realistic look at, let's
say, the clients that provide the top
50% of your income, and ask yourself
whether they're likely to cut back on
translation in a financial pinch.

STEP 2: CONSIDER YOUR
CURRENT CLIENTS

STEP 3: CONSIDER WHAT THRIVES IN
A RECESSION

In the podcast episode, Reuven makes
the point that recessions don't hit every

Even in a serious recession, there's still
business to be found. Reuven provided
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