It's Brian Preston, the money guy, restoring order to your financial chaos, retirement,

investing, taxing.

You've got financial questions, he's got financial answers.

It's Brian Preston, the money guy.

Whenever we see our first quarter, people start using the R word.

Is this a recession?

Is a recession coming?

So we thought it'd be viable to define for you what is a recession.

And very simply, a recession refers to a significant decline in economic activity.

It's generally recognized as two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP.

So if we have another quarter with GDP negative, then that technically would qualify as a recession.

Well, recession, I think, makes people get nervous because it's not just the stock market.

It's actually impacts financial, not the stock market, but also the housing market, the

employment numbers.

There's a lot of ripple effects that come when the economy is in struggling and having

issues.

And one of those ripple effects that we often see is negative stock market performance.

Now, it want to be clear, we're going to talk a little bit in a moment about bear market.

It's a bear market and a recession are not the same thing, but they often go hand in hand.

And for most of us, the way that we feel recessions on a very personal level is what's going

on in our portfolio, what's happening in our retirement accounts, what's happening

with our army of dollar bills.

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