This has happened before — 90s Japan is what the US has in store for the 20s. The same collection of factors (high valuations after decades of rapid growth, a declining birth rate and an aging population) are present in the US. The main difference being there is no “safe haven” currency; the US is still a superpower and a declining US economy will hurt the global economy and set the stage for China to take over as the sole global superpower.
Use your existing dollars to buy non-volatile assets like real estate or gold requires you to pay long term capital gains. Gold mostly keeps a constant value, but the dollar value goes down, and the gold price goes up. That looks like a "profit" and you need to pay 15%, soon to be 20%. Effectively, the effect of inflation decreases by 4/5.
For example. suppose you have $100. Holding it over two years of 2% inflation effectively makes the money worth 96$ = 100/(1.02^2). Instead, if you bought $100 of gold, hold for two years, and sell it for $104, you are taxes on 20% of $4. Your loss is $0.8 instead of $4.
Your need to ask for a raise proportional to inflation, but that puts you in higher tax brackets. Your new dollars over 85k are taxes at 24% instead of 10%. Asking for a raise is very difficult for some people...
If you just want to preserve value of cash, you can buy I-series bonds from TreasuryDirect, to the tune of $10k/year. They have 20 year duration and track inflation. You can buy an unlimited amount of TIPS, although they aren't better than I-series bonds.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm considering real estate, but don't have enough money for the downpayment, and in a crash, I will lose my job like everyone else and not be able to make my payments.