As someone living in Europe, I’m really not sure how to financially insulate myself anymore. It’s not clear which asset class is safest to protect against inflation or a large negative economic event
(educational purposes only, not investing advice, pay a pro a fixed fee for an hour or two of time)
Easier said than done.
Far more important is keeping your salary up with inflation, since for most people 1y salary > savings.
Luckily the primary function of a home is to provide shelter. You don't have to worry about being out on the street if you're unemployed (pending you can afford local taxes).
It's possible that the house price falls by 10%. It is very, very unlikely that rents will crash by 10%; they're sticky, at best you'll see a very slow slide over years.
If you're still paying your mortgage, do you really own your home?
You own your home in this scenario just as much as the entity on the other side of the equation owns the income stream from your mortgage.
A mortgage is a collateralized loan. You agree to give up ownership of your collateral if you fail to meet the terms of you contract. So yes, you own the home now, subject to constraints.
Ownership is almost always subject to some constraints. Nobody says “do you own your home even though you can be taken out of it (and jailed) if you refuse to pay taxes on it?” even though that’s arguably a more extreme condition upon your ownership. While I am sympathetic to conversation about the broader meaning of ownership, this “mortgage => !ownership” thing is a tired meme.
Hopefully you don't mean in a bank? If history is any guide that's useless with capital controls initiated before the public even gets whiff of it, see Greece and Cyprus 2008. A bolted-down safe in your house seems to be the caveat on such a statement. Money in the bank simply isn't yours and far too many people don't realise this.
It's still wise to at least consider the possibility of a bank failure, qv Northern Rock.
Grandparent comment's advice about keeping an overseas investment is wise, too; as a Brit I've not regretted having US investments.
Most industrialized countries have insurance of bank deposits up to a certain point. So even if the bank goes poof your savings are still safe.
It would simply be prudent to have money in more than one bank (or credit union), as if something bad happens then things may get chaotic in the short term.
A second account also helps with IT problems:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_RBS_Group_computer_system...
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/27/natwest-and...
That advice you're giving there is actually kind of dangerous & misleading.
Depends which EU country he is living in (though he said Europe). Italy pension system is hazardous. Greece is in the EU too, by the way.
Just think about it. If Greece needs x billion € to pay its debt off the most logical way to deal with the problem would be to just buy a huge amount of Greek products rather than send x billion € directly.
The Rational Reminder podcast looking into this and basically concluded that there is no hedge:
* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/150
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f0dns9fHFs
The best you can probably do is have some debt which will worth less and less over time as its nominal value stays the same whereas you get cost of living (CoL) increases with your salary so have more money in really terms to pay it off.
Other than that equities have (generally, but not always) had good enough nominal returns so that you get a real return increase in your investments.
Of course the flaw with this is that I get 4% interest on personal loans so I actually can't make money off of this strategy.
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2639284
For insurance against negative economic events... that's a more rapidly evolving, short-term issue. To the extent you can do it, it is a matter of identifying near term risk sectors, and minimizing exposure to the and/or having investments in areas negatively correlated with the at risk sector.