A decade has passed since the second worst recession of modern times wiped out more than $10 trillion in stock and home values. People are feeling good about the sustained bull market.

But nothing good lasts forever and it will all come down again at some point, but probably not with the crash that shook the financial ground in 2008. At that time, stocks took a $6.9 trillion tumble and homeowners lost $3.3 trillion in home values.

The stock market has gained more than 300% since bottoming out in early 2009, and many economists and advisors feel it cannot be sustained at the current level for much longer. That kind of thinking became widespread in last year’s fourth quarter, when the S&P 500 declined 19.8%.

However, the next downturn is unlikely to replay 2008 and 2009 all over again. “Both companies and individuals have better balance sheets now than they did in 2008,” says James Sullivan, vice president and financial advisor at Essex Financial, a financial services firm in Essex, Conn. The unemployment rate is still good and the economy, although slowing, is still growing. “That will stop the snowball effect we had 10 years ago.”

When a downturn happens, “It will still be painful. We cannot predict when it will come, but markets historically tend to recover quickly,” notes Nevenka Vrdoljak, director of retirement strategies at Merrill Lynch.

The question is what should advisors and their clients do now to prepare themselves to minimize the pain, especially if retirement is looming in the near future and disbursements, rather than accumulation, are going to be needed? “I wish I had some surprise answer for you that no one had thought of before, but I don’t,” says Andrew Crowell, vice chairman of wealth management at D.A. Davidson & Co., an employee-owned investment firm based in Great Falls, Mont. “Having a plan in advance is the key to success. If you know your time horizon, your risk tolerance and your asset needs, you establish a plan ahead of time.”

Even if a client is 60 or 65 years old, he or she can live another 30 years, and “it is inevitable there will be a recession during that time,” he says. “If the client was in cash in 2008, he was all right, but if he was in equities, he was in trouble. Asset allocation and diversification in each category is a key in any market. If you have all Google, Amazon and Facebook, that is not diversification.”

Advisors can present numerous possibilities to clients facing retirement, but it all should be thought about and planned ahead of time in order to provide protection for retirement money, advisors agree.

For instance, “put options get a very bad reputation sometimes because they are mistaken for risk, but if you purchase a put option now for a reasonable price and the stock falls, you have protection. It can be like buying insurance for your portfolio,” Crowell says.

Another possibility is switching to alternatives and commodities that have a product backing the investment, rather than tying up most assets in equities.

High-net-worth investors, most with more than $200,000 in annual income, seem to be switching to private equity, real estate, hedge funds, infrastructure and natural resources, as well as commodities, according to Millennium Trust in Oak Brook, Ill., which deals with high-net-worth investors as well as mass affluent households. Less than half of the 500 high-net-worth investors in a recent Millennium Trust survey invested new money in individual stocks in 2018, which is a 10% decline from the previous year.

“High-net-worth investors are not going to leave equities completely, but they are looking for diversification,” says Gary Anetsberger, CEO at Millennium Trust. “The benefit of alternatives is that they do not correlate to the stock market and they provide protection if there is a downturn. The investors are trying to balance their portfolios for different economic scenarios” to preserve money into retirement.

The most common way for the mass affluent to save for retirement is through workplace-sponsored plans such as 401(k)s or IRAs. The number of companies offering retirement plans has remained relatively steady since the mid-2000s, and stood at 66% of employers in 2017, according to “A Retirement Security Retrospective: 2007 Versus 2017” by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies.

However, Catherine Collinson, CEO and president of nonprofits at the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and the Transamerica Institute, says American workers have faced myriad challenges over the last decade: “high rates of unemployment, dramatic shifts in home values, volatility in the financial markets, and the double-edged sword of a low interest rate environment that provides for favorable lending rates but nominal investment returns on savings accounts and other conservative investments,” which workers need when they are facing retirement, says Collinson.

Employees’ confidence in their ability to retire hit bottom during the recession before rebounding for several years. However, it has stalled since about 2014 when 61% of workers indicated they were confident that they would be able to fully retire with a comfortable lifestyle, including 16% who were very confident and 45% who were somewhat confident, Collinson says. The Transamerica survey included 6,372 employees.

The percentage of workers who reported having some form of retirement strategy slightly increased from 53% in 2007 to 61% in 2017. Nevertheless, in 2017, only 15% of workers had a written retirement strategy, while the other 46% had an unwritten retirement strategy, Collinson says.

This is not sufficient. “Relatively few people are familiar with what they are invested in. They should prepare themselves for surprises” if a recession hits, she adds. There has to be a plan and it has to be designed for the long term.

Dan Keady, chief financial planning strategist at TIAA, notes that traditional wisdom says investors should stay the course, diversify and rebalance periodically in order to succeed at investing. However, many retirement savers do not want to do that.

“There is more to it than that,” Keady says. “The 40-year-old can keep buying equities in a downturn and enjoy the fruits of that later; he has time to let it recover.” The 60-year-old, on the other hand, may not have time to do that—but neither should he try to take safe haven in cash or all bonds.

“If he moves to bonds, he may feel safe now, but he may not get enough growth out of the portfolio to sustain a long retirement,” Keady says. Turning to cash may not be the answer either. “It is unrealistic to think the investor will get it right twice: once when he turns to cash now and again when he wants to get back into the market later.”

A viable option is to create an income floor with an annuity or move into real estate, which has more staying power, he says. “The important thing is for the advisor to warn him that things will not always be rosy. The investor should start thinking about this before the age of 60.”

Keady likens investing to driving a car. “You can’t put on a seat belt after the car starts to slide into a ditch. You have to put it on before the crash. The seat belt won’t keep you from getting in a crash, but it will make the outcome much better,” he says.

Part of that “seat belt safety” can be an annuity, says Vrdoljak of Merrill Lynch. “Annuities have a role to play, but not all annuities are alike,” she says. “Variable annuities are tied to market indexes. Fixed annuities can cover basic expenses in retirement.”

Michelle Brownstein, vice president of private client services at Personal Capital in San Carlos, Calif., agrees annuities can play a part in protecting assets but she warns against putting all assets in an annuity. “Think of an annuity as an insurance policy, but it is not a cure-all,” says Brownstein. “And be wary of variable annuities with lots of features because of the fees attached to them.”

Taking refuge from a down market in commodities is an option, but a risky one, according to Rob Cirrotti, head of managed accounts at Pershing. “Commodities can go sideways in a lot of different ways,” Cirrotti says. “Everyone should seek the assistance of an advisor who can be helpful in planning and in providing emotional support in a volatile market.”

But there is a disconnect between advisors and their clients when it comes to talking about a potential bear market, according to a recent study by Hartford Funds. Eighty-nine percent of advisors say they have tried to prepare their clients for a bear market, but only 43% of clients who have an advisor say they have talked about a market downturn with their advisors, according to a survey of 1,005 individuals and 121 advisors.

Michael Hoeflich, wealth manager and Social Security claiming strategist with the Financial Guys in Williamsville, N.Y., said some investors may want to take advantage of the uncorrelated nature of commodities and alternative investments, “but do it in a prudent way, taking your risk tolerance into account.”

Why? “Nobody has a crystal ball. We do not know where the market is going to go day to day, let alone year to year,” he adds.

Investors are slightly more pessimistic about a downturn than advisors, according to the Hartford Funds study. Sixty-eight percent of individuals expect a bear market during 2019, while 77% of advisors say a bear market will not occur until at least the second half of 2019 and 31% of those do not think it will happen until 2020.

Scott Tucker, president of Scott Tucker Solutions, a financial firm in Chicago, adds another possibility: a fixed indexed universal life insurance policy to safeguard some assets. Universal life policies, which can act like a bond alternative, come in a variety of forms and should only be part of a portfolio, he adds.

“Just start saving,” says Samuel LaNeave, managing partner at Wealth Innovations in Richmond, Va. “I don’t care what you put it in, just don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. If there is a downturn, even the 60-year-old can buy low. You cannot afford not to be in the stock market because you have to beat inflation in your growth.

“If you are looking for the perfect strategy to beat a down market, you are not going to find it, but you can prepare,” LaNeave adds.