I think it's wise to bank as if one of you might lose your job tomorrow - not just when there is a lot of recession talk, but year in and year out.
I got surprised by a downsizing once, and even though I was in pretty good financial shape at the time it was stressful and took a bit of scrambling to get through.
From that I realized that my kind of work was in the department where companies always make the first cuts, and I was old enough and well paid enough that a clever manager could easily replace me with a new college graduate at half my salary. And they'd probably be able to get more hours per week out of them for a few years too. That's when I switched to banking as if the job would vanish the next day.
People used to joke about my packed lunches, older car, and fairly basic lifestyle. Then one day at my new company they decided to cut over half the engineering staff. By keeping my eye on being prepared for that sort of thing I was able to retire at age 46. All of the other folks who were cut had to scramble to find work, and all of the ones who weren't cut had to take on our work and stress out about how secure their own jobs were. I went home, had a cup of tea, checked my accounts, and my husband and I laughed about what a jerk my old boss used to be and about how I wasn't going to miss him a bit.
I don't think you need to freak out - but prepare seriously so that you can ride out a job loss for a year or two if you need to. The worst thing that will happen is that you might end decide to retire early and love every minute of it. That's more valuable than the extra dinner out or decorative doo dad purchased in your 20s.
Economic hard times come and go every few years. It's good to be ready ahead of time for the next round.
Lynda