A series of very hard (but fascinating) questions, in a domain I love to talk about. But first, the caveats:

• I'm (obviously) not a financial advisor.

• Even if I was, the error bars on any recommendation here will be huge. If you take the advice, you need to be emotionally resilient to massive swings that are possible, any which way, and not roil your emotions with hindsight bias.

trying to buy a home with cash because I never know when there might be a RIF

There will definitely be a RIF at some point. Whether you're included is a different question; but yes, you should prepare for uncertainty. Especially given how quickly the industry is changing.

That said, it's unclear to me whether you should buy with cash. It's smart not to be "cash-poor" after moving into a house with a huge mortgage, so it's good you're saving up, but there are other tradeoffs (e.g. the nicety of being able to customize your living space when you own vs. rent, etc). Buying in cash is definitely the most fiscally conservative approach though; then again, Warren Buffett said his biggest mistake was buying his home instead of renting for life. Some people would argue that buying, at all, is a mistake (relative to investing your money wisely), given the average US home value growth over the past 70+ years is something like 4% a year. In the end, I think you shouldn't think of a home as an investment; you should either buy one because you enjoy owning one (and view it as an expense), or rent for life because you don't want to put the majority of your assets into one real estate gamble.

What do you recommend investing in and should I automate it like my retirement? So far I have been slowly buying and holding Vanguard ETFs

I'm fiscally conservative and don't chase returns... so I'm completely behind index ETFs and manual rebalancing periodically. When you say "automate it," I'm not positive what you mean, but if you mean "follow a principled formula and don't change the approach based on emotion," I'm a big fan.

when there seems to be a dip

This sounds a little bit like trying to time the market... which doesn't work. It also sounds like the opposite of what you might have meant by "automate it," so you can guess which side of this argument I'd fall on. 🤣 I'm all for dollar-cost-averaging yourself across a principled asset allocation, and letting time-in-market do all the work.

Do you think the US stock market will crash?

Yes, always does, because it's cyclical. Might be pretty bad this time because of the US debt problem, which feels unresolvable via normal politics until something disastrous happens.

Should I focus on ETFs invested in international companies?

Unclear. I have something like 15% in international ETFs, just as a matter of principle. But it's not clear to me that you should increase your international exposure simply because you anticipate a US crash, because sometimes when the US crashes, the rest of the world does even worse. There's also a funny way in which buying US large-cap is a good deal of international exposure anyway, because so many of those companies make a huge slice of their revenue internationally. My vote is just to be principled about the amount you'll want to put into international ETFs and to stick to that, resisting the temptation to adjust the portfolio based on your prognosis of world situations (i.e. get out of the business of being an oracle).