So if the market/banks, fail/crash you won’t feel foolish, that all the signs were there?
I won’t feel foolish one bit. I’ll just buy more and wait 20 years.
If it doesn’t, will you feel foolish?
Maybe I will. But if that really does happen, the people who got out of the market won’t be much better off.
I’m 33, by the way, and expect never to retire.
A little anxiety is not necessarily bad. After all, there is nothing that’s risk-free in the market. However, if you’re losing any sleep in a choppy market, then your asset allocation is out of whack. Get that straightened out and you can really stop paying so much attention to the everyday ups and downs of the market. I have a good chunk in the market, but I sleep well.
Am I worried? Not really. About 80-85% of my wealth is in the market. I invest religiously every two weeks, and I don’t try to time the market or look at what it’s doing too closely. I don’t plan to touch that money for 30 years, so I’m not going to worry about it now. If the markets do crash and everything all goes to hell, I figure I got worse things to worry about than the money in the market.
I’ve already survived the dot com crash just fine. The main thing is that this is money I don’t need right now.
[kindly pardon the slight hijack]Why’s that?[/blah]
Speaking for myself, I like what I do, and I can’t ever see not doing it (or maybe something else) professionally in some capacity. I can be a lazy SOB, and I enjoy my free time probably more than most people do, but I can’t ever see myself not do something. I’d die of boredom.
Do what you must. I was simply answering your question.
There’s that “if” again. If a market crash is not a sure thing, then you’ve got no business saying “all the signs were there.” As Ace309 counters, are you going to feel foolish if it doesn’t crash?
FWIW, the market has always recovered from its downturns and crashes, and it’s almost always done it in just a few years’ time. This is why the standard advice for retirement investing is to stay in equities until about five years before you’ll need the money, and then move most of your nest egg to the safety of bonds.
If you stick to the safety of bonds for the long haul, your money will accumulate, but it won’t grow, since bonds do little more than keeping up with inflation. Unless you’ve managed to earn and save a LOT of principal, you will be just about certain to live out your golden years in poverty. You need the historically high rates of return of equities in order to grow your nest egg into something big enough to support you after you retire.
If you try to keep flip-flopping your investments back and forth between equities and bonds based on your expectations of what the market is going to do, you’re almost certain to make things worse. For starters, each transaction costs you a bit of money, if only because you are selling stuff just a smidge below market price (and there may also be transaction fees). And then there’s the problem of just being really bad at timing the market, which is the truth for damn near everyone out there. If you try to time the market, you’re probably going to get it wrong, just like Hampshire’s wife’s coworker.
I like what I do too but I don’t want to still be doing it at 80. I don’t plan on just sitting around the house either.
As a retiree, I don’t have the luxury of 30 years or more ahead of me for investments to rebound. When it was apparent that the dodos in WDC were in gridlock and that Europe was becoming shakier by the moment, I moved most of our assets into safer investments. The shit hit the fan the following week, and I saved us a whole lot of stress. Since I don’t need to make a killing by buying back in when the market is supposedly at its nadir, I’m sitting things out until we know if a worldwide recession is coming our way.
I understand. I do want to be doing something professionally at that age, if I even make it that far. I honestly don’t see myself ever truly retiring.
No, I’m not worried about my market investments. To me, bad news is a good buy signal (as a general rule), so finding good businesses that are getting hammered due to systemic or psychological reasons is something I look forward to.
Because being a mostly checked-out old college professor is probably the best job in the world.
I second this. The fool is an excellent website. Well written and easy to follow with lots of great online tools. I also highly recommend their books on investing for beginners.
Most of my long term savings are in the market. Long term is in twenty to twenty-five years from now. I worry far more about saving money than I do about investing it. My husband and I already have about 750k in assets including real estate even with the downturn. We aim to save at least 40k each year.
You have to be in the market with at least a five year time horizon or there’s no point in being the market at all.