That’s not really true though, unless you’re actually within sight of retirement. As long as those shares regain their previous value before they actually retire, they didn’t actually lose anything.
Look at it this way- if you had 50k of money invested in say… 2500 shares of something last week, and now you have the same 2500 shares worth 40k, *you didn’t actually lose anything. * You could just as easily have the same 2500 shares worth 60k in two weeks. You won’t have gained anything at that point either.
Only at the point when you actually sell the shares is that material, so that’s why it’s only really relevant if you’re within some short distance of retirement. For a person beginning their career, the bigger thing is to contribute consistently over time, and not sweat it.
Not really; they could have upped all the other stuff except keeping the base hourly wage rate the same, and it would have been largely unappreciated.
That’s kind of the point of the thread- do the younger generations discount the value of the other stuff? And the answer seems to be yes, they do. I mean, I never gave half a shit about health insurance until I had children, other than I didn’t like paying more and more for stuff I didn’t really use anyway. Then it mattered a lot once I had children, both for their direct sake, and for the sake of keeping my wife and I in good enough shape to take care of them/provide for them.
But at 25, had they given me the option of shifting say… $50 a month out of health care coverage into salary, with the attendant lower coverage, versus adding $50 to giving me better health care coverage without any additional pay, I’d probably have chosen the first one, even though the second is a higher overall compensation.
That’s assuming the person in question didn’t get laid off and then have to dip into retirement savings.
If you keep working, and keep investing, and don’t panic, recessions are great, since you are buying into the fund at lower prices. I did very well in the Great Recession.
Sure, but that’s much more of the exception than the rule, and none of the normal assumptions about retirement savings and/or pensions really applies. Even in the case where someone lost a lot of the value of their retirement savings because they had to cash out early, they’re still better off than someone who’s got some portion of a pension waiting to kick in when they retire, as at least they can withdraw the savings, while pensions, as I understand them, don’t work like that.
I’m just challenging the commonly held notion that you gain/lose actual money as the financial markets fluctuate. That’s not actually true; there’s always the “if you sold everything right now.” caveat that is usually overlooked.
My employer, a large airplane company, includes this in our employee portal. Right at the top of our total compensation webpage is a pie chart that breaks it all down for us. I just checked mine, my health insurance is 39% of the compensation, hourly wage is 32% and the company match for my 401K is 19%. There is even a little tiny sliver for the movie tickets I was given a few weeks ago.