Is anyone reacting to this WRT their own personal finances?
I don’t have a lot of money, and I don’t “play” the stock market; I’m a believer in just holding, reinvesting dividends, and not reacting to routine ups and downs. However the heady upward trend in the last year (thanks, Obama!) has transported both my brokerage account and my IRA into the low six figures where they were never going to get on their own. I just went into both accounts online and sold off some stocks to cement those gains. I didn’t sell everything, and I didn’t even sell all the shares of the BIG gainers. I might buy back in when things have sunk some more. I just didn’t want to sit by and watch all the gains go away. Yes, I’m contributing to the slide. Sorry.
Is anyone else doing anything that they can share (see what I did there?)?
What took it so long?
I’ve been through enough of these so that when I see half the columns talk about over valued stocks, and the other half talk about how it is all different this time, to know the bottom will fall out.
I’ve moved most of my volatile investments to less volatile funds which emphasize stocks that don’t move so much and which pay good dividends.
However I wouldn’t bet that this is the crash. I’m not sure anything happened to cause anything more than a correction. I’m expecting some trigger to cause the real crash, which will get worse when the White House acts incompetently.
Imagine how bad the Great Recession would have been if Bush had listened to the right and let the banks all fail to teach them a lesson.
I looked at the recent gains as a bubble, and didn’t count on that money. I’ve 10 years before I can hit my retirement accounts. I figure a lot will happen in that time.
I’m waiting to see if it drops a bit more. If it does, I’ll buy in with some of my (currently cash) savings. I haven’t decided where that point is yet, but I’ll watch it tomorrow and probably the next day before making a decision.
The market is tanking? I hadn’t noticed - the only stocks I “have” are part of my 401k. If this means that my 401k is going to start shrinking faster than I’m putting into it, well, that’s happened before. It’ll probably happen again.
Your 401k has been growing nicely for the last 8 years, and up until this week it was still doing well. Don’t sell when the market is falling. Instead, this could be a good time to do some buying. The market just dropped about 4%, and it won’t keep that up for long.
DO NOT PANIC. The government’s policies have been market-friendly since late 2009, and the current government has done very little to change that.
Woke up this morning to find I’d lost $30,000 on paper last night. Had honestly forgotten about it by the time I was having breakfast.
Not thrilled, but pretty much knew something like this was coming from a ways off. I’ve always been a long-term buy-and-hold investor in broad things like market-wide ETFs, and it’s worked through one crisis after another. My feeling is, if those collapse, then the entire world economy has collapsed, in which case no investment was going to survive. Not going to panic, not going to sell, not going to hoard gold or bullets.
I never sell on market downturns - almost a certain way to lose (see Market Timing).
An anecdote… A bunch of us were laid off together in 2009. My 401k was down 40%. Several in the group sold everything and went all cash to ‘preserve their retirement’. As it turned out, the market had bottomed out and did nothing but climb since then.
I ran into one of them recently - they are working, eventually invested again and their investments are back to where they were in 2007. I retired, stayed invested and have doubled my account (even after living on it for nine years).
My business partner are in the process of closing our 401k. I’m rolling over to an IRA and he’s taking some cash, so I guess if he takes it all in cash he’ll have less taxes to pay since it’ll be a smaller amount. Yay?