Looking for optimism

[rennigade]

You're only 31...you have many years of work ahead of you. Keep investing, the whole way down, and the whole way up. Im boring so I like to invest in vtsax, index fund that tracks the s&p, 500 different companies. If a few of them go belly up, not a huge deal.

[Like2Plan]

2001 didn't have a huge impact on us. My 401k was mainly bonds. DH had only started contributing to a 401K a couple of years prior (so, not a lot in there to begin with).

2008-- The big joke back then was our 401K had become a 201K. But, in truth we really didn't lose 50% I was still mainly in bonds. DH was in a target date fund. I "think" he lost about 39% of his 401k. We just figured he would be able to buy more shares at a lower price. I couldn't say the exact day that we recovered. And, there have been tumultuous years in between then and now. Was it 4 years ago--there was a lot of market volatility? Not sure. But, the highs and lows recently have been pretty crazy.

2020-- The year of the coronavirus. DH turns 65 and he is planning to retire in a couple of months. Ha-what timing! We keep seeing daily oscillations in the market that exceed our 4% annual safe withdrawal rate. We will get a chance to see if our plan of putting some of our bond asset allocation into a CD ladder will help ease the sequence of returns risk.

[~bs]

Being 31, this is the first significant drop I have experienced since really being invested in the market. We have lost over $110 from a high of almost $420k in the past few weeks. My wife and I are dealing with it a lot better than I would have ever thought.

But I also thought it might be nice to hear some real life experiences from those of you who have been in the market longer. What were the impacts in 2008, 2001, etc.? How much ($ or %) did your investments drop, how long did it take to recover and how high did it go before the next?

you're lucky. you should be investing more money if you're able to. A lot of people are kicking themselves not investing over the past decades. The market lows today are still higher than the market high pre-2008 drop. The market today is still 3-4X higher than the 2008 low. This is an opportunity to get in more while the market is low. The opportunity normally comes around once a decade at most. dollar cost average your way down, then as the market recovers, dollar cost average your way back up.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

young enough to ride it out.