FrugalJim

I’m pretty amazed at what I’ve been able to experience this year.  I keep hearing the phrase “…not seen since the great depression/WW2/etc..”, and I’m wondering what it will be like to look back on this time period in some distant future.

My 401K is officially down 52%.  I can hardly believe it.  The people who I pay an annual fee to manage mutual funds in my retirement account have actually lost more than half of my money.  The only upside is that I’m only in my 20′s and have another 30 years to save for retirement, but I can only imagine the grief that some older people are feeling right now who were getting ready to retire.

My personal investing account is down 20%.  When compared to my 401k, it looks like I’m a genius, but the reality is that I had only a chunk of my money in stocks when this whole event started.  Through the downturn I’ve invested, thinking it must be getting close to the bottom, only to see it keep going down.  Remember the GM stock I bought for $10?  It recently hit the same price it was during the Great Depression in the 1930s at $1.75. 

Both my company and the Wife’s company have gone through layoffs, and at both companies there are rumors of more to come in the next quarter or two.  One of the guys I worked with who has a year old daughter and a wife who just quit her job in order to take care of the kids was let go.  I feel bad for him, but there’s nothing I can really do.  At least I know they gave him a few months worth of a severance package.

And just look at the economic forecast for next year….

I may seem like I’m all depressed about the bad news, but it’s funny.  I’m not really bothered by it, and I’m not worried about myself or the wife getting laid off.  I guess I kind of see how “good” we have it, and I also feel that we could handle anything that gets thrown at us.  One thing they talk about in stock market psychology is that people assume the future will continue as today does (think about how everyone thought house prices were going to keep heading up, or that the stock market will continue going down).  I think we might be close to the worst we’ll see by the end of the year, and I can only hope the investments/401k will be heading up from there.