What are you doing about the stock market?
Not that I have any control over it, but I am curious to learn what other people are doing about their retirement accounts, if anything. Are you reacting now, or did you react earlier? How far off is retirement for you, and how did that play a role?
Back in September, my husband and I discussed our retirement investments. For our IRA accounts (held with Vanguard), we decided to pull out of the stock market to some degree, and invest in more of a mix of stocks and bonds. I had a gut feeling that the housing market decline and the general state of things in this country might have an adverse effect on the market, and we were interested in preserving the money we had in the IRA accounts. When it comes to investing, both of us lean a little more towards the conservative side.
In terms of my husband’s 401(k), we also pulled a majority of his money out of the stock market funds and placed them into a fixed income fund in September 2007. I know that this seems like a stupid move, considering that we are in our early 30′s, but we had gotten a notice about how the funds were going to handled by another company starting in January, and we wanted more information. We’re still allocating the money that is going into the account according to our original plan (it is divided between an index, small cap, large cap, and international funds). The last time I checked, we were close to breaking even in terms of our contributions vs. losses (over the past couple months).
I want to update our total net worth in our retirement accounts, but of course the site is down for general maintenance. I’ll try to remember to update things this week. I’m hoping that our retirement picture is brighter than our current debt picture – did I mention that I really need to get a job?
I have about $500 in mutual funds and then $1250 in my retirement account in mutual funds and I’m just leaving them alone. I’m 21, so I have plenty of time for the market to go back up and I think that it would be a very bad decision to sell now – not anything like buy low and sell high! (well maybe today would be an ok day to sell, if I’d bought stocks very recently) I fully trust the market to go back up. I also contribute bi-weekly to my retirement plan, so I’m very happy that I’m buying right now and taking advantage of both the low market and the dollar-cost averaging of buying little bits of stock throughout the years.
Julie’s last blog post..Financial Meltdowns
Julie,
Congrats on starting to save so early! I am no expert, but it sounds like you did (and are doing) the right thing.
I agree that now is not the time to sell, but I am really glad that we did back in September. So far, we’ve done a decent job at preserving what we do have while hopefully getting in on some good buys now.
Thanks so much for commenting!