But seriously. I do. We have some money in a mutual fund that is supposed to be a house down payment. DH and I were just discussing that we should take the money out because of all the China craziness and so on, but I procrastinated and then last Friday happened. So now we are just sitting around, hoping that we won't lose too much more money and that there will be some kind of rebound. I know the *market* is rebounding, but it hasn't quite translated into an increase in value in our account. It makes me so angry that an amount of money that represents hard savings for us can evaporate in three days. It makes me angrier that we were clued into the fact (we pay attention to financial news) that there could be some craziness and didn't act. This may be a very expensive lesson on procrastination. All I can say is that I'm glad that we didn't make a big contribution to our IRAs last Thursday.
My mother calls investing in the stock market "gambling", and I think she's right. I graduated from grad school in 2006. Where are my 7% returns, Dave Ramsay? Did they happen during the great recession? Did they happen when I couldn't get a very good paying job when DH was in grad school? Did they happen last Friday? Um... no. It's supposed to be the case that if you invest in mutual funds (or ETFs or whatever) that you are protected because all your eggs aren't in "one basket". But they are! They are in the single basket that is the stock market. It can all lose value! So easily!
But then what? Put our money in CDs and savings accounts with no interest? We'd be losing money to inflation, but at least it wouldn't be $XXXX in one single day. Real estate? I'm actually intrigued by the idea of owning rental properties, but we haven't even bought a house for ourselves yet and we need what little is left of our money to pay for our own down payment. And I don't have the mental space to become a slumlord right now.
Sheesh.
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