No,
@waltworks, I guess I wasn't clear. We didn't sell anything. We just bought something else with our investment money. We definitely didn't do the "classic panic and sell" but I'm sad for anyone who did that and possibly never recovered. We have an older friend who has suffered for many years by an unfortunate series of events that undermined his life savings. It's a personal reminder that behind all these statistics there are real people, maybe people that you love. For us, there was no panic and no selling (except for what was left of the little high school experiment-- that just got whittled away bit by bit. We just kept "going the course" and finding that, due to our lack of knowledge/poor choices, it wasn't working out as we'd hoped.
Round 1 lost money but eventually went to the money manger, which was round 2
Round 2 was the money manager and got moved to Fidelity and is still there today
Round 3 is current, at Fidelity, and being funded regularly, now that we're "rebalancing" our RE heavy portfolio.
Tongue in cheek, because it all worked out, I can say we were the ones who got low returns on the chart! But the bright side is that we found what did work for us. We put our money where it worked out.
We just focused our investment funds into real estate, where it ALSO grew tremendously over time, just like the Rate of Return of Just About Everything calculated. I read through a portion of the report last night, and it appears to be one of the first blocks of research that compiled the long term historical data across these categories. If I read it right, that paper says we might have even done better then if we had stocks. We feel we did. No complaints here.
There's some regional variance in RE returns, so we got a boost there by being in a high COL area, even though we're minimally diversified both regionally and as a complete portfolio (being real estate heavy at 90%). I see that regional variance as the same type of pitfall as making a poor stock choice or not diversifying, but sometimes it works in your favor. We chose what was easy in a familiar and local RE market where knowledge helped us make good purchases. Surely there was more money to be made elsewhere, but we did what worked for us. We stuck with what we knew. I'm grateful we made some good (or lucky) choices and took a path that did work for us, even when the going was tough. Like you, we did have to go the distance during the RE crisis, and we held RE during the same type of crisis/downturn that stocks experienced. We didn't panic and sell our holdings then, much like you didn't. It wasn't easy, because of the costs involved with holding, but we managed. That is a big and negative difference than with stocks. Now, like stock investors that bought low and stuck it out, we "went the course" and time has worked its magic and we're out the other side.
Since this is the Real Estate portion of the forum, and the topic is "How much is too much?" I'm chipping in with this example of a 90% real estate portfolio, and some of the investment bumps and personality traits that got us there. I'm glad your path is working and support all the choices that work for you. FI takes discipline --to earn, invest whatever you can and save to your goals. Yay! It's all good!