The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Investor Alley => Topic started by: kendallf on October 22, 2014, 06:31:40 PM
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I'm basically King Log with my investments; I have few choices for the majority of my money (TSP) and I am fine with it. A few days ago though I was eyeing my balances and thinking, I'm not going to switch anything up but it's not particularly cheering me up to lose $30k in just a couple of weeks.
I have read that in an average year, the majority of gains come in just a few days. The past week bears that out.. I've recouped more than half of the losses since the September peak.
I have no idea what the market will do tomorrow; it might drop another 20%. But it might gain back 10%, too. I'm going to go work on some cabinets and not worry about it.
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Amen. My wife has the TSP, and in the lifecycle 2040 to boot, and I have been tempted every now and then to fiddle, but then I come to my senses and realize that there's nothing to do (except I will switch it over to the 2050 once the bond % gets too high, but since the future allocations for the TSP lifecycle plans are available online, I can see that this will be several years away still). I even convinced her to role her IRA into it. I'm tempted to get a fedgov job so that I can do the same with my 401k/IRA before fully FIREing.
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Same here, I've left everything alone (nor did I "buy on the dip"). I fiddled with my allocations a little bit back in 2012 once, when stupid F*ing Congress was playing chicken over the federal budget and debt ceiling, threatening default. The markets were set to go crazy, so I moved towards a more conservative allocation, then moved it back after the nonsense was over a few weeks later. In the end, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up basically the same either way, whether I had left it alone or moved money around as I did.
I've also largely adopted the theory of "Once you've won the game, quit playing." Once I accumulated enough, I moved to a safer stock/bonds allocation I'm comfortable with (about 60/40). As a result, my balances didn't move down that much with the recent market swings so I don't really have to sweat it out anyhow.
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Same here, I've left everything alone (nor did I "buy on the dip"). I fiddled with my allocations a little bit back in 2012 once, when stupid F*ing Congress was playing chicken over the federal budget and debt ceiling, threatening default.
I actually dropped my TSP contributions down to 5% for a few months during that mess; didn't end up affecting us much but I didn't like the uncertainty. We had people at work talking about getting their cars repo'd if they had to take a few weeks off.. sigh.
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This thread proves that we're all very boring :-)
Too bad I'm not single again and could wow my next first date with a discussion of market timing vs. index investing. Then just wait for her to tear my clothes off.