Thursday, October 9, 2008

Market Meltdown

Your Personalized Rate of Return reflecting account balance plus deposits, withdrawals and earnings from 02/09/2008 to 10/09/2008 is -42.856800%.

This is a copy and paste from my 401K statement after the days trading on Thursday with another large slide. Now personally this isn't so bad as i receive a 100% employer match for what i put into it so I'm still up about 7%. As well as that fact that i hadn't had the account for more then a month or two so the balance wasn't a significant amount. I stoped contributing to it about 4 weeks ago in anticipation of something fairly bad happening in the
market. I never expected it to be as bad as it currently is and i don't think it will stop dropping soon either.

This will hit the soon to retire within the next 2-3 years as if its sooner then that its a good idea to switch from a high volatility area such as stocks. And move them to a more secure though less likely to make any real gains area. Forcing some of these people to postpone retirement coupled with unemployment rates going over the half million market this quarter. These two will compond the situation with less jobs and more workers driving wages down. These are tough times ahead even for those not feeling it now that are renting but are thinking of owning a home. For once they finally try to they will be forced into coming up with and inexorably high down payment on the home and higher interest rates.



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