Where were you in September 2008?

[audreyh1]

I bought 1,000 shares of Lehman Brothers at 3:57p.m. prior to the weekend that they went into bankruptcy. I paid $1.06 a share and was certain that the Govt. would label them too big to fail. Needless to say, I was wrong and this poor decision quashed all future aggressiveness in the stock market. A cheap lesson to be learned but frustrating times.

I

Thank goodness you did not spend more!

Several things I read talk about how the Bear Stearns takeover meant people thought Lehman for sure would be bailed out. But I guess it was a good lesson?

 

[ESRwannabe]

2008 was very scary and I didn't handle it as well as I wish, but I did ok. My ten year return is like 7% which compares favorably to the world stock allocation like VTWSX.

I was not 100% US stocks unfortunately which made a killing. I had a lot of money in bonds and foreign stocks. Foreign stocks have been pitiful compared to the US. Maybe the next decade we will see some mean reversion.

Anyway what particularly freaked me out during the great crash was that there was legitimate concern that money market funds would break the buck (I think one did) also seeing "safe" municipal bonds crashing (anyone remember merridith whitney, and also the muni bond insurance companies blowing up).

It wasn't the stock market that made me worried, it was all the "safe" debt issues going on. I always knew the stock market could crash 50% or more.

In that crisis at least, the only safe bonds were US treasuries. I wish more balanced funds would just hold US treasuries and forget the total bond market. Corporate bonds, munis, GMAs, etc. none of them will hold up in crisis. The only thing that works is cash (does not include money market funds) and treasuries.

 

[copyright1997reloaded]

Too busy to be fazed

In September 2008, I worked for mega-corp in the financial district of NY. My client was (and still is) a financial mega-corp. Things were unbelievably hectic those days with firms failing and return of capital concerns.

Fortunately, there were companies acquiring the failing firms, and at those places there was work in terms of integration.

On my home portfolio front, I (like most) was losing tons of money, sometimes six figures in a single day!

I typically don't trade a lot, but I was also trading (and sometimes day trading) some of the financial firms as well as things in the market in general. Looking at my brokerage history, I find things like:
09/16/2008 09:53:45 Buy xxx AIG @ 1.99
09/16/2008 09:56:01 Sold xxx AIG @ 2.75
yes, that much swing in under 3 minutes.

Not all were positive (of course), things like:
10/24/2008 15:00:20 Bought xxx EEM @ 20.3299
10/24/2008 15:59:20 Sold xxx EEM @ 19.88
and I even see where I managed to lose money on AAPL doing a trade over a weeks time. (Fortunately, I never sold my core holding and short term traded Apple a couple times making an overall modest profit. Wish I had kept those extra shares!)

One thing is for sure...it was a hectic, gut wrenching time which made me look very closely at my asset allocation and exposure to single stock, sector, and market in general risk --- every day.

 

[wmc1000]

We closed on our current house Sept. 28, 2008. We got a full price offer on our previous home in June of 2008 but the buyer didn't want to close until the end of Oct. 2008.

The buyers were pre-qualified even if they didn't sell their previous house, (they didn't for quite a while), and I personally talked to their bank for assurance of that fact.

Bought the new house from the builder at a 30% discount, (potential buyer got transferred during construction phase), so we were happy as clams.


Probably should have bought the builders stock instead as it has gone up 600% in the last 10 years but we needed shelter.

 

[Scuba]

I was CFO of a company that had derivative agreements with Bear Stearns. My predecessor had put them in place. Scary times but since JPM bought them we were ok.

On a personal note, we were afraid DH was going to get laid off so we decided to downsize from owning 3 properties to one. This was a key enabler for our ER because none of the three was a cash flow positive producer.

 

[kcowan]

We had just bought our snowbird place in PV MX (closed Dec 15 2007) and were happy we had to liquidate some of the portfolio. Then we embarked on a major renovation that involved me staying in Mexico until June 2, 2008 to oversee it. MIL had died and so our need to "stay home" had gone down substantially. Did not have time to focus on investments, but let all maturities remain in "cash". Had been retired for 6 years and the portfolio had grown substantially during the dotcom recovery.

All turned out for the best. Better to be lucky than good. :lol

 

[SumDay]

I was swamped at work. In addition, my dad had just passed and his estate included some promissory notes for homes he'd flipped & owner financed. Today, I have a LOT less of those notes - some folks just walked away. My mother died shortly thereafter, and a few days later DH was diagnosed with cancer. He was offered early retirement the same day he was diagnosed. Luckily I kept my job through it all (& ER provided health insurance!) so the fall of 2008 is not a time I remember fondly. In fact I got a little queasy typing this. Everything worked out well, but I spent a lot of time laying on the floor crying during those months. God had truly given me more than I could handle, but yet I did.

 

[Sue J]

DH and I were both 53. Our sons were 24 and 21, the younger one was in his 3rd year of college.

Unrelated to the financial issues unfolding at the time, DH had been feeling that his county social service agency job was not as secure as it had been. It was administrative politics. So we had been preparing for the big "what if" for a year or so, paying off debt and trying to save as much as possible.

I was working a part time job to help pay for buying back 5.5 years of service in his pension system that DH had refunded in the early 1980s in order to pay for graduate school. I think by that time in 2008 we had finished the repurchase of the pension time and by October 2008 DH would have the 25 YOS to be eligible to retire with a reduced pension. My part time income was going toward our son's very affordable college expenses.

We had about $15,000 left on our mortgage in a low COL area. Sometime in 2007 or 2008 I had paid off our mortgage with a 1.99% credit card (free balance transfer and 1.99% for the life of transferred balances) so this was very cheap.

As for investments I was still a newbie chicken investor and we only had CDs. So I felt like the financial crisis didn't touch us. But of course it did in other ways. Our house value dropped like many others but we were not selling. Plenty of businesses closed around here. And DHs state pension system had plenty of investments that dropped and took a long time to recover.

Indirectly, this hit us later after DH retired and they changed their health care coverage. The retiree contribution went way up and then they dropped any allowance for spouses. For 2018 it costs $1200/mo to cover a spouse! Is this due to events in 2008? Probably to some degree.

Since DH retired in 2010 I have been investing in Vanguard Mutual Funds. Mostly Star and Wellington and 500 Index. Because part of me is still a chicken I keep a nice chunk in Prime Money Market and I still have those 5% PenFed CDs from 2011.

 

[35nothing]

We are fast approaching the 10 year anniversary of what was for me the scariest financial news month ever. A lot happened in September 2008 that reavealed t the unlicensed how very badly our financial system had been damaged and how unprepared our leadership was to handle it. Up until then it appeared that any crisis had been contained. But suddenly it became an emergency.

September 2008

7: Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are taken over by the government.

15: Bank of America agrees to purchase Merrill Lynch for $50 billion.

15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy-court protection.

16: American International Group, the world's largest insurer, accepts an $85 billion federal bailout that gives the government a 79.9% stake in the company.

21: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies subject to greater regulation by the Federal Reserve.

25: Federal regulators close Washington Mutual Bank and its branches and assets are sold to JPMorgan Chase in the biggest U.S. bank failure in history.

29: Congress rejects a $700 billion Wall Street financial rescue package, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down 778 points, its single-worst point drop ever.

Oct. 3: Congress passes a revised version of TARP and President Bush signs it. Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. bank on the West Coast, agrees to buy Wachovia for about $14.8 billion.

Timeline from https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...onology-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2779515/

The funny thing is I was in another country and its markets were at teh highest peak and I purchased 1000$ worth of shares which are worth nothing now.

 

[sanfanciscotreat]

Was looking forward to retirement in 2010; continued saving and investing.
By the time I retired 18 months later, things were ok for me.

 

[Zona]

We were lucky, there is no other way to describe it. During 2005-2008 DH and I had both taken a "break" from w*rk, bought a boat and went sailing (we were just young kids and thought we'd retire and sail around the world, lol). In May 2008 our previous company came calling with contracts to be part of a multi-year IT project, and the rates were too good to turn down. So we put the boat on the hard and came back to w*rk. We were still kind of young (mid-30's) and not very focused on the day-to-day of the market, so all our cash went into savings during that time. I remember being so glad that DH and I had jobs/contracts during and after Sept 2008, and that we were well above water on our house (bought in 2001, which we had kept/rented out while sailing). Again, lucky.

Sometime around May-Sept 2009 a coworker mentioned that the market was "on sale". We realized we had a lot of extra cash and just started dumping it all in. That, and selling the boat/continuing to do IT consulting, has really helped put us in a position to hopefully FIRE by 2020, before DH turns 50.

 

[Spock]

Costco stocking up on cases of food.

Very few people realize how close we came to the music stopping.

 

[Live And Learn]

My best friend and I built homes next to each other. He was a homebuilder. In early 2009 he would commit suicide so that his family could survive with the life insurance proceeds. I still live in mine and get a daily reminder of his decision as I walk out the door every day.

That is so heartbreaking bigcmagor. I am sorry for your loss.

I was working and worrying - ALOT. There were layoffs all around me. I was having panic attacks.

I just checked my spreadsheet from back then and my total net worth was 35% of what it is today !! Some of increase to today is because of the bull market. Some if it is because back then 30% of my net worth was cash, so I bought SDY close to the bottom. Some of it because although I had been frugal all my life I was starting to "live it up" a bit around 2007. The crash was an eyeopener and I evaluated my spending habits and went back to basics. I am still at a basic, and very HAPPY, spending level today. All of this allowed me to retire in 2015 at the age of 52.

Good lesson. I'm so thankful that I was working at the time and that I did not lose my job. I would have been even MORE of a basket case.

 

[deserat]

September 2008 - had just sold home in NoCal and was finishing up last few weeks on job with employer before moving to Germany to be with active duty military husband. Took money from house and placed in 2 year CD (had a lot of equity, so it was a lot of $$$). Investments did go down quite a bit (I go back and look at the graphs), but did not need to do anything, so stayed put and placed money in mutual funds over the next 9-10 years. Amazing how much it had recovered and then some.

However, I had the same experience with the dot com bubble - I had not invested except in mutual funds, but had held on to my stocks and they came back. I knew the dot com bubble would burst, too, as WSJ had articles on how the new young millionaires were blowing their IPO money on parties, drugs, travel and stupid $hit....

LYBM, decent AA and padding help mitigate the downward amplitude rides of the market.

However, I do remember seeing the news where the Lehman Brothers employees were walking out of the building in Manhattan with their boxes of stuff. Later on I read about what had happened...the New York Federal Reserve Board had not gone after the ratings agencies who had 'tranched' the mortgage stocks into derivatives (I'm probably getting the terminology wrong here) and graded them as high quality versus the junk they were. So people bought them thinking they were low risk...when they were very high risk. Very sad to me that one could not trust a government ratings agency wrt information on the risk...LOTS of lessons learned in that 2008 mess.

 

[gayl]

I was complaining that it was taking soooo long for the 457 to transfer to Schwab. I had converted it all to cash per their instructions but it took almost 8 months for it to transfer. I don't remember exactly when it came over but looked and my first statement dated 12/31/08 (won't open on droid). Dumped it all into SPY

 

[tdv2]

DW and I got really, really serious about an automatic investment plan by the end of 2006. We were putting more than 50% of our income into a 60%-40% portfolio on a monthly basis. We had a nice chunk at the time but were looking to call it quits in 7 to 10 years. When the bottom fell out we just kept plodding along....both of us were fortunate enough to keep our jobs and I was traveling 40% of the time. In 2015 the company I work for was acquired and I cashed out. The funds reduced my portfolio allocation by 10% immediately since I didn't plow it back into equities....good timing since I wanted to be a little more conservative heading into ER. Actually I'm back to near 60-40 now due to the recent market gains. I contemplate moving to 50-50 from time to time....I'm an avid reader of financial books...read all the classics recommended here: The millionaire next door, Random walk down wall street, The 4 pillars or investing, The intelligent Investor and others. The Bernstein "won the game" statement is always in the back of my mind.



I feel fortunate that we were able to invest during the downturn....returns have been great. I ER'd in May and DW is looking at September 2018. Couldn't have drawn it up any better.

 

[joeea]

September 2008

7: Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are taken over by the government.

15: Bank of America agrees to purchase Merrill Lynch for $50 billion.

15: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy-court protection.

16: American International Group, the world's largest insurer, accepts an $85 billion federal bailout that gives the government a 79.9% stake in the company.

21: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies subject to greater regulation by the Federal Reserve.

25: Federal regulators close Washington Mutual Bank and its branches and assets are sold to JPMorgan Chase in the biggest U.S. bank failure in history.

29: Congress rejects a $700 billion Wall Street financial rescue package, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down 778 points, its single-worst point drop ever.

Oct. 3: Congress passes a revised version of TARP and President Bush signs it. Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. bank on the West Coast, agrees to buy Wachovia for about $14.8 billion.

I was working for a financial services company. Most of the companies mentioned were customers of ours. We had to frantically make changes as dropoffs and mergers occurred. From a business point of view, it was crazy time.

From a personal point of view, I changed absolutely nothing. We were still in the accumulation phase. My wife and I continued to contribute to our 401ks, we didn't change our asset allocations, and didn't change any of our investments. Many of our friends and coworkers were panicking, but we just continued on with our long-term plan.

Eventually, we got back to even, then far exceeded it.

 

[joeea]

My best friend and I built homes next to each other. He was a homebuilder. In early 2009 he would commit suicide so that his family could survive with the life insurance proceeds. I still live in mine and get a daily reminder of his decision as I walk out the door every day.

So sorry to hear that.

Not to be morbid, but most life insurance policies won't pay out when a suicide occurs. I'm surprised this one did.

 

[bigcmagor]

So sorry to hear that.

Not to be morbid, but most life insurance policies won't pay out when a suicide occurs. I'm surprised this one did.

I was surprised at the time too. Evidently it was a function of how long the policies were in place and not specifically excluded. Not sure he planned it out this way, but it appeared to me he may have. He made some off hand comments alluding to this before he did it and I told him if he was serious, it was a crappy business plan. He should just declare bankruptcy like the other home builders and start over with a new shingle - and I was his largest creditor at the time.

 

[Walt34]

Not to be morbid, but most life insurance policies won't pay out when a suicide occurs. I'm surprised this one did.

I think it depends on the policy. I've read that virtually all life insurance policies have at least a two year wait time before they will pay out on a suicide (for obvious reasons) but after that time it will be covered. But I haven't shopped for life insurance for decades so things may have changed.

 

[Bigdawg]

on Thursday 2 October, 2008 I returned from one year in Sadr City. On Friday 3 October, 2008, my son intercepted a pass and ran it in for a touchdown. Thanks for the birthday present son. 9 months later we could not sell our house in SoCal because the RE market had tanked. Moved to the east coast in July of 2009 and watched the market rise as I rented out my SoCal house. Just sold that house in May for a big $. I just rode out all the nonsense and began to ramp up[ investments in 2010-2011 timeframe. Glad I didn't sell anything back then.

 

[latexman]

I was working for Dow Chemical in their Freeport, TX plant. Prior to the meltdown, I had gotten nervous and converted my entire 401k to Fixed Income Fund, so I saw no decline in value.

Also prior to the meltdown, Dow was working on a huge JV with Petrochemical Industries Company (PIC) of the State of Kuwait. Dow stock was trading in the $30-40 range. Target date for the JV was 1/1/2009.

Then came the meltdown. Kuwait got nervous and pulled out of the deal on 12/28/2008. Everybody lawyered up. Lawsuits were threatened. Lawsuits were filed. Dow stock tumbled nonstop to $7 in 3/2009.

Then, I put every penny I had in my 401k into Dow stock.

Warren Buffet saved the day by buying a special issue, preferred stock just for him. Stock started tracking up. Dow didn't really need the cash, but they did benefit greatly from the confidence the market got when the Oracle of Omaha invested billions of $'s.

In 2011, I gradually sold all my Dow stock for about $35 average.

Thank you, Mr. Liveris.

 

[uncaD]

I was working in equity research at a Wall Street investment bank on the Equity Strategy team. Fun times indeed.

 

[The Onceler]

Ugh horrible 18 months. And more. In London on business most of September 2008. Canary Wharf dominated the news. Too busy to do much more than simply wonder while the financial world crashed. Watched our investments tank. Took a long time to come back. But looked the other way and they did. On the plus side As I seem to recall the dollar/pound exchange rate was decent. Hahahahaha you can pay 20% less for a pair of English shoes with 50% less money in your account. What a bargain.

 

[CamasSaver]

No company bonus that year which hurt the family budget, but kept my job.