Rayvt
Your wife is considerably more understanding than mine. If I mortgaged the house and stuck it in the market, ...
Well, first off, I never mortgaged the house and put that money into the market. The most drastic I ever did was to refinance the house (at a lower rate) and take enough cash-out so that the new payment was the same as the old payment. IIRC, the cash back was around $20k. So we didn't really have much change in our risk exposure, since the payment didn't go up. That 20K was the initial seed that resulted in us being able to retire at age 58.
I got the first taste of my my wife's risk tolerance when we were engaged. I was a private pilot, and I took her up for a ride one weekend. She did the white-knuckled thing as soon as we lifted off, and when we landed, she said, "I'm fine. I just kept telling myself over and over---- if we die, at least we'll go together."
Subsequently, she says, "When we started we had nothing and we survived okay, so the worst thing that can happen is we fall back to where we started. You can't go below nothing."
That was 42 years ago. Since then, she only cares about 2 questions:
1) Can we pay our bills?
and
2) Do we have enough money for a comfortable life?
As long as the answers are "Yes", then everything is fine with her.
She said recently that she believes in division of labor in a marriage. My job is to make & invest the money. Her job is to spend it.
She just wants me to do one thing. Tell her when/if we need to cut back on spending. With the recent market meltdown she told me, "Let me know if I need to stop buying stuff. And let me know if we need to stop going on cruises."