Okay - sorry for the melodramatic title...
I'm 55 and DW is 57 and we are (were) right on the cusp of fully retiring. Now down 700k from our high and have a really lousy feeling about the foreseeable future in terms of equities.
We have a portfolio of 100% equities - all in Vanguard and all, or very nearly all, in Index funds with decent diversification in terms of value, growth, dividend payers and intl exposure.
We have a year's worth of cash to cover living expenses and probably could eek out another 6 months (total 18) without needing to sell anything.
No debt except regular monthly expenses. Recently, my wife's former employer (I'm still consulting, she was retired) has asked her to return to work. She will draw a small salary but, more importantly, we'll have healthcare insurance. We had been paying $1k for COBRA monthly.
I made what is now a mistake when bond funds started to go down by selling them and using the proceeds to add to my equity funds/ETFs.
I'm not comfortable seeing what we have in our taxable and nontaxable accounts potentially decline by another 20+ percent. If we were to sell, it's conceivable that we could live close to our "end of life" age with the proceeds invested in considerably less risky investments than equities and have enough but it would certainly change our lifestyle considerably.
I'm one of those people that is currently feeling "this time is different" meaning I have very little confidence things will get better for a very long time. I could handle an occasional 10% decline and possibly a bit more but I'm already down 22% with more downside coming IMO.
My consulting gig will probably end soon (by end of year) not by my choice but likely because of the economy slowing. My wife's job should be more stable.
I'm struggling and fighting the desire to sell and cut my losses knowing that the market has historically rebounded. There are already lots of graphs and charts for how long bear markets take to recover from so no need to rehash those.
In another forum there is a person who has posed the question: "What reason would one want to keep money in or invest in the market today?". The only answer provided is that "The market always comes back". Not much substance to that I'm afraid.
I'm aware I should have probably put aside 3 or more years of expenses worth of cash so lesson learned there. If the FED succumbs to pressure and starts to ease, we'll have another artificially propped up economy. If they continue to tighten (rip the band-aid off essentially), there will be further erosion in the markets and we'll see more of our $ erased.
Sorry for the long post. Not how I thought things would go...obviously. For what it's worth, I sort of hoped we'd make an average of 7% a year in equities with some down years and some up years but average 7%.
Thoughts? Words of wisdom?