Closet_Gamer
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Before my time on this board. On one hand I was in a safe job in a company that kept growing thru the recession, so we were very blessed. On the other hand, I had just moved to a more expensive part of the country and bought a house that cost 2x the one I sold...not because we traded up but just because of COL. Got hammered on the house. Still looking up to see the surface of the water.
The implosion of the kids college funds was what really scared me. We had been so disciplined including putting over $50K into a 529 when I got a severance check in 2000. I remember looking at it one day and realizing that we would have been better if we'd buried it in the backyard. I also remember thinking that my least depreciated asset was my BMW 3 series and chuckling that I should have bought the 5 series.
Overall we were OK on the discipline front but not perfect. After it started to recover (back to Dow 8000) I switched 1/3 of the kids college money into a guaranteed growth fund...obviously that was dumb. Moved the other 1/3 into a more conservative AA...less dumb but still dumb. I fell victim to recency bias and also held onto growing cash for about 2 years expecting another drop that didn't come so I bought higher than I should on the way up. But I didn't panic and sell everything for example.
It did cause me to stare down the "how long could we last unemployed" question even harder and I became much more conservative in how I thought about my balance sheet. Which is probably a great thing. I sleep great (at least on this stuff).
The implosion of the kids college funds was what really scared me. We had been so disciplined including putting over $50K into a 529 when I got a severance check in 2000. I remember looking at it one day and realizing that we would have been better if we'd buried it in the backyard. I also remember thinking that my least depreciated asset was my BMW 3 series and chuckling that I should have bought the 5 series.
Overall we were OK on the discipline front but not perfect. After it started to recover (back to Dow 8000) I switched 1/3 of the kids college money into a guaranteed growth fund...obviously that was dumb. Moved the other 1/3 into a more conservative AA...less dumb but still dumb. I fell victim to recency bias and also held onto growing cash for about 2 years expecting another drop that didn't come so I bought higher than I should on the way up. But I didn't panic and sell everything for example.
It did cause me to stare down the "how long could we last unemployed" question even harder and I became much more conservative in how I thought about my balance sheet. Which is probably a great thing. I sleep great (at least on this stuff).