Violet Sky

As I write this, we are halfway through the month of March. Our investments are down $28,105.19 since the start of the month, despite contributing $4,902. This is not the first time I’ve watched our account balances go down, and in fact not even the worst two week stretch I’ve watched in recent history, but it’s making me grateful that my reaction to the stock market plummeting is to just hold still.

In 2020, I had just started a new job at the beginning of the year when the COVID drop hit. My husband and I had a little over $76,000 in retirement accounts at the start of March 2020, and it was down to $70,000 by the start of April 2020, consuming our fairly substantial contributions along the way. I remember watching the stock market fall day by day, watching the news of the circuit breakers kicking in, and knowing that this was the time to buy low – and doing nothing. I didn’t stop contributing, but I didn’t contribute more, or move any of our cash savings into the market. I was scared of layoffs, as I didn’t know how my new company would handle this unprecedented time – of course, I also wouldn’t know how my old company would have handled it (being unprecedented and all), but I felt like I had even less of a finger on the pulse of my new C-suite than I did on my old.

So I did nothing different.

In 2022, the decline was more gradual, but it ground away at the psyche nonetheless. Each month, our contributions doing their best to keep us treading water – sometimes the number went up, but just as often it went down, as the contributions couldn’t compete with the market movements.

As it went on and on, I felt less and less like I should rush to “buy the dip” (when will the dip stop dipping?!) and more like I should just wait it out. I started paying more attention to the Fear and Greed Index, not because it was guiding me, but just for something to do while I waited this out. When I found myself getting too antsy about the state of the stock market, I would increment my MBDR contribution percentage up by 1%. I did this a few times, the last time being approximately two weeks before the trough of that year’s market. I found media that explained how the average bear market lasts something like 13 or 14 months, and oriented myself around that number for lack of any other real concrete hope.

Being in tech, this was an especially stressful time, as thousands of my peers were laid off in droves, but I didn’t sell or change my investments, other than gradually increasing them.

And here we are in 2025. Tariffs and trade wars with our long-term partners are the hot new thing, and the stock market doesn’t like it. The government narrowly avoided a shutdown, and the Atlanta federal reserve revised their 2025 GDP prediction from modest positive growth to less modest negative growth. It seems unlikely to me that the United States will be able avoid a recession in the coming year, as jobless claims spike from thousands of federal workers flooding the job market, prices increase, and consumers tighten their spending after an already tough 2024. I, of course, know about as much as anyone about the future, but operating on probabilities, it’s not looking great.

2008 was really hard for our family. Maybe I’ll go into greater detail someday, but for now, suffice it to say that my husband and I experienced such catastrophic job loss that I have significant financial anxiety stemming from that August 2008 event. As soon as the Atlanta fed released their revised forecast, I panicked. I thought about the $19,000 we just borrowed from our own savings to pay for the new car. I thought about reducing my MBDR contributions – either in whole or in part – to build up a better cash position. I found myself tempted to entertain more wild potential catastrophes and trying to problem-solve those possible eventualities without having even decided whether they had true merit. And as I became more and more stressed, I also recognized that I was panicking.

So I did nothing different to our investments.

Instead, we looked at our budget and our spending, and acknowledged what we already knew: we have a ton of fat to trim from the budget, before we consider reducing investments. Rather than trimming from our future selves, we took a hard look at our highest spend areas (food and travel) and concluded that while we were unwilling, at present, to compromise on travel, there was plenty of room for compromise on our food budget. So we started trimming there.

As of the writing of this post, we’ve spent $666.03 less on all categories of food/drink than at the same time last month (highly tempting to leave that three cents off, by the way). I typically write these in advance and schedule them, so this won’t be going out for another week, but we will continue to monitor our spending, make smarter choices with our meal planning, and curb our impulse-buying of lunches and dinners out. This is not to say that we’re not eating out anymore, but we’ve spent $365 less than this time last month on dining out.

Maybe I’m wrong, and we’ll boomerang back out of what seems like a certain recession. Maybe I’m right, and we’re in for a couple years of low returns, trade wars, and financial pain. But absent a crystal ball, the best thing I can do when I feel stressed about our investments is stay the course and do nothing at all.

Just hold still.