Don't Look At Your 401k

We get up pretty early, well, early to me, anyway, about 4:15 AM to get ready for our 47-mile drive to work. CNN on in the background, I am pretty much bleary-eyed during the morning ablutions. It's a good day when I arrive at work with matching socks. I heard CNN Business anchor, Jennifer Westhoven, say something about this not being a good time to look at your 401k. So of course, what did I do?

Yeah, I can see why people get scared about the economy. I am pretty well set for retirement with a military pension so when I turned 59 and a half I started to tap into my 401k. It's almost empty now. Yeah, the taxes are nasty but I don't figure to live long enough to feel the bite and resort to eating catfood.

So I had wood floors installed in the house, bought my big new Gammill quilting machine and assorted other goodies. Then when we started seeing so many foreclosures, I pulled out $25k from my 401k to sit in my savings account in case my son found a "perfect" foreclosure that he wanted. So the money has been sitting in savings vice multiplying in my 401k. I continued to add money to the 401k thru my work but it was only $5k the last time I looked on 30 September.

So I logged on and looked at my 401k and it has lost $976 in about 2 weeks. I'm not going to panic and pull that money out, the stock will go back up so I will sit it out. The $976 does not sound like much until you realize that if I had left that $25,000 in my 401k, I would have lost about $6,000 in that 2 week span. Gosh, I would have had more fun taking that money to Las Vegas.

I know that the economy will get better. As soon as we have a new guy in the oval office, everybody will settle down, get back to work and we will start to rebuild. I don't think it matters who will be sitting in the chair in the oval office. We just need to make the change and move forward.

So my advice to you is.....don't look at your 401k, it is too depressing.