Yes it seems like a recipe for housing souffle (super fast high gains => quick collapse) or else very bad housing affordability and all its problems
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I include the house in my Net Worth statement, but Hubby and I always look at the figure without the house too. I calculate the house value as what we paid for it, plus half the difference between that and the market price. In my almost 40 years of home ownership I’ve been very lucky to make considerable amounts on housing, partly due to my handyman hubby. But I’ve also seen house prices fall like a rock.
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Holy crapola! Just calculated our net worth (I knew it would be bad) and we are down $20k. I’m so grateful I read a lot about money early on because otherwise this would seem so scary! Right now we’re at $248k, oof but still good.
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I keep being scared and then grateful and then scared again that enough of our net worth is in investments that it’s going down.
Acceptance. It’s a process?
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My kid asked about the recent dip. I showed him the chart for the past two weeks, which shows a huge drop and a plateau. Then I pulled up the chart for 3 mos, 6 mos, a year, five years. This drop became invisible very quickly. In the long run this means nothing at all. Look away.
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Agreed. At best, it’s on slight sale. At worst, you have to wait it out.
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But I started a new investment account January 7th 
I have lost $100.
ETA: for now
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My first time investing was my first grown up paycheque. I was in my early 30’s and had two kids to support and couldn’t really afford it but I had been reading MMM and wanted to be improving my awful situation. I took like $200 and put it all on Tesla, after thinking long and hard about what companies I thought would do well. That week Tesla tanked and I got scared and pulled out my money, which had shrunk.
It sucked so bad. I almost gave it all up. It seemed like there must be some secret code available to other people and not me.
But then I did more research and re-invested and over time the panic at market drops grew less. Exposure therapy, maybe?
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Just wait until you have even more $$: I’m down 100k for the month. It’s fine.* As Smacky said, it’s just a blip in the long game.
*It’s fine unless I think about how many years it took to save that first 100k. Then it seems like a lot.
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Jaysus. I’m down 35k (a full years salary 2 jobs ago) and it’s stressing me out.
Not enough to do anything about it, but still.
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I saved up to start investing and I put my money in on my 30th birthday, which was early March 2020. I don’t need to tell you how much of a ride that first year was! It’s all rebounded and grown since then. A great learning experience.
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Of note: market contraction can be part of reversing inflation. Also, equities are historically your BEST bet at wealth preservation through times of high inflation.
Hold the course y’all, we’ve got this!
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Correction, because I hadn’t updated everyting: $134k. Oof. It’s still fine.
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I generally update my tracking spreadsheets at the end of the month (within a day or two, since I don’t always remember on the day of). I suspect this month won’t be pretty.
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This would be a really good time to do my annual Roth IRA conversion, so I can get more shares converted for the same taxed dollar amount. Will I actually do it? Maybe. I missed taking action in the downturn of March 2020, though.
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We’ve been debating front loading our ROTH IRAs to take advantage.
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I definitely took some of my fun money that I’d been saving and put it toward my Roth a few days ago, but now I feel like I should add a little more.
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I’m “dollar cost averaging,” right?
It’s fine, I’m fine, I know this is what happens, but after the last 2 years (aka the time when I invested the vast majority of my net worth) it doesn’t feel great.
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Our net worth is up this month because our house estimated market value (very conservative) is included in our net worth. Housing here went up 24% in 2021, according to the real estate review that just came out. Currently houses are selling in bidding wars for 80-100% over assessment for tax purposes. I can’t justify putting that kind of value on our house, so I just added 24% to our April 2020 purchase price. In reality it’s worth a lot more on the open market.
ETA: CBC News just posted an article online saying house prices in our area went up 14% in 2020 and 26% in 2021.
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Courtesy of the market, our networth is down 4.89%, or a little over $31k. Glad I track our direct action separately though- we socked away $3100 this month. Keeps me rolling.
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