In the parlance of ‘The Dude’, what do you do when the market pees on your investment rug? Well in June, the market did just that to us, particularly our international stock ‘rug’. But, since our work has been commended as being highly focused on rebalancing… we bought more of it.
I highly recommend watching the video for the more entertaining version of the story, but overall, here’s the what happened with our retirement plans in the months of June and July.
- In June, the international markets didn’t do so well.
- We contributed to our retirement funds in June, buying some of these lower priced international stock funds.
- Those funds rebounded in July.
- The market made up for the loss, and we got to buy cheap in the meantime.
You see, there is always a reversion to mean, so when an asset class falls in price we buy it on sale, and eventually it will go back up. We do this proportionally, whenever we make a contribution. It reduces the need to sell anything to maintain the allocations we want.
Saving for retirement is mostly about patience. The market has historical performance indicators, and unless the zombie apocalypse actually happens, time will correct the market. So, even if we hit a bit of a downturn, there’s no reason not to buy low. History has shown that this market aggression will not stand…prices will rise. And that means we will definitely recover our bones, or clams, or whatever you call them.
For full details of our financial retirement goal achievements are in the video…and if you want the full back-story, you can get it in our Retirement Goals episode – it’s long, but it’s detailed.
We hope you enjoy the episode! We post financial updates once a month, so if you don’t want to miss them, please subscribe to our Living the Middle channel on YouTube, right now!
Happy Living!
Steffan (& Kelly)