My husband. I am powerless to do much about it except go to work, don't put all my eggs in one basket and pray. I have no idea what to make of all this either.

I got out of the market over a year ago, in preparation for retirement.

Hi. Longtime lurker here, but I feel that I need the support of all of you. I wonder if anybody is NOT feeling queasy about the stock market. I have very recently become a widow, and am just overwhelmed with worry about my finances, etc. My husband and I thought that we had everything under control - now this. He would be going nuts if he were here to see the financial mess, as you so aptly described it!

Oh yes...I am worried that if something isn't done we could really be facing something that our generation has not seen - a depression. I hope it doesn't come to that but when all you see in the headlines is doom and gloom it makes you wonder. I live in California and this State is really on the verge of going under. We have been told there will be no COLA's (annual raise) this year and probably next. That means we are officially going backwards. The cost of everything is going up, and we are can't keep up with the higher prices. I expect a hiring freeze next. My personal IRA (from another companies 401k) has lost thousands of dollars in this decade, but I have never seen it go down as fast as these last 3 or 4 months. Yikes. This mess will effect us all if it continues. I really hope they can get it together and decide upon another "plan" that really works for all. And I hope they don't call it a "BAILOUT plan"!! That word alone gives me a nasty taste in my mouth.

For me personally I am paying special attention to what's happening because my goal is to retire this coming June. I'm not sure if I can achive that goal now...but I still have faith in the "powers that be" to get us help to stop the bleeding.

Susan

Yes, I feel a bit queasy.

But I am not going to WORRY, as worrying does absolutely no good.
We are diversified... we got out of risky stocks/funds last spring... we did what we could and it is out of our hands.
Fortunately, since we are in out mid 50s, we have time to rebound.

Plus, not all out stocks tanked. Some are actually doing well!

i can see that alot of people don't understand this bailout and only see it as helping bankers but they will see how exactly this problem is going to directly hurt them. if you have enough cash to live on for the rest of your life w/o social security and medicare and will never need another credit card, mortgage or car loan then you are going to be fine. otherwise w/o some sort of help today will become the norm for the market until all the companies w/o a ton of cash on hand are eliminated from the market.

i think more importantly we've started to see the affects of the tightening credit crisis in the orlando area. one of the largest chevy dealers in this country, bill heard chev, just closed all 6 locations in the south including a huge one w/ 300+ employees. another car dealership went under, courtesy buick, took another 300+ employees too. my employer keeps reassuring us we can weather the worst financially but we are all uneasy anyways. everyone we deal w/ is depressed about the state of the economy, it's sooo bad most of us did not go visit a huge tradeshow we do for the industry last week. none of us wanted to hear all these industry people predicting the worst.

if you have a bank of america credit card there are real rumors of them yanking credit to anyone w/ a FICO score under 750. that constitutes 60-80% of their customers. they need to dump losses fast for their 4th qtr reports. credit card companies are expected next to fail and need bailout followed by auto loan providers.

my dh & i are lucky we've been working to improve our financial outlook for yrs and yrs thru getting better degrees and training. i was raised to believe social security/medicare would not be around for me even thou i've paid in for 25 yrs now and have reached my payout limit ($2K month) before i was 40 yrs old. i started my 401K when i was 19 and work very closely w/ my dad who is a cpa & certif financial planner to allocate my $$ around as the market moves. even thou i feel we can weather this crisis in our house i still feel uneasy. my birthday was a week ago and i had planned a really big shopping spree, i can afford to do it but w/ this feeling of doom i decided to be conservative and wait and see....~ liz

Good post "western pa luann". I forgot to say I have a very balanced portfolio. But my IRA has taken a hit straight across the board. Try to stay calm and stay as debt free as possible, keep yourself educated on what you invest in and find an honest financial advisor that you have faith in...and stay connected with them.

I don't think it's going to be the end of world, but it's not going to be easy either.

Susan

No, I think it will get ironed out
Maybe not to everyones liking.
They have to put a curb on the bad mandates the govenment put on banks around 1999 which forced them to ease the credit requirements on loans ala Fannie Mae those banks had to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit was generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans.
This really started back around 1977 in the CRA Community Reinvestment Act.

The problems accelerated and efforts made to curb it or investigate or change it were thwarted by the ruling congresses.

I'm sure it will get fixed.

we'll hang in and pray that the 401's recoup, which i believe they will in time...it's those horrid a/r/m's mortages and the foreclosures...i'm sooo glad all my kids refinanced and went to 30 yr fixed, when they did!

It's encouraging that some of you with a better grasp of the situation than I feel somewhat optimistic.

Veta, I'm in a similar boat. I've been a widow for almost three years, and my finances suffered a huge blow when my DH spent 2.5 years in a nursing home before he died. So my assets are nothing like what he thought they'd be. I supplement my income with freelance work, and I'm frugal by nature (thank heavens!), and I've been hoping I won't have to go back to work outside the home.

I probably shouldn't have used the word "worried." I agree with Luann that worry is worse than useless, and I'm a big believer in positive thinking. But I am concerned.

I do have confidence in my financial advisor. A friend of mine has been calling her financial advisor just about every day in recent weeks. She says if the market goes low enough (she said this before today), she wants him to sell everything. That makes no sense to me.

We were talking about this at supper a little while ago. Luckily we also are in our 50's and have time to recover (crossing my fingers).

DH was wishing we had a spare $10K or so laying around. He'd go buy stocks first thing in the morning. Buy low, sell high.

Smart move, Monica.

I just checked 7 stocks, and all 7 were up in the 'after hours trading' from what they were at the close of the market today. Things have already started a rebound.

Sue

Here is a link that might be useful: Ford Motor Co.

i know several people going on buying frenzies right now and a few waiting on the bottoming out yet to come, i'm in that bunch. but like i said getting available credit is going to be very very difficult for the next 2 yrs or more so alot of people can not afford to spare tens of thousands of cash$$ to buy a decent amount of stock right now. i know intellectually now's the time, even more so when it drops farther, but i also know darn well that unless you have perfect credit score w/ 6 figures in the bank as cash, credit is not avail so buying anything worries me. i'm a plan for the worst w/ cash girl, then invest...i do have to say that cash is king right now and people will bend over backwards to do what you want to get your cash. ~ liz

I'm feeling a bit uneasy but not so much for me and more for my daughter. She's in college right now and loans are hard to come by. She finally got hers on Friday for this semester but next semester is a wait and see. I'm not spending any extra cash just in case I have to help her out more than I had planned. I have been having to reassure her that we will help her out much more if we have to. She just hates asking us for money. I'm not sure why, we have never given her a hard time about it. She says she just feels bad asking. I know that things could be much worse for us though.

The only comfort we have is that our house is paid for, cars paid for, and we have no loans. Our portfolio is diversified and we have quite a lot of utilities. Our money is in a credit union, not a bank. Not sure why, but CU's are supposed to be safer. I worry for my children. They all have loans out the wazoo. They all drive new cars, and my oldest daughter has bought about 10 houses that she has rented or else is selling and is owner financing them. She owns her own business and that scares me. I just hope they vote again and this thing passes. DH says we will vote against all incumbents next time!!

I learned the hard way "playing" the stock market & mutual funds back in the mid-90's. Heck I could spend the $$$ Prudential was losing, (oh wait, I think they called it "investing")AND I would still have something to show for MY way of investment.....what $$$ I have is safely in my 401k and it will stay there!

I was thinking earlier today about my parents. When the Depression hit in 1929, I was 5 years old, the youngest of 9 children. So my thoughts today were along the line of wondering how my DM and DF might have felt and what their thoughts were at that time.

I know that my DF lost his business, (automobile sales) our house and the new house he was building for us. I was too young to know if they were worried, or distressed, etc. I only know that we all survived, because everyone who was old enough to work, did. There were jobs if you didn't mind getting your hands dirty and blistered.

I am not a worrier, never have been, don't even know how. Hopefully my financial resources will be sufficient. The one thing I kept saying to myself is, well, there goes my long term nursing home $$. I've always said I'm going to live to be 100, so by then I'm sure everything will have righted itself, and I'll be sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the Old Folks Home. Thats only 16 years from now!

I've always been frugal, so this is nothing new to me. We have to realize what caused this. Too many people over spending, overloaded credit cards, houses and cars way more than were needed. And now we expect it to be "fixed."

I was widowed almost 26 years ago, after 38 years of marriage. My DH was a High School teacher and salaries then kept us counting pennies, but we did fine; had everything we needed, a home with a mortgage, and a a car or two.

All that to say this. Hunker down; you may need to make some hard decisions. I hope it isn't too late for any of you. I don't expect to see or hear of anybody jumping out the windows this time around!

Cheer up!

Sue

Good post Sue Thanks

I lost well in excess of 5 figures today; even more over the past year.

Darned right I feel queasy.

It's going to be awhile before we recover from this.

But I lost a lot of money during the dot.bomb of 1999-2001, and I recovered from that.

Not really, I think it will recover eventually.

No, not feeling queasy or worried. We are diversified in our holdings. We are in it for the long run not the short race. They will rebound. NancyLouise

I'm a little queasy, but I'm not in the stock market. When I retired I took my money and put it in annuties with a financial advisor. I have no 'smarts' in investing, and just hope he's doing a good job for me. I'm a widow, and living off my pension, SS, and a little monthly check from my annuities. No COLA here. I just won't go in and look at my balance in my annuity account for a while. I know last time it dropped 500+ points, I didn't do as bad as I thought I was going too. Anyway, I still don't/won't look until things smooth out a little. I'm not going to listen to any news, read any papers or anything on line about it either. It'll only make me upset, and there's nothing I can do anyway but ride it out.
Leslie

I still have 20 years until retirement so I hope to the higher beings that it doesn't take that long to get this mess straightened out.

I'm not in the stock market either (never trusted it) and I certainly hope that the corporate big wigs are not given their golden parachutes. They don't deserve it.

SamKaren
your resident DJ

There is substantial recovery started today.

Dow is up 261 pts in the short time the market has been open today.

(the other) Sue

Here is a link that might be useful: Dow Jones Industrial Average

For those of you in the market who have stocks that have lost value, remember that you do not experience that loss until you sell. If you have good value stocks, you will be fine over the long term, as those stocks once again gain value. This is a big reminder that funds that will be needed in the short term, should not be invested in the market.
Good luck!

I heard a telephone interview with Donald Trump, yesterday.
He said this is what we need, because it will really bring down oil prices. He said that oil is the life blood of the nation and the world. It will not be easy but it will bring some great improvments.

A little queasy? Yikes. I agree with Liz's post. The stock market ride is more the surface symptom of a sick economy. There'll be starts and stops along the way, but the trend is down, down, down.

Time for a major correction in both the stock markets and the world economies.

Gold, silver and precious metals are almost impossible to find right now because people are looking for a safe haven for their nest egg(s). Today - right now - it's not so much about making money as protecting what you have. People are pulling their dollars out of the banks and putting their money into the "Bank of Sealy Posturepedic."

I believe things will get worse before they will get better. And if this $700,000,000,000 bailout passes, all hell will break loose. It's nothing but an asset redistribution scheme, taking money from the poor and middle-class and giving it to the wealthiest bankers and financial institutions. IMHO, of course.

Rose

Mark to market. Many Republicans and Democrats are pointing to that ONE screwed up accounting rule as the cause. Google it for more info...and hope it is repealed. Soon.

My DH and I put our nest egg of about $10,000 in the stock market in 1985. In 1987, there was a crash and we lost $9000 of our nest egg. We left our remaining money in that account and it was back up over $14,000 by 2000 when the next "market adjustment" hit. Our lesson? Things go up and down, up and down. The important thing is we were both working, paying taxes, having and raising our children. we keep going. Just like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

I'm saying prayers for all of us. I've recovered from Financial Disasters 3 times.

Gayle

I'm not worried about it because my husband and I will be okay and plan to ride it out. As several have said, it will come back and the worse thing to do now is to panic and sell. What saddens me is that my dad doesn't have a whole lot longer to live (he will be 84 on Oct. 8th, and has cancer). He may not have time to see his money grow again. I hate for him to die with much of his savings diminished.
Lu

Oh, I'm sorry to hear about your dad, Lulie. My mom will be 84 on Oct. 7. (They're almost twins!)

Sorry to hijack your thread. As you were......

What Lulie said holds true for us too. We will live out our life in relative comfort having lost a significant amount of money that we probably won't be able to recapture. We have done it in the past though so you never know what will happen. I pray that the pass a bill..A good bill to help because as Liz said....this isn't about a bail out for the big companies and the big execs...it's about the little guys. Everything that we own is completely paid for, we have a budget that is more than we spend each month so it is taking away the inheritance from our kids ...not from us.

My husband fired off an email yesterday during the vote to Fox news and now he is smiling because they were laughing and they actually read one of his emails on the air.

At age close to 80, living on less than my pensions, my assets are about 80% in stocks ... and I bought some more, a couple of weeks ago.

I wasn't watching on Mon., but if I had would likely have bought something solid.

Go to "Yahoo", click on "Finance", at top left there's a box labelled, "Get quotes", enter "BRK-B", then click on the box.

You'll get a repoort of the open, high, low and close of the smaller Berkshire-Hathaway stock for the latest day, with current and average volume, and there's a chart of the price progression during the latest day on the right. Under the chart box, click on "6m" or "1 y" to find chart showing closing prices, daily or 3 days, for the recent 6 months or 1 year. If you'd like to see the price action during those days, above the chart there's a choice of "Bar" (which click on) or "Line" (or another for candlestick).

Or try "JNJ" or "BAC" (Bank America).

Or try "TD.TO" (Canadian bank, TD Canada Trust) or "ABX.TO" (Barrick Gold) or "ENB.TO" (Enbridge) or "TRP.TO" pipelines, "ECA.TO" (EnCana -natural gas), "NXY.TO" (Nexen - petroleum), "POT" (potash, a major fertilizer), all but the first are major resource providers, plus giving you some assets based in non-U.S. dollars.

But - if the U.S. economy gets a cold, the Canadian one usually gets pneumonia. However, those resources are sought in many parts of the world.

If you'd like to see a list of open, high, low and close, plus volume, and dividend rates (for some) click on "Historical prices" near top left.

What's better than putting your money into the bank?

Buying the bank! Let others' money work for you.

Good wishes for wise use of your resources.

ole joyful