The sky is NOT falling. But it's not raining dollar bills, either.
So ... I never look at my investment statements.
I get the envelope.
I toss the envelope in a pile.
Three months later, during a manic cleaning tear, I find the envelope again.
I take the papers out of the envelope, flatten them and cram them into one of a dozen manila file folders tottering precariously in a tower on my kitchen floor at three in the morning.
Those papers don't make sense in the middle of the day after sensible amounts of espresso; I'm not about to attempt unfogging my financial future while sitting cross-legged on the cracked tile in my fluorescent-lit kitchen, bleary-eyed and distracted by thoughts of how I'm really going to stay on top of the housekeeping "this time."
I've had this particular account for three years next month. And I never look at the statements. Ever.
Insert the new-fangled InterWeb thingy.
What idiot picks a recession to first look at her 401(k)?
This idiot.
I cried.
That was two months ago.
Tuesday was Meet With Joe the Investment Guy Day. And (for me) it was Print Random Pages From Your Account and Weep Day. And so, for the first time in three years, I met with Joe. The meeting is mandatory for all employees who've been here at least a year, elective for everyone else ... I elected to listen through the spiel of "This is a 401(k). This is what it does. This is why you should have one." I clutched my sheaf of papers which said, essentially, that I have been making very nice contributions to someone other than myself, and I listened very intently to Joe's speech, wondering whether I had slept through something crucial the first time around and was now being punished for it.
The meeting finally over, I took my papers up to Joe, who asked what I was worried about.
"I've lost a fifth of my money this year," I said, the tears welling up in my eyes.
He laughed.
I'm not kidding. He laughed.
"You wanna trade?" he asked (still laughing). "I'm down thirty-seven percent this year. I'll take your nineteen percent any day."
My publisher was still sitting there. He laughed.
"Do you wanna trade? (to Joe) I'm down fifty-one percent."
And really -- really, that's all I wanted to hear. That someone is worse off than I am. Well ... that, and that I'll someday get that money back. And whether I should rearrange my distributions. "I filled out the form thingy in the back of the booklet thingy," I said. "And then I filled in the distributions by what it told me to ... but maybe I was high? Because one of these things has lost 51 percent this year. That can't be good."
"You're young," Joe said. "Your risk tolerance is high." Which, according to the questionaire that I filled out three years ago, is true. On paper, statistically, my risk tolerance is high. But it's one thing to have a high risk tolerance when your account is making money every quarter; it's a completely different thing to read that a fifth of your money is gone and still tolerate any level of risk. On Tuesday, I had no risk tolerance. If it's possible to have a negative risk tolerance, that's where I was. I wanted to run - screaming - from risk and never see it again. I do not have a constitution that can handle the stock market. I sometimes don't have a constitution that can handle the supermarket.
"Stop looking at your account," Joe said. "What you were doing before was just fine. Don't read it. Just stick it in a folder and let it sit there. In thirty years, you'll have your money back."
And I believed him. I'll hide the investment folder, the way I hid "Crime and Punishment" under my sofa so I wouldn't be reminded that I didn't finish reading it. I'll hide the folder so I won't be reminded that some big, cosmic black hole is getting rather rich off of a naive copy editor in a frozen Wyoming valley.
Which brings me to another pondering:
Do we trust people in situations like these because the advice they offer is sound and worthy of our trust? Or do we trust them because we want to trust them, because we want to believe that it'll all be better, even if the tiny voice of common sense is screaming at the top of her lungs in the back of our mind that we're crazy fools, soon to be broke crazy fools?
