What’s Happening in the Financial Markets?

The stock market is going through an incredibly difficult period in 2022. You may hear phrases like “crashing, tanking, diving, or plunging…” If you have looked at your retirement or investment accounts recently, you might be feeling stressed, worried, or frustrated. Like many investors, you might be asking – what does this mean for me and what do I need to do?

For investors with 10 years or more from retirement, the best thing to do may be to take no action. If you are retiring sooner, it’s important to ensure your investment allocation matches your time horizon. And – if you feel like you must take action, we encourage you to reach out to our team for a financial coaching session (or speak with an independent financial professional). In the video below, Allison from our team goes into more detail on what this market volatility means and how this kind of market can be an opportunity for some investors. You can watch her video below or read through the video transcript.

Do you have any money questions you’d like answered? We’d love to answer them. Email us!

Resources:

• Top 5 Things Every Beginning Investor Needs to Know About the Stock Market
• How to Relax with Market Worries
• The Power of Healthy Stock Market Corrections
  

Video Transcript:

Hi, I'm Allison Rosenberg, one of the advisors with AFS 401(k) Retirement Services and I wanted to reach out to talk for a couple of minutes about what is going on in the markets right now. There are a lot of terms being used in headlines and in normal conversations, things like crashing, tanking, diving, and plunging. For any of you who have looked at your accounts recently, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

There is a lot of volatility in the market right now, and this will be going on for maybe the next couple of weeks, or months, we don't really know when it's going to end, and so the question is, what does that mean for you? So, I want to start by saying that your retirement accounts are long-term investments, and so if you have, you know, 10 years or more until you're going to be retiring, probably the best thing for you to do is nothing. I know that's frustrating to hear but we don't want anybody making the wrong decision at the wrong time. Now, if you're feeling really panicked or worried and you are going to be retiring, in the next couple of years, then absolutely, we would love it if you could reach out to one of the advisors at AFS. If you know, what's going on in your account, but you've kind of been there before you went through the tech bubble or the financial crisis, or even remember what was happening to our accounts during the beginning of the pandemic.

Then I want to say to you. It's okay to stop looking at your statements for a while and if you feel like you must make a change to your account, then you know, perhaps make a small change, not some giant move where you're moving your entire account balance into different investments. If you've been there before you remember what has happened and so you're thinking, well, wait a minute. I think this is a great buying opportunity. Yeah, prices are down. So, if your budget allows for it and you want to put more money into your accounts, great! You can take advantage of these lower prices. You know, during our working years, what we're trying to do is buy as many shares of our investments as possible.

And when the markets are down, what that means really is that the price of those investments are down, and so every time we contribute to our retirement plan, we're actually buying more shares. So, when the prices are down and we're still making our contributions, we're actually buying more shares. Really investments are probably the only thing that people are buying right now. So, inflation is up, the stock market's down and we at AFS know that everyone's kind of wondering, what should you do?

So, if you haven't been to MyMoneyNav.com recently, I'm going to recommend that you go ahead, go to the site, see the content that we have that talks about dollar cost averaging and market volatility, and when is the right time to make a change, if ever, and certainly reach out to our team, if you would like to have a conversation about your account and what you can be doing to feel better.

So, thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you soon.