Quick Link of the Day

Check out Moom's comparison of the federal budgets for Australia and the United States-- fascinating.

Ooh, I Feel So Stimulated!

I just took a look at my savings account and was momentarily puzzled by the appearance of a $19.70 deposit labeled "US TREASURY 220 TAX REFUND PPD." I got my tax refunds long ago, and was wondering if this was the correction of some sort of error. But then I got this warm tingly feeling as I realized that this is my economic stimulus payment!

I've heard people in the office talking about when and how they might get their payments. These are mostly younger assistants who don't make much money and are really excited to be getting $600. I hope they use it well.

As for me, I'm not sure that $19.70 is really going to make much of a difference in my life. I wonder how many millions of people are getting this kind of piddly little payment. If a million people get $20 each, that is $20 million dollars. I'd like to think $20 million could have more impact in other ways, but maybe it doesn't matter.

Have you gotten an economic stimulus payment? What will you be doing with it?

Today in the News

Oooh, it's a good day for finance related news today:
People are cutting back their spending, even in Europe.
Meanwhile, politicians are using taxpayer money to guzzle gas.
Despite inflation, there are still stores where every item of clothing costs less than $10.
Fewer immigrants are sending money back home.
And there's an editorial on why a temporary gas tax cut is a bad idea.

But enough about the world, what about ME!?!?!
My last 5 financial transactions were:
$3.35 on breakfast (cash)
$4.42 on lunch yesterday (cash)
$3.35 on breakfast yesterday (cash)
$23.18 on Chinese takeout for dinner the last two nights (credit card)
$31.19 to ConEd (e-payment from checking account)

Okay, maybe the world is more interesting.

When Irish Eyes Aren't Smiling

If you want to feel better about our housing melt-down, read this article from today's New York Times. I think a lot of people, myself included, knew the housing boom couldn't last forever but didn't realize the extent to which the problems there would drag down our entire economy. But check out the chart with the article: residential investment is a little less than 6% of the gross domestic product in the U.S.. In Ireland, it's almost 14% of GDP. (At least that is how it looks on the chart-- the body of the article says it's 12% in Ireland and 4% in the U.S. Maybe they need to draw those graphs a little more carefully!) Spain is also in trouble, with thousands of new homes sitting empty and prices dropping.

Economists have been busy cutting their growth forecasts for Spain, with a few saying that it may stagnate this summer. BBVA, a leading Spanish bank, forecasts that unemployment will rise to an average of 11 percent this year, from 8.6 percent in 2007.

Such cutbacks are well under way in Ireland, where the taxi drivers complain that their ranks are being swollen by laid-off home builders. The housing collapse has brought an abrupt end to more than a decade of pell-mell growth that earned Ireland the nickname “the Celtic tiger.”

Yikes.

But at least here in America, the rich are still spending:

Who said anything about a recession? Sometime between the government bailout of Bear Stearns and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that America lost 80,000 jobs in March, Lee Tachman spent roughly $50,000 last month on a four-day jaunt to Miami for himself and three close friends.

The trip was an exercise in luxuriant male bonding. Mr. Tachman, who is 38, and his friends got around by private jet, helicopter, Hummer limousine, Ferraris and Lamborghinis; stayed in V.I.P. rooms at Casa Casuarina, the South Beach hotel that was formerly Gianni Versace’s mansion; and played “extreme adventure paintball” with former agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Mr. Tachman, a manager for a company that executes trades for hedge funds and the owner of “a handful” of buildings in New York, said he has not felt the need to cut back.

“I always feel like there’s a sword of Damocles over my head, like it could all come crashing down at any time,” he said. “But there’s always going to be people who are trading, and there’s always going to be a demand for real estate in New York.”

Here's another nice quote:

In October, Marc Sperling, the 36-year-old president of an equity-trading company, bought a new condo on the Upper West Side in a building where four-bedroom apartments like his cost more than $4 million. When he moves into the completed building next year, he plans to hold on to his other two apartments in Murray Hill and Miami Beach — each of which he values at about $2.5 million.

Mr. Sperling views the nation’s economic slump as a temporary problem, and is grateful that it has yet to affect him. “I think if you have the means to ride it out, that’s what you do,” he said.

His view of the subprime mortgage crisis seemed to reflect a sort of inverse class resentment.

“I don’t want to sound harsh, but the people who were buying million-dollar houses with a combined household income of $70,000 or $80,000 were the ones who were chasing easy money,” he said.

"Inverse class resentment." That is kind of a new one. Yes, there is greed and stupidity at both ends of the economic spectrum, but I'd point more fingers at the people in the mortgage industry who actually ended up benefiting from all this craziness, not at the middle class families who believed it when they were told they could have their little piece of the American dream and are now facing bankruptcy.

The Latest (Late) Links

An Explanation of the Credit Crisis

Raise your hand if you don’t quite understand this whole financial crisis.

It has been going on for seven months now, and many people probably feel as if they should understand it. But they don’t, not really. The part about the housing crash seems simple enough. With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.

But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?

Teachers Can Make $125,000

“The money, as funny as this may sound, is not about the money,” he says. “The money is a signifier. Because money, in our culture, is a signifier of how jobs are valued, and right now schools are telling teachers that they are not valued. The great and talented people who go into teaching are incentive-ized in every possible way to leave the classroom for jobs in administration or jobs outside of schools altogether. What we are trying to do is reverse those incentives. We want the best teachers to keep on teaching, to be challenged and valued.”

Tuition Breaks at Harvard Law

For years, prosecutors, public defenders and lawyers in traditionally low-paying areas of the law have argued that financial pressures were pushing graduates toward corporate law and away from the kind of careers that they would pursue in the absence of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

“The debt loads that people are coming out of law schools with are now in six figures,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “When the debt load is that great, I have had a lot of applicants who’ve said, ‘I’d like to take the job, but I really can’t afford it.’ ”

My Investments

I thought I'd take Moom up on his suggestion from the last post-- here's a look at the current state of my portfolios, since it's been quite a while since I shared them. This doesn't show how long I've held anything, but it's where I'm at now, and it's not all pretty.

Here's my main E*Trade account. This is what I've always considered a sort of experimental investing account-- I used to have more money in it, but I sold off some things before I bought my apartment. One thing that is worth explaining is that my shares of ALU resulted from the Lucent/Alcatel merger. I originally bought about $300 worth of Lucent shares, back in 2003.


Here's my E*Trade Roth IRA. Boy does this one really suck! I'd thought about selling off some of these funds when they were just kind of flat, and now I really wish I had!


And here's my 401k. This is where it's at right now-- with all the constant contributions, it's not as simple to show the overall gain and loss as it is with E*Trade-- the change per share shown is just yesterday's. The year-to-date change in market value is shown as being about -$23,000, and they calculate my year-to-date rate of return as -12.1%. They don't give any life-to-date returns number, but I can go 2 years back, and it shows my rate of return for 3/20/06 to 3/19/08 as -0.7%. How depressing.

It's definitely on my to-do list to figure out if my overall portfolio allocation makes sense for someone my age (25 to 30 years away from retiring)... but other than that, what is the best way to decide if you need to dump a mutual fund?? I welcome all opinions!

My 401K is Down.

I mean, really down. It can be hard to get an handle on gains in investment accounts when you're making regular contributions. Of course I saw the recent monthly statements and knew I was having some down months, but it didn't bother me too much. I just figured I could roll with it, and that it just meant I'd shaved a few points off the heights my account had reached, just a bump in the road during an overall upwards trend. And of course the balance is usually increasing just because I am contributing almost $1,400 a month to the account.
But last night I looked at my portfolio in Quicken and it says the value of my account is down 6%. As in, 6% below the cost basis of the investments I've made. As in, 6% of my hard-earned contributions have evaporated. WTF!?!?!?
Of course this account is complicated. There are my contributions going in, and employer contributions, and I have rolled over 2 earlier 401K accounts. Maybe the cost basis is not accurate. But still! I'm a bit worried. My E*Trade account is down, but it's still showing a 40% gain over the cost basis. My E*Trade Roth IRA is also down, below its cost basis, but I knew I had rather conservative investments in that account that didn't do all that well when the market was booming, and I haven't had them as long, so it was no surprise to be down a bit.

As always, I am trying to take the long-term view and not worry too much, but I can't help wondering if I've picked some real losers in that 401k account, and whether I should do anything about it. But on the other hand, the more I think about it, I can't imagine that my Quicken number is accurate-- if I have had several years of that account posting positive gains of 7-10% each year, it would take a lot worse of a beating than we're having now to wipe out all those prior gains... I hope!

The Money of Color

... as in skin color.

I read the text of Barack Obama's speech on race-- I thought he did a great job confronting a difficult topic. I couldn't help noting, of course, that one of the main things he cites as dividing the races, as well as one of the main things that can unite them, is, basically, money.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

***

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

***

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

***

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.

I'm glad he talked about these things so clearly. So often, I think people politely (or not) sweep issues of race under the rug and want to pretend we're all totally past it. I don't often blog about this issue but when I touched on it in one of my early posts, "What Color is Your Millionaire," there were some fairly heated comments. Somewhat later, I was interviewed and talked a little bit about the controversy that post generated. That part of the interview-- which included a comment along the lines of "I didn't say the author of The Millionaire Next Door was a racist, I just said he was ignoring the issue of race in a disingenuous way, and the statistics supporting his message make it absurd"-- was completely edited out, and as far as I could tell it was the only part that was edited out! Whoa, guess that got a little too divisive and controversial!

So I'm glad a politician has managed to frankly acknowledge that we have a legacy of an uneven playing field, and that we need to work together on the common economic goals and aspirations that unite us.

[In case anyone's wondering, this isn't meant as a "run out and vote for Obama" pitch. I am still undecided as to who our best future president would be. Also, though my family is ethnically mixed, my experience is that of a white person.]

Crazy Days

These are interesting times to be trying to blog about personal finance. It's just one thing after another in the news, from high-priced hookers to the rapid implosion of major financial firms. The stock market is all over the place, the government is trying to bribe people to go shopping, and who knows what kind of bailout they'll cook up for mortgages.

I am not enough of an economic genius to even begin to comment on most of these things. (Though it's tempting to try to tackle the expensive hooker issue.) Like most people, I suppose, I feel like a small boat on really choppy seas, wondering how best to reach the shore. How do we cope with all this? If we're having an unprecedented kind of economic turmoil, do all the old rules apply? Do I still keep plowing money into my usual blend of investments, which is heavily weighted towards stocks? It's so depressing to see your hard-earned contributions completely negated by market losses for several months in a row. Meanwhile, for safer investments, interest rates are dropping, so they don't help much either. Fortunately I think my job is fairly secure, but what if it wasn't? I know a few people who have lost jobs recently and most of them haven't landed anywhere yet. It's scary to think what could lie ahead, and how easily most people's savings could evaporate.

Then you have today's New York Times, which has a special section on "Wealth and Personal Finance." Lots of helpful stuff here: how to set up trust funds that will give your children just enough so that they don't become lazy leeches. How to manage when your wealth is spread out into lots of different accounts. How to start investing in hedge funds once you've made your millions. And tips on figuring out what kind of servants you might need and where to hire them.

Great timing, NYT! I'm sure all those Bear Stearns employees will be gobbling this info right up!

Inflation

How do you feel about the effects of inflation in your own life? Are there things you particularly notice? I know for most Americans, the cost of gas is in the forefront. As a New Yorker, that isn't especially noticeable to me, and doesn't directly affect my life on a regular basis, though it may contribute to a rise in other costs. However, here's a couple other things that struck me this past weekend.

• Bagels: a bagel store I went to had just put up signs about their prices increasing from 80 cents to $1. (also noticed by Hedonic Adjustment)
  
• Wine: one of my favorite wines just went up in price, from $12.99 to $15.99, and in general prices seem to be higher on average.
  

The wine thing was what really hit me. A $12.99 bottle can sort of seem like it's a $12 bottle (you know, if you happen to ignore the last two digits of the price), and that is within the price range I feel okay about these days. I certainly don't spend that much on every bottle I buy, and I used to try never to buy anything over $8 or 9, but I've definitely been drifting upward in that respect, in part due to what I find in the most convenient liquor stores, in part due to an overall increase in prices, and in part due to me just being a lush. But I'm not so much of a lush that I'll spend $15.99 on my everyday plonk! $12.99 was my absolute upper threshold for everyday wine. I'll spend $15 once in a while for some kind of special occasion, or $20 for something that is a gift, but otherwise, I'm a cheap lush.

How about you? Is there anything that is costing you noticeably more lately?

This Week's News

Here's a few New York Times articles that caught my eye this week:

Investment advice from Yale's portfolio manager: Keep It Simple, Says Yale’s Top Investor

What should an individual investor do?

Don’t try anything fancy. Stick to a simple diversified portfolio, keep your costs down and rebalance periodically to keep your asset allocations in line with your long-term goals. That is the advice of David F. Swensen, who has run the Yale endowment since 1988, relying on a complex strategy that includes investments in hedge funds and other esoteric vehicles. The endowment earned 28 percent in its last fiscal year, which ended June 30, beating all other endowments. It finished the year with $22.5 billion....

For most individual investors, he said, copying the strategies of institutions like Yale is virtually impossible: big investors have access to fund managers and arcane strategies that are beyond the reach of most people....

So he advocates another approach, which he outlined in the book “Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment” (Free Press, 2005). He proposes a portfolio of 30 percent domestic stocks, 15 percent foreign stocks, and 5 percent emerging-market stocks, as well as 20 percent in real estate and 15 percent each in Treasury bonds and Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS.

The real estate investment can be made through real estate index funds. Though the real estate market has declined and your portfolio is below its target allocation to it, he said, don’t try to time the market. Go ahead and rebalance because no one really knows where the market’s bottom is.

A peek at the financial life of Sandra Boynton, creator of greeting cards galore: The Power of Whimsy

As an entrepreneur, Ms. Boynton maintains a firm grasp on market realities and her finances, but she says she has succeeded by refusing to make money her main objective. Instead, she says, she has focused on the creative process, her artistic autonomy, her relationships and how she uses her time.

“I don’t do things differently to be different; I do what works for me,” she says. “To me, the commodity that we consistently overvalue is money, and what we undervalue is our precious and irreplaceable time. Though, of course, to the extent that money can save you time or make it easier to accomplish things, it’s a wonderful thing....”

When Ms. Boynton was 14, a local newspaper printed drawings from an exhibit of her school artwork. She used the $40 she earned from her first published work to invest in two shares of AT&T — though she mistakenly thought she was buying shares of I.B.M. She still has the stock but has no clue how much it is worth.

Stocks held a special glamour for her: Her grandfather worked at a silver company, rising from the mailroom to the vice president’s perch. “Family legend has it that the company offered penny-a-share stock to employees, and he bought as much as he could afford,” she says. “And he became a wealthy man. That stock eventually put most of his 17 grandchildren through college....”

In 1974, Ms. Boynton met Phil Friedmann, a partner in Recycled Paper Greetings, a greeting card company based in Chicago, at a stationery trade show. After Mr. Friedmann and his business partner, Mike Keiser, saw Ms. Boynton’s work, they asked her to start making cards for their company.

They wanted to pay her a flat rate. Though she was only 21 and unknown, Ms. Boynton, who had learned a lesson or two from her father’s other careers as a writer and publisher, demanded royalties.

“We quickly relented,” Mr. Keiser recalls of the royalty negotiations. It was a shrewd move on his part, too. He says that over about a decade — from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s — revenue at Recycled Paper went from $1 million to $100 million, largely because of the popularity of Boynton cards. Ms. Boynton has made 4,000 different cards for Recycled Paper, including the still popular “Hippo Birdies 2 Ewes” birthday card.

By Mr. Keiser’s rough estimate, Ms. Boynton has sold around a half-billion cards, which, he says, makes her one of the best-selling card creators of all time.

Artists on the move in NYC, for reasons of money, of course: Moving Soon to an Apartment Near You

Having lived in more than 30 apartments in 20 years — three of them in the last six months — [Brooke] Berman is skilled at making herself comfortable almost anywhere very quickly.

“I can make anything home,” says Ruth, Ms. Berman’s proxy and the central character in her latest play, “Hunting and Gathering,” presented by Primary Stages through March 1. “A couple of books, a scented candle in a tin, some fresh flowers, and we’re good....”

Living on money from the odd grant, temp jobs and teaching positions, she is emblematic of her Gypsy tribe — theater people are the original urban nomads — and a vivid example of the increasingly precarious domestic life of an artist trying to live in New York.

Rent for a studio or a one-bedroom in the East Village, for example, has more than doubled in 10 years, said Douglas Hochlerin, a broker with Bond New York, a firm specializing in Manhattan rentals. Last year, when the rent on Ms. Berman’s Mott Street one-bedroom, where she had lived for three years, rose to $1,550 from $1,350, she gave up her lease, beginning another bout of itinerancy, as she described it.

“It’s all about money,” Ms. Berman said cheerfully. “It’s not like I have a penchant for the transient life.”

According to Emily Morse, the director of artistic development at New Dramatists, “two major things have changed as far as this city is concerned: the real estate market and the fact that very little money is going directly to artists.”

She continued: “You used to be able to work a 20-hour week, pay the rent on your tiny studio, and still write your plays. That’s no longer possible.”

And finally, from today's paper:

Rescues for Homeowners in Debt Weighed:

Not since the Depression has a larger share of Americans owed more on their homes than they are worth. With the collapse of the housing boom, nearly 8.8 million homeowners, or 10.3 percent of the total, are underwater. That is more than double the percentage just a year ago, according to a new estimate of the damage by Moody’s Economy.com.

Go On a Savings Spree:

Why not ... try to stimulate investment by all Americans? The simplest approach would be to seed universal mutual fund accounts for low-income Americans. The best way to do this would be through a so-called refundable tax credit deposited directly into a special investment account for each taxpayer. In future years, the government could contribute an additional 50 cents for every dollar the taxpayer deposited into this account. Think of it as a universal 401(k), but one that could be used not only for retirement but also for things like a down payment on a house, college expenses or unexpected health costs.

Don't Rerun That '70s Show!

Jimmy Carter’s overall economic record was much better than most people realize — the average economic growth rate under his administration was 3.4 percent per year, slightly higher than the growth rate under Ronald Reagan and far better than growth under either Bush.

Reagan famously asked Americans whether they were better off than they had been four years ago; the answer, actually, was yes — most families had higher real income in 1980 than they did in 1976.

But the good economic news came in the Carter administration’s early years, while its final year was marked by rising unemployment and soaring inflation, largely caused by a surge in oil prices.

And once again we have a weakening economy coupled with rising inflation, again thanks in large part to a surge in oil prices.

Reasons for a Rise in Mid-Life Suicide

The New York Times just ran an article about a disturbing spike in the number of suicides among middle-aged Americans, which is only just beginning to attract more attention, research, and prevention resources. The hypothetical causes discussed included depression, a decrease in the use of hormone-replacement therapy, and an increase in the use of prescription drugs. I thought for sure that the article would delve into the issue of financial stresses, but it didn't, really, other than alluding to unemployment as a possible trigger, among a list of things such as failed romances and substance abuse. The comments on the Times website, however, immediately hit that topic:

It's the economy, stupid. People aged 45-55 are among those most likely to be downsized, outsourced, laid off. Then they have no insurance or affordable medical care until they reach 65. Life has been getter tougher for many people, and national events are not cause for optimism.

— ajdemar, ca

Another factor is likely the economy. Suicides also tend to increase during severe economic downturns. Remember the "Great Depression?"

— Leo Toribio, Pittsburgh, PA

It's better to take control than to lose control. Life is getting longer, the risks are greater that as I age I will have bankrupting health or other problems and run out of economic resources. Our emphasis on individual rights and the knee-jerk resistance to taxation in this country means we are all on our own, that there is no social safety net in the USA like we see in most Western European countries; if something unforeseen should happen, I don't want to end up on the street or in a nursing home on medicaid... have you seen what that's like? And finally, being gay, I don't have confidence that my oh-so-christian family will be there for me if I should need help. It's a dog eat dog world. Who needs it?

— W, California

Other reasons were also mentioned in the comments, such as 9/11, the war in Iraq, and an increase in ageism in our youth-obsessed culture. Whatever the reasons, it's certainly a sad topic and certainly one that I hope never to have to face in my own family.

"Americans Start to Pay as They Go"

Here's a front page story from today's New York Times:

Economy Fitful, Americans Start to Pay as They Go

For more than half a century, Americans have proved staggeringly resourceful at finding new ways to spend money.

In the 1950s and ’60s, as credit cards grew in popularity, many began dining out when the mood struck or buying new television sets on the installment plan rather than waiting for payday. By the 1980s, millions of Americans were entrusting their savings to the booming stock market, using the winnings to spend in excess of their income. Millions more exuberantly borrowed against the value of their homes.

But now the freewheeling days of credit and risk may have run their course — at least for a while and perhaps much longer — as a period of involuntary thrift unfolds in many households. With the number of jobs shrinking, housing prices falling and debt levels swelling, the same nation that pioneered the no-money-down mortgage suddenly confronts an unfamiliar imperative: more Americans must live within their means.

“We don’t use our credit cards anymore,” said Lisa Merhaut, a professional at a telecommunications company who lives in Leesburg, Va., and whose family last year ran up credit card debt it could not handle.

Today, Ms. Merhaut, 44, manages her money the way her father did. Despite a household income reaching six figures, she uses cash for every purchase. “What we have is what we have,” Ms. Merhaut said. “We have to rely on the money that we’re bringing in.”

The shift under way feels to some analysts like a cultural inflection point, one with huge implications for an economy driven overwhelmingly by consumer spending.

I do think sometimes that we've really painted ourselves into a corner. To get our economy back on track, we need people to spend money. But we also need them to save money. What's the answer?

Bummer.

It was to be expected, I suppose: my FNBO Direct online savings account, which I opened several months ago at 5.05%, just had its rate slashed to 4.30%. I have about $11,104 in this account, so I guess this will cost me somewhere around $83 this year-- assuming the rate stays at 4.30% and doesn't drop even further. Not the end of the world, but still... bummer.
I haven't written too much about all this economic turmoil, but it's certainly snowballing into a bigger and bigger topic of conversation. Last night I was at the Trader Joe's wine shop and noticed that they seemed to be raising some prices, which the cashier confirmed when I asked him about it. Someone else in line chimed in that "given current stock market conditions, that's just cruel."
I overheard a conversation somewhere else where someone said she had sold some of her international mutual funds yesterday, since she was too aggressively invested for her age and wanted to cut her losses since she thought things would only get worse. My international funds seemed to be up a little when I checked earlier this morning, so who knows if she was right! I myself am just sitting tight and not changing any investments around right now. And repeating silently to myself "30 years to retirement, 30 years to retirement..."