Taking Stock

With the stock mar­ket act­ing like a bead of grease on a hot grid­dle, lots of folks have been talk­ing about how the incom­ing 401k reports are going to affect the elec­tion. I don’t have a 401k; since I’m a pub­lic employee, my pen­sion is man­aged by OPERS. I haven’t got­ten that state­ment yet, but the state­ment for my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan, an addi­tional, vol­un­tary, pre-​tax retire­ment option came in the mail today.

A nice thing about this plan is that I can go in daily and make changes to how my money is invested. I’ve done this a few times over the last year as the grease griddle-​hopped in the stock mar­ket. Since I started the plan, I’ve done noth­ing but lose money. Even as I moved the invest­ments into more and more con­ser­v­a­tive port­fo­lios, I’ve lost more and more. The last state­ment indi­cates that 55% of the money that was taken out of my pay­check this last quar­ter and invested in my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan has been lost. I’ve lost 17% of the total money invested since July of 2007.

So I log on to stop addi­tional defer­rals and find out that in the last week, I’ve lost an addi­tional 11% in the value, bring­ing the total loss in one year to 28%.

That’s some seri­ous shit. Espe­cially since my invest­ments are diver­si­fied among the most con­ser­v­a­tive invest­ment port­fo­lios that they offer. No more addi­tional defer­rals until what’s cur­rently in there starts earn­ing money. I basi­cally gave that cash to some­one else to throw away. I’d much rather throw it away myself, or just let it pile up in my sav­ings account, which, at least, is FDIC insured.

I won­der how much worse my OPERS pen­sion plan is going to be.

Comments on this post

  1. GRANDPA HARVEY

    INVEST IN YOUR OWN ANNUITY THAT IS GUARANTEED. INDEX ANNUITY WITH NO LOSS GUARANTEES. DAD

  2. jmay

    I “lost” 30% this year and “made” 24% the year before. I look at it this way: I may not be mak­ing money on the money I’m putting in there, but I’m buy­ing end­ing up with more shares than I was get­ting a year ago (I’m get­ting some­thing like 30% more shares with the same amount of money). So when this whole stock thing gets up to where it was I should get my 30% back and then some. It’s not where you are at any given time, it mat­ters where it is at when you fin­ish. So retir­ing now would be a bad move (but then I think we knew that already) Here is to hav­ing a excel­lent stock prices 35 years from now.…

  3. Adam Harvey

    Some other folks have told me the same thing, and I under­stand the logic behind it; but I’d much rather put that extra cash into pay­ing down my stu­dent loan debt or sav­ing toward the down pay­ment for another house or refi­nanc­ing of my cur­rent one.

  4. jmay

    I’ve just set my % and have stuck to it. Sure I could dig into it dur­ing hard times (like now), but I look at it as dis­ci­plined sav­ings. I have to be as dis­ci­plined in set­ting aside money as I am in spend­ing. It is too bad that my rainy day fund is now gone, but I’m still very leary of pulling money out of retire­ment funds as if things actu­ally get worse, then I might need it and it’s not all going away over night (even if it did lose sev­eral thou­sand over the last 3 weeks).

  5. Adam Harvey

    I’m still steadily invest­ing in my pen­sion plan; its just the extra deferred com­pen­sa­tion that I’m bail­ing from for the time being. I’m con­sid­er­ing start­ing up a Col­lege Advan­tage plan for Abra­ham, so I’ll likely start putting cash into that instead.

  6. jmay

    Very good to start doing that. My col­lege advan­tage plan is called work­ing at Notre Dame. As long as I’m employed here the kids can go here for room & board and to any other col­lege for up to 80% of ND’s tuition. If you want I can always keep an eye open in the web dev office for you.

  7. Tough Times | Organic/Mechanic

    […] I lost my shirt with my pen­sion plan and my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan. […]