The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You know, the funny thing about this is that, unless you were invested in stocks at the time of the dotcom bubble or the 2008 crash, it won't help your emotional incompetence. Part of my learning to stay calm and hodl on was panic selling my 2 year old 401k (moved from stocks to money market) at the bottom. I had just started working, I had a very small amount in it, and it was a valuable lesson I had to learn the hard way. Sure would have sucked to have put that off for 40 years instead.
Well the individual in question was old enough to have had been invested in some stock during both. He was just in a conservative portfolio in his mid-50s (so he lost out on a ton of growth over 30 years). When I talked to my dad (same rough age) about investing he definitely knew the lesson of not pulling out in a downturn.
But overall I think you’re right about most people. I had also got my first adult job just before the 2008 crash and I was in a position where I had put a hell of a lot of my pay into my investment fund. (I was in the military so I didn’t have a lot of extra expenses for a few years.) It sucked watching the numbers go down but it wasn’t like pulling out a few grand ~40 years before I hit retirement was going to make sense. And I had read enough about buying and holding to not be tempted.
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