Nearly a month has passed when the coronavirus outbreak really began to take a negative toll on financial markets, and it hard and fast.

There aren’t many investors who haven’t felt the impact of the market crashing in March. The average drop across the board was around 30% but many companies saw their value decrease by 60-80%. The ramifications from a fall like this can be life-changing for people that didn’t have a financial plan. 

No matter how large or small the losses in your retirement accounts have been over the past month, there’s no reason to dwell on the balance that remains. Hopefully you have time to be patient while the markets recover. What you can be doing is working with your financial advisor to find out what opportunities exist during a time like this. Maybe it’s a perfect time to reposition your 401k and take advantage of equities that might bounce back when the market recovers.

But what we want to focus on during this episode of Money Wisdom is what lessons will you learn when this has all passed? You might not have stopped to process what we’re seeing and where you financial planning could have been improved, but we’re going to help you with that today. 

Joel will lay out a few things you should be thinking about when the dust settles so that you are in a stronger position the next time the market goes south. And we all know it’s only a matter of time before this happens again so be prepared. Two major areas of focus will be risk tolerance and how much information you’re consuming, which we’ll discuss in detail during the show. 

We hope everyone is staying healthy and keeping a good attitude. Our offices have been working virtually and Joel will talk a little about the adjustments we’ve had to make during this pandemic on this episode. Plus, we’ll share a great tweet that takes a light-hearted look at what we’re dealing with.

Thanks for listening to this episode. We’ll be back again next week for another show.

[0:25] – How is Joel adjusting to life working from home?

[3:05] – Why we feel confident our small business we’ll make it through this shutdown. 

[5:54] – Tweet of the Week

[7:14] – Once we get on the other side of this, what are some of the things we should learn from this. That’s our focus today.

[7:40] – What should we be prepared for next time that we weren’t this time?

[9:36] – Next time we’ll know we had too much risk in our portfolio.  

[15:28] – Should you be making changes to your 401k right now and repositioning yourself?  

[17:07] – Maybe we should dial back the amount of news and information we’re taking in everyday. 

[20:04] – Now that we’re talking about planning, what exactly does a plan consist of?