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.