Mark Pride

Ignorance is bliss
Call me crazy, but I refuse to peek at my investment returns

I am either too stupid or too smart to fear the collapse of my retirement plan. I am also one of those people who haven't dared to peek at the damage. And maybe I am a victim of faith, believing too much in axioms that served my wife and me well for all my years in the stock market. I say maybe.

Monique and I both retired in June. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average was still in five figures, and my 401(k) and our IRAs provided a good backup to our pensions. I planned to continue writing to augment our income.

I also figured modest withdrawals from our retirement accounts would allow me to postpone taking Social Security for as long as possible. I'm 62, and the longer I wait, the bigger the monthly checks will be.

It was a good plan, but events have battered it. How much I don't know, but I'm guessing the value of our retirement accounts has shrunk between 30 and 40 percent.

A friend who retired a few years ago had a similar plan. He and his wife began withdrawing from their retirement accounts in 2005. About a year ago, he said how incredible it was for a middle-class kid like him to have built up such a large fund. And even though he was now taking out a few thousand dollars a year, the fund was still growing. "You can't kill the thing!" he said.

We contributed to our accounts for more than 20 years, always putting our money into a variety of mutual funds running the gamut between aggressive and safe. With few exceptions, they went up, up, up. This was true even after I turned 60 and we moved almost all the money into a modest mutual fund geared to soon-to-be retirees.

When stocks occasionally swooned over the years, we followed a cardinal rule: Don't try to time the market. In other words, don't sell, let it ride. When the market is down, you'll be paying less to add to your account; when the market rebounds, your account will grow even faster. Be patient, don't be greedy, what goes down must go up.

Several months into the meltdown of 2008, I see little choice but to continue to live by these rules. This may be totally irrational. After all, we children of the '50s and '60s never thought the Cold War would end, and then, suddenly, it did. Certainly I knew in mid-summer that stocks would continue to drop, but I hung in there.

I've thought a lot about the psychology of this course of action. It would be nice to believe that it is wisdom, but it is not. More likely it is the inertia that comes with growing older. I am slower to act and stuck with my beliefs.

And isn't it a bit odd, or even perverse, to seek comfort in ignorance? During the two months before we retired, I checked the bottom line in our retirement accounts at least weekly and sometimes daily. On my home computer, I dutifully recorded these sums in a folder titled "finances retire." It was so reassuring. When Monique asked me whether we could safely retire, my answer was always a resounding "Yes, we can."

I haven't opened that folder since June. It has been two months since I last looked up our fund totals online. When our quarterly IRA statements arrived from Fidelity in September, I didn't even open them.

Nor do I spend much time trying to figure out what caused the collapse of the markets and whether the proposed remedies will work. Economics is not my strength, and the politics of economics does not interest me. Main Street vs. Wall Street oversimplifies the case. I have only knee-jerk opinions about who deserves to be bailed out and who doesn't. I don't see what good it would do me to know why one financial giant should be saved while another is left to fall. Life is short, and I'd rather read the sports page or a good book.

As a baby boomer, I am a child of children of the Depression. I understand the mentality this created in my parents and how their fiscal habits influenced me. I have read enough history to know how devastating the Great Depression was to the country.

I do not think we are entering a new depression, but who am I to say? I do know that I am lucky. My naïvely suppressed distress is another person's lost job or skipped mortgage payment.

But if we are in a depression, there isn't a lot I can do about it other than try to help out those in need. If we aren't in a depression, maybe things, including our retirement accounts, will bounce back.