I Didn’t Buy Low

Should I have?

Photo credit: Jeremy Thompson, CC BY 2.0.

If you were on Twitter on Tuesday night, you might remember this tweet:

I sat there on my second-cheapest Ikea sofa and I thought “I need to invest in my Roth IRA right now. I know the markets are going to rebound, that’s how this works. I expected this would happen and I even made myself a to-do to watch the markets on November 8–9 and buy when things got low.”

And I didn’t do it.

Because I felt bad. I didn’t like the idea of profiting off this kind of event. I hadn’t put together that when the markets drop so quickly that they trip the circuit breaker, a lot of people are feeling really anxious and uncertain about something.

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I had my own anxiety and uncertainty, and doubled up on this was my weird anti-Rhett-Butler sentiment of “I cannot use this moment towards my own gain,” which makes no sense because buying into the stock market at a time in which it is plummeting is a good thing. Having faith in in the market when it is low is a good thing. It will benefit me and it will benefit the entire market, right? This is what I am supposed to be doing.

But I didn’t do it because I felt ashamed of myself.

Should I have? Did you?


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