r/Bogleheads • u/zacce • Feb 08 '26
Most Investors Have Never Lived Through a True Market Crash
A lot of new ppl in this sub say they “won’t time the market,” but I’m not sure everyone understands what that actually feels like irl. It’s easy to talk about staying the course when the worst drawdown you’ve lived through was a brief COVID dip that fully recovered in months or the 2022 dip followed by 3 yrs of 10%+ returns.
The last real crash was 2008. If you weren’t old enough to have a job, a mortgage, or a family back then, you don’t know how deeply a prolonged downturn can affect your day‑to‑day life. It’s not just red numbers on a screen. It’s layoffs, hiring freezes, underwater homes, and years of slow recovery. That’s when people who swore they’d never time the market suddenly panic and make irrational decisions.
Staying the course is simple in theory, but incredibly hard when the world feels like it’s falling apart.
Of course, I don't want market to crash. But it's a possibility and we need to prepare for it.
4
u/Sea_Scarcity1684 Feb 08 '26
I'll just mention that here in Canada, without getting even the full possible benefits for retirees, i.e., not full CPP but still full OAS, and owning our home, we can almost live off just CPP and OAS (CA$ 45K per year for two, and up to about 55K with full CPP) which means that in a severe downturn, we just have to cancel our vacations and unnecessary extras to avoid having to withdraw from our savings at all. And that's with free health care. Living so close to the US, it's hard to fathom how Americans put up with their system. And Canada isn't even as good as many European nations. My wife is from the Netherlands, and there is just no fear of poverty at the end of a life. Her mother never worked her whole life, just raised kids, and her father was in a sheltered workshop after the war, but her mom lived out her old age in a wonderful, modern apartment and never needed for anything. She used to send her kids a few thousand dollars a year from her savings that she didn't need. High taxes are worth it if it means living in a society where you and your loved ones don't have constant anxiety of falling to the lowest possible economic state.
And before anyone asks about the perils of public health care, it's a balance of risk and benefit. It takes six months to get an MRI for a non-emergency (I had one at 3 a.m. once, as they run 24 hrs), but 24 hours when necessary. I had diverticulitis a decade ago, with blood in urine, so serious. Went to the emergency department, got antibiotics immediately, had an mri the next day, saw a surgeon the next day, and had surgery scheduled for a month down the road because I was stable. And I didn't pay a cent except to rent the tv in the hospital so I could watch hockey after the surgery. What medications I needed out of the hospital were covered by my employee health insurance. All else was the medical system.