Welcome to the early retirement show. If you are a long time listener, thank you. And if you are new to the show, as a reminder, this show is dedicated to helping you retire early, otherwise known as the show dedicated to helping you understand what you have to do to be in a position where you are financially free, where work is now optional. So whether you are a few years out from retirement and you just want to know everything to prepare

for that big date or you're new in your journey and you want to get a head start on maximizing

what you've worked so hard for throughout your life, this is the show for you.

So we discuss everything from investments to

taxes to insurance and everything that comes in between. So without further ado, let's go ahead

and hop into today's episode. Today's episode is an important one, which is all about how to

react to bear markets. When markets are doing things that are not fun and

you're seeing your accounts go down, you go, what do I do? Do I invest more to take advantage of this?

Do I sell? Am I getting it at the right time? Do I even try to time it? Is it worth it? How does it

impact my goals? All of this is what we're going to be covering in today's episode.

So as a reminder, you can always submit your question if you have a specific question that you

want me to answer on my website, early retirement podcast.com. And you can find all of this that

we talk about today and more on my YouTube channel in the description below. So let's hop right in.

So what I want to start with is at the worst point of the sell-off this year, the S&P 500,

the 500 largest companies in the US, it was down a little more than 13%, which is certainly

not fun for anyone.

There's no one that sees that and goes, yes, that's what I want

to happen in my portfolio. No, but that is just how investing works, but what we really want to

understand is how does that impact our goals? Now, we often get, you know, sidetracked by seeing the

portfolio. And if you have $100,000 and now it's worth $87,000,

you go, hey, that's not fun. That's not the experience I was looking for. Well, what we want to

understand is how does the market work so that when these things happen, we don't have to stress.

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