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Her money comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody it's Jean Chatsky. Thanks so much for joining me today on her

money. What a year this month has been. Yeah, it feels like it's been a whole year in the span of a week. I mean really starting on March 9th, we watched as the Dow began a series of record setting point drops and on March 11th the World Health

Organization announced what many of us probably already knew in our guts that

COVID-19 was officially a pandemic. The market

volatility that we have seen the last few days has left many, many of us on edge

and understandably, according to a new survey

from our sponsor Fidelity,

70% of people are either somewhat concerned or very concerned about how the market is impacting

their retirement savings. But there is some good news and I definitely want to get to the good news even though emotions are running high right now

People seem to be staying focused on their long-term goals through March 15th, 96% of fidelity customers had not made changes to their

401k accounts since the beginning of the year. That is huge when you consider how many people have their

401k with fidelity. I think it's great because it can be so very tempting to try and protect your money during times of market downturn.

But what we know is that when we sell out near the bottom that is typically a mistake.

Staying the course and focusing on the long haul has historically been the way to

go. I also wanted to share a very interesting study with you about what happened

when people did cash out. Fidelity looked at people who moved completely out of stocks during the 2008 financial crisis and those people who stayed invested.

And what they found was that in 2008, the investors who elected to pull out of stocks but eventually got back into the market

they had an average account balance when they pulled out of stocks of $89,000. Now you fast forward to the

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