A Financial Literacy Blog for All
The Debt Snowball repayment method will always cost you the same or more interest than the Debt Avalanche method if you have more than one debt and they have different interest rates. The debt repayment calculator in this post will tell you how much extra …
A reverse mortgage can be a valuable financial management tool for seniors and their families. However, if misunderstood or misused, borrowers and their heirs can encounter any one of a number of different challenges. In this post, I’ll define “reverse mortgage” and provide illustrations of …
Choosing the right type of life insurance policy and its death benefit can be confusing. Not too long ago, I published a guest post from Baruch Silverman of The Smart Investor on the different types of life insurance. In this post, you’ll learn how to buy life insurance. Specifically, I’ll help you evaluate which, if any, of those types of policies fit your situation and how to select your death benefit.
The first thing you want to consider is why you are buying life insurance. Three common purposes are:
If your primary purpose for purchasing life insurance is the death benefit, you’ll want to focus on term and whole life insurance.
Some people use life insurance similar to other financial securities (such as stocks and bonds). Variable life and universal life have investment components to them. In simplified terms, the total amount you pay as premium for these types of life insurance is split between the amount to cover the cost of a whole life policy and the excess which can be invested. As such, the life insurer doesn’t invest the portion of the premium related to the death benefit. Further, the life insurer reduces the excess to cover its expenses, a risk charge, and its profit margin before investing it.
Variable and universal life policies include the cost of whole life insurance. Thus, only people who want the coverage provided by whole life insurance might consider using life insurance as part of their investment portfolio. Even then, the returns may not be as high as other investment vehicles with similar risk because of the additional costs charged by the life insurer.
Sheltering gifts to your heirs from income taxes only applies to the very wealthy (those who have more than $11 million in assets). I’m assuming that the vast majority of my readers aren’t in this situation, so won’t address it here.
All types of life insurance can have an indirect impact on your investment portfolio. If you purchase life insurance in an amount that will cover your dependents’ basic living expenses, it allows you the option to invest your portfolio in riskier assets in anticipation of getting higher returns. That is, the death benefit itself could be considered a low-risk investment. It reduces your overall portfolio risk when added to the other assets you own.
If you are more concerned about outliving your savings, annuities can protect against the opposite risk from life insurance. Certain types of annuities provide a stream of income from a stated start date until you die. If you are concerned about this risk, this post about annuities might help.
Some people don’t need the death benefit from life insurance. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to buy life insurance as an investment security either. In the last section of this post, I provide the details of estimating your target death benefit. People whose target death benefit is zero are those who don’t need life insurance. Briefly, characteristics of people who have a target death benefit of zero are:
If you aren’t sure if you meet these criteria, keep reading!
If you’ve decided that you are buying life insurance for the death benefit, you need to decide whether term life or whole life insurance will better meet your needs. The primary differences between the two options are the length of time you need the insurance and the cost.
If you think you will need life insurance for a limited period of time, term life insurance is likely better for you. For example, you might have dependents who aren’t currently able to cover their living expenses and the cost of any debt. In that case, you might want to buy life insurance that will pay off your debts and support your dependents until they are independent. If your needs change, many insurers will let you convert a term life insurance policy to a whole life policy without having to provide medical information or have a physical, one or both of which are often pre-requisites for purchasing whole life insurance.
Term life premiums are constant over the term of any policy you purchase. However, if you buy a policy when you are older, the premium will be higher than if you buy the same policy when you are younger.
If you think you will need life insurance for your entire life, whole life insurance is likely better for you. For example, if you have a spouse or disabled children who will never be able to support themselves, whole life insurance could supplement your savings to help make sure they are able to live more comfortably, regardless of when you die.
In addition to the death benefit, whole life insurance gives you the option to borrow money. As you pay premium, life insurers designate a portion of your premium as the cash value. The cash value is always owned by the insurance company, but you are able to borrow an amount up to the cash value at any time without prior approval, any collateral or impact on your credit score. The interest rates on cash-value loans are less than many other sources, particularly credit cards. If you die before the loan is re-paid, the amount of the loan will be deducted from your death benefit.
Whole life insurance is much more expensive than term life when you are young, but eventually becomes less expensive.
The graph below provides some initial insights into the difference in cost between whole life and term life, as it shows the probability that you will die at each age. I calculated the values based on 2016 data from the Social Security web site.
Not surprisingly, the probability you will die increases at each age. If you buy whole life insurance, it will cover the entire portion of the graph from your current age until you die. As such, there is a 100% probability that the life insurer will pay your death benefit (assuming you continue to pay your premiums). It is just a question of when.
If you buy a 20-year term policy and you are 30 years old, only the deaths that occur in the portion of the graph below highlighted in green would be covered. That is, you will receive the death benefit if you die between ages 30 and 50 and will get nothing if you die after age 50.
The probability you will die is much smaller in this narrow window than the 100% probability you will die at some point.
There are many factors that determine the premium for term life and whole life insurance policies, but the most important component relates to the death benefit. Actuaries (who help price life insurance) usually base the portion of premium related to the death benefit as the present value of the death benefit expected to be paid, on average, in each year.
The chart below shows the present value for $1 of death benefit for several sample policies. For illustration only, I have calculated the present values using a 3% interest rate and the probabilities of dying from the charts above.
The easiest way to see the impact of the increasing probability of dying is to look at the present value of the death benefit for a 1-Year Term Life policy. You can see it increases from almost zero (actually $0.0015 per dollar of death benefit) at age 25 to $0.042 per dollar of death benefit at age 70 which corresponds exactly to the increase in the probability of dying at each age.
There are also increases in the present value of the death benefit for the Whole Life and 20-Year Term Life policies as the age you first start buying the policy increases.
You can also see that the present value of the death benefit at age 25 for the Whole Life policy is much, much larger than the present value for either of the two term life policies. This relationship corresponds to the graphs above which compared the probability of dying in a 20-year period as compared to the 100% probability that you will die at some point.
The difference between the Whole Life and 20-Year Term Life policies is fairly small at age 70, because there is a high probability that you will die between age 70 and 90 – the period covered by the 20-Year Term Life policy. In fact, almost 80% of people age 70 will die during the 20-Year Term Life policy period. As such, the present value of the death benefit for a 20-Year Term Life policy at age 70 is very roughly 80% of the present value of the death benefit for a Whole Life policy.
The insurance company collects premium over the full life of the insurance policy to cover the present value of the death benefit. That is, you don’t pay all of your premium to the insurance company in one lump sum, but rather on an annual or monthly basis.
Unless you die during the policy term of the Term Life policy, you will pay premium for more years under a Whole Life policy than under a Term Life policy. Therefore, the differences you see above are larger than the differences in premium payments.
The chart below shows the annualized amount of the loss costs. That is, I divided the present values of the death benefits by the average number of years an insured is expected to pay their premium. For example, for the 20-Year Term Life policy, the denominator was calculated as the sum of the probabilities that the insured would be alive in each of the 20 years and therefore able to pay his or her premium.
Although these relationships are not precise, they are roughly representative of the differences in annual premium you might pay for the different types of policies at different ages. At age 25, the annual cost of a Whole Life policy in this illustration is roughly three times the cost of either of the Term Life policies. By age 70, the annual cost of a Whole Life policy is less than the cost of 20-Year Term Life policy because, while the present value of the death benefit isn’t all that different between the two policies, people who buy Whole Life policies make more premium payments, on average.
It is important to understand that I prepared these examples as illustrations to help you understand the differences between Whole Life and Term Life insurance premiums. In practice, life insurers use different tables showing the probability of dying and different interest rates than I used for illustration, as well as using more sophisticated methods for calculating the present value of the death benefit and including provisions for expenses, risk and profit.
In practice, I’ve seen estimates that Whole Life annual premiums are anywhere from three to fifteen times more than Term Life premium at young ages. As you are looking at your options, you’ll want to get several premium quotes, as they vary widely depending on your age, location, gender, health and many other factors.
As with any financial decision, there are two conflicting factors that will influence the amount of the death benefit you buy on a life insurance policy – your budget and your financial needs. In the section, I will talk about how to estimate the best (i.e., target) death benefit for your situation. Once you’ve selected an amount, you can get quotes from several insurers to see whether the premium for that death benefit will fit in your budget or whether you will need to find the best balance between premium affordability and death benefit for you.
Not surprisingly, there are some rules of thumb for guiding your selection of a death benefit. Some of the ones I’ve heard are:
Rules of thumb like these can provide some insights, but they, by definition, can’t take into account your personal circumstances.
A better approach for selecting a death benefit is to analyze your own finances and goals for buying life insurance. I suggest calculating your target death benefit as the total of the amounts needed to meet your goals, considering the following components.
If you have debt, you’ll want to consider whether your dependents will be able to continue to make the payments on the debt out of their own income. For example, if your spouse’s earned income is high enough to continue to make your mortgage payments, along with all of the other expenses he or she will need to cover if you die, then you might not need to include the remaining principal on your mortgage as a component of your target death benefit. On the other hand, if you are concerned about your dependents’ ability to continue payments on any debt, you’ll want to include the outstanding principal on those debts as a component of your target death benefit. I’ll define this amount as “Debt Principal to be Pre-Paid.”
When you die, your dependents will incur some one-time expenses. These expenses can include your funeral or memorial costs and professional expenses to settle your estate. I’ll call the amount of these expenses, “Final Expenses.”
The next component of your target death benefit calculation is the amount you need to cover your dependents’ future living expenses.
Start with your household’s total expenses from your budget. This amount will include monthly expenses for everyone in your household, the amounts you are setting aside each month for your designated savings and any amounts you are setting aside for your spouse’s retirement. To be clear, it will exclude any amounts you are saving for your own retirement.
You can eliminate any monthly expenses or amounts for designated savings for things that are only for your benefit. For example, if you spend enough money on clothes for your job to include it in your budget, you can eliminate those expenses. Similarly, you can also eliminate any expenses related to a vehicle that only you drive or designated savings to replace it.
You then need to calculate your dependents’ monthly earned income. This amount may be calculated in two parts – current monthly earned income and future monthly earned income. For example, your spouse may currently work part time as you are relying primarily on your income for support. If you die, your spouse may be able to work full time to increase his or her earned income. Alternately, your spouse may need some education (discussed below) to get the qualifications needed for his or her desired profession.
Next, you’ll need to calculate the amount of any expenses that your household will have because of any changes in your spouse’s availability to provide household services. For example, your spouse may work part-time while your children are in school and provide childcare after school. If your spouse starts working full time after your death, you will need to add after-school care expenses to your budget.
The last factor that goes into this calculation is the length of time until you think your dependents will become self-sufficient. For children, you might assume that they will become independent after they turn 18 or graduate from college. The ability of your spouse to become self-sufficient will be a function of his or her skills, education and/or need for more education and household responsibilities (e.g., childcare or elder care).
I suggest splitting the calculation of this component of your death benefit into three time periods – short-term, medium-term and long-term. For each time period, you’ll calculate your net living expenses as expenses minus income. For any periods for which income is more than expenses, set the difference to zero.
You also need to estimate how many months each of these three time periods will last.
Your Net Future Living Expense amount for each time period is calculated as the number of months it will last multiplied by monthly net living expense amount. You can then calculate your total Net Future Living Expenses as the sum of the three amounts you calculated for the three time periods.
For those of you who like to see formulas instead of words, you will calculate:
You could refine this amount by considering inflation and investment returns. Depending on your investment strategy and the time until the funds are used, your investment returns, on average, can be more than inflation. As a conservative first approximation, I suggest using the total without adjustment for inflation and investment returns.
There are two types of education expenses that you might want to include in your target death benefit calculation:
You can now calculate your target death benefit as follows:
Debt Principal to be Pre-Paid
Plus Final Expenses
Plus Net Future Living Expenses
Minus Savings in excess of your real estate and personal property assets, emergency fund, designated savings and spouse’s retirement savings
Plus Education Expenses
Minus Amounts in existing college funds
Minus Any amounts included in your Net Future Living Expenses designated for college
If you are single with no debt, this amount could be zero indicating that you might not need to buy life insurance. If you are married with no children, don’t have a lot of debt and have a spouse who can increase income or decrease expenses to be self-sufficient fairly quickly, you may need only a small death benefit. At the other extreme, if you have several children and a spouse who won’t be able to be financially independent for many years or ever, your target death benefit could exceed $1 million. As you can see, the specifics of your financial situation are very important to setting a target death benefit and a rule of thumb may not work for you.
Creating your own financial plan can be a daunting task. If you aren’t sure where to get started or have a plan but want to improve it, a financial planner might be able to help. If you decide to go it alone, we’ve created Financial …
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Financial markets have been more turbulent in the past few weeks than has been seen in many years, probably more volatile than has happened since many of you started being financially aware. You may be wondering what actions you should take. With the sense of panic and urgency surrounding recent news, it often feels as if drastic action is necessary. If you have created financial plan, inaction may be the best strategy for you! If you don’t have a financial plan, you might start by downloading Financial IQ by Susie Q’s Personal Financial Planner.
As indicated elsewhere on this blog, I do not have any professional designations that qualify me to provide professional advice. In addition, my comments are provided as generalities and may not apply to your specific situation. Please read the rest of this post with these thoughts in mind.
I suspect that losing your job or losing business if you are self-employed is the biggest financial risk many of you face. Understanding your position within your company and how your company will be impacted by coronavirus, oil prices and other events will inform you as to the extent to which you face the risk of a lay-off or reduction in hours/salary.
If you think you might have a risk of a decrease in earned income, you’ll want to look into what options for income replacement are available to you, including state or federal unemployment programs, severance from your employers, among others. Another important step is to review your expenses so you know how you can reduce them to match your lowered income. In addition, you’ll want to evaluate how long you can live before exhausting your emergency savings, with or without drastic reductions in your expenses. You may even want to start cutting expenses before your income is lowered and put the extra amount in your emergency savings.
In the rest of this post, I’ll look at the various components of a financial plan and provide my thoughts on how they might be impacted by the recent news and resulting volatility in financial markets. For more tips on how to handle financial turmoil, check out these mistakes to avoid.
If you are unfortunate enough to get COVID-19 or are required to self-quarantine and can’t work from home, you may face a reduction in compensation. Your first line of defense is any sick time or paid time-off (PTO) provided by your employer. In most cases, your employer will cover 100% of your wages for up to the number of days, assuming you haven’t used them yet.
Once you have used all of your sick time/PTO, you may have coverage under short- or long-term disability insurance if provided by your employer or if you purchase it through your employer or on your own. Disability insurance generally pays between 2/3 and 100% of your wages while you are unable to work for certain causes, almost always including illness. It might be a good time to review your available sick time/PTO and disability insurance to understand what coverage you have.
Emergency savings is one of the most important components of a financial plan. There are two aspects to your emergency savings that you’ll want to consider. The first is whether you have enough in your emergency savings. The second is the risk that the value of the savings will go down due to financial market issues.
If you are laid off, have reduced hours or use up all, exhaust your sick time/PTO or get less than 100% of your wages replaced by disability insurance, you may have to tap into your emergency savings. The need to spend your emergency savings increases if you tend to spend most of your paycheck rather than divert a portion of it to savings.
I generally suggest one to six months of expenses as a target for the amount of emergency savings. In light of recent events and the increased risks lay-off and illness, I would focus on the higher end of that range or even longer. As you evaluate the likelihood you’ll be laid off, the chances you’ll be exposed to coronavirus and your propensity to get it, you’ll also want to consider whether you have enough in emergency savings to cover your expenses while your income is reduced or eliminated.
In certain situations, such as in response to the coronavirus, creditors will allow you to defer your payments. You will then have the option as to whether to defer them or make those payments from your emergency savings./a>
I’ve suggested that you keep at least one month of expenses in emergency savings in a checking or savings account at a bank or similar financial institution. The monetary value of your emergency savings is pretty much risk-free, at least in the US. The only way you would lose any of these savings is if the financial institution were to go bankrupt. In the US, deposits in financial institutions are insured, generally up to $250,000 per person per financial institution, by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). For more specifics, see the FDIC web site. Similar protections may be available in other countries.
I’ve also suggested that you keep another two to five months of expenses in emergency savings in something only slightly less accessible, such as a money market account. There is slightly more risk that the value of a money market account will go down than a checking or savings account, but it is generally considered to be very small. Money market accounts are also insured by the FDIC. For more specifics, see this article on Investopedia.
As such, the recent volatility in financial markets are unlikely to require you to take action related to your existing emergency savings and could act as an opportunity to re-evaluate whether you have enough set aside for emergencies.
Another component of a financial plan is short-term savings. Short-term savings is money you set aside for a specific purpose. One purpose for short-term savings is expenses that don’t get paid every month, such as property taxes, homeowners insurance or car maintenance and repairs. Another purpose for short-term savings is to cover the cost of larger purchases for which you might need to save for several years, such as a car or a down payment on a house.
Short-term savings are commonly held in money-market accounts, certificates of deposits (CDs) or very high quality, shorter term bonds, such as those issued by the US government. CDs and US government bonds held to maturity are generally considered to have very little risk. Their market values are unlikely to change much and the likelihood that the issuers will not re-pay the principal when due is small.
Thus, the recent volatility in financial markets is also unlikely to require you to take action related to your short-term savings.
Savings for retirement and other long-term goals are key components of a financial plan. If they are invested at all in any equity markets, your long-term savings have likely taken quite a beating. Rather than try to provide generic guidance on how to deal with the losses in your long-term savings, I’ll tell you how I’m thinking and what I’m doing about mine. By providing a concrete example, albeit one very different from most of your situations, my goal is to provide you with some valuable insights about the thought process.
As you may know, I’m retired and have just a little income from consulting. As such, my financial plan anticipates that I will live primarily off my investments and their returns. I have enough cash and bonds to cover my expenses for several years. As such, I’m not in a position that I absolutely have to liquidate any of my equity positions in less than three-to-four years.
For many of you, your most significant goal for long-term savings is likely retirement. As such, your time horizon for your long-term savings is longer than mine and you can withstand even more volatility. That is, you have a longer time for stock prices to recover to the recent highs and even higher. In the final section of this post, I’ll talk about how long it has taken equity markets to recover from past “crashes” to help you get more perspective on this issue.
My view is that, if I wait long enough, the overall stock market will recover. It always has in the past. If it doesn’t, I suspect something cataclysmic will have happened and I will be focused on more important issues such as food, water and heat, than my long-term savings. For now, though, my view is that my investments in broad-based index funds are going to recover from the recent price drops though it may take a while and be a tough period until then. As such, I am not taking any action with respect to those securities. Once the stock market seems to settle down a bit (and possibly not until it starts going up for a while), I might invest a bit more of my cash to take advantage of the lower prices.
I have a handful of investments in stocks and bonds of individual companies. These positions have required a bit more thought on my part. I already know the primary products and services of these companies and the key factors that drive profitability, as I identified these features before I purchased the stocks or bonds as part of my financial plan. I can now look at the forces driving the economic changes to evaluate how each of the companies might be impacted.
I own some bonds that mature in two to three years in a large company that provides cellular phone service. As discussed in my post on bonds, as long as you hold bonds to maturity, the only risk you face is that the issuer will default (not make interest payments or re-pay the principal). With the reduction in travel and group meetings, I see an increased demand for technological communication solutions, such as cell phones. While the stock price of this company has gone down, I don’t see that its chance of going bankrupt has been affected adversely, so don’t plan to sell the bonds.
One company whose stock I’ve owned for a very long time focuses on products used to test food safety. While the company’s stock price has dropped along with the broader market, I anticipate that people will have heightened awareness of all forms of ways of transmitting illness, including through food-borne bacteria and other pathogens. As such, I am not planning to sell this stock as the result of recent events.
I own stock in an airline that operates primarily within North America. This one is a bit trickier. It looks like travel of all types is going to be down for a while. I’m sure that US domestic airline travel will be significantly impacted, but suspect it will not be affected as much as international or cruise ship travel. The reduction in revenue might be slightly offset by the lower cost of fuel, but that is probably not a huge benefit in the long term.
I’ve owned this company for so long that I still have a large capital gain and would have to pay tax on it if I sold the stock. At this point, I don’t think there is a high probability that this airline will go bankrupt (though I’m not an expert and could be wrong). I expect the price to drop more than the overall market average in the coming months, but also expect that it will recover. As such, I don’t plan to sell this stock solely because of recent events. However, if this company had most of its revenue from operating cruise ships, was smaller, or had more foreign exposure, I would study its financials and business model in more detail to see if I thought it would be able to withstand the possibility of much lower demand for an extended period of time.
I have gone through similar thought processes for each of the companies in my portfolio to create my action plan. I will re-evaluate them as time passes and more information becomes available. If my advice isn’t enough, consider Warren Buffett’s evaluation of his individual stock positions, as described by Kat Rucker.
Although every market cycle is different, I thought it might be insightful to provide information about previous market crashes. For this discussion, I am defining a market crash as a decrease in the price of the S&P 500 by more than 20% from its then most recent peak. I have identified 11 crashes using this definition, including the current one, over the time period from 1927 to March 14, 2020.
As you’ll see in the graphs below, the market crash starting at the peak in August 1929 is much different from most of the others. It took until 1956 before the S&P 500 reached its pre-crash level! Over the almost three years until the S&P 500 reached its low and then again during the recovery period (from the low until it reached its previous high), there were several crashes. I have counted this long cycle as a single crash, though it could be separated into several.
The table below shows the dates of the highest price of the S&P 500 before each of the 11 crashes since 1927. It also shows the percentage decrease from the high to the low and the number of years from the high to the low.
|
Date of Market Peak |
Price Change | Years from High to Low |
|
9/17/29 |
-86% | 2.7 |
|
8/3/56 |
-21% |
1.2 |
| 12/13/61 | -28% |
0.5 |
| 2/10/66 | -22% |
0.7 |
|
12/2/68 |
-36% |
1.5 |
|
1/12/73 |
-48% | 1.7 |
|
12/1/80 |
-27% | 1.7 |
|
8/26/87 |
-34% |
0.3 |
| 3/27/00 | -49% |
2.5 |
| 10/10/07 | -57% |
1.4 |
| 2/20/20 | -27% |
0.1 |
While they don’t happen all that often, this table confirms that the S&P 500 has suffered significant decreases in the past. What seems a bit different about the current crash is the speed at which prices have dropped from the market high reached just a few weeks ago. In the past, the average time from the market peak to the market bottom has been 1.4 years, but the range has been from 0.3 years to 2.7 years. While the 27% decrease in the S&P 500 from its peak on February 20, 2020 until March 14, 2020 is large and troubling, the average price change of 10 preceding crashes is -41% (-36% if the 1929 crash is excluded). As such, it isn’t unprecedented.
This table shows how long it took after each of the first 10 crashes for the S&P 500 to return to its previous peak. It also shows the average annualized return from the lowest price until it returned to its previous peak.
|
Date of Market Peak |
Years from Low Back to Peak | Annualized Average Return During Recovery |
|
9/17/29 |
22.2 | 9.3% |
|
8/3/56 |
0.9 | 29.8% |
| 12/13/61 | 1.2 |
31.7% |
| 2/10/66 | 0.6 |
55.3% |
| 12/2/68 | 1.8 |
28.3% |
|
1/12/73 |
5.8 | 12.0% |
|
12/1/80 |
0.2 | 293.4% |
|
8/26/87 |
1.6 |
28.1% |
| 3/27/00 | 4.6 |
15.7% |
| 10/10/07 | 4.1 |
22.9% |
For example, it took 1.6 years after the market low price on December 4, 1987 (the low point of the cycle starting on August 26, 1987) for the S&P 500 to reach the same price it had on August 26, 1987. Over that 1.6-year period, the average annual return on an investment in the S&P 500 would have been 28%!
Because the values from the 1929 and 1980 cycles can distort the averages, I’ll look at the median values of these metrics. At the median, it took 1.7 years for the S&P 500 to reach its previous high with a median annualized average return of 28%. There are obviously wide ranges about these metrics, but, excluding the 1929 crash, the S&P 500 never took more than 6 years to recover from its low. This time frame is important as you are thinking about the length of time until you might need to use your long-term savings.
After hitting bottom, the S&P 500 always had an average annual return of 12% or more over the recovery period, a fair amount higher than the overall annual average return on the S&P 500. Anyone who sold a position in the S&P 500 at any of the low points missed the opportunity to earn these higher-than-average returns – a reminder to not panic.
The graph below shows the ratios of the price of the S&P 500 to the price at the peak (day 0) over the 30 years after each of the first 10 market peaks in the tables above.
The light blue line that stays at the bottom is the 1929 crash. As you can see, by 30 years later, the S&P 500 was only twice as high as it was at its pre-crash peak. For all of the other crashes, the S&P 500 was at least four times higher than at each pre-crash peak, even though in many cases there were subsequent crashes in the 30-year period.
To get a sense for how the current crash compares, the graph below shows the same information for only the first 100 days after each peak. The current crash is represented by the heavy red line.
As indicated above, one of the unique characteristics about the current crash is that it occurred so quickly after the peak. The graph shows that the bright red line is much lower than any of the other lines on day 17. However, if you look at the light blue line (after the peak on September 17, 1929) and the brown line (after the peak on August 26, 1987), you can see that there were similarly rapid price decreases as occurred in the current crash, but they started a bit longer after their respective peaks.
We can’t know the path that the stock market will take going forward in the current cycle. It could halt its downward trend in a few days to a week and return to set new highs later this year. On the other hand, if other events occur in the future (such as the weather conditions that led to the dust bowl in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s that exacerbated the banking issues that triggered the 1929 crash), it is possible stock prices could decline for many years and take a long time to recovery. Based on the patterns observed, this trend is less likely, but it is still a possibility.
As such, it is important as you consider your situation that you look at your investment horizon, your ability to live with further decreases in stock prices and your willingness to forego the opportunity to earn higher-than-average returns when the stock market returns to its pre-crash levels if you sell now, among other things.
My goal in writing this post was to provide you with insights on how to view the disruptions in the economy and financial markets in recent weeks and plan your responses to them. My primary messages are: