REALITY CHECKS

Meltdown jolts consumers from financial fairyland

CHICAGO (AP) — The stock market bounced back, just as it has for nearly three decades. It just doesn’t feel that way.

Last year’s financial meltdown knocked the swagger out of Americans’ views toward investing. The baby boomers who forged the Reagan bull market; survived the 1987 crash; bought Amazon.com at $2 a share and sold at $100; brushed off the collapse of the dot-com bubble and kept plowing money into their 401(k)s are reassessing what they once believed.

It’s hard, after all, to keep the faith in buy-and-hold after the market crashed harder than at any time since the Great Depression. It’s hard to trust your financial adviser after Bernard Madoff stole billions from his clients. Most of all, it’s hard for a generation that equated personal finance with investing in stocks to accept that the rules have changed.

People are still investing. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up 58 percent since hitting a 12-year low on March 9. 401(k) participation rates have held steady.

But financial planners around the country say there is a sense that people are returning to basic principles that were shunted aside: Maximize your savings; limit your use of credit cards; keep a substantial emergency fund; know how much risk you can tolerate; diversify your investments; don’t try to short-cut your way to wealth.

“Before the market chaos, there was a very low savings rate, inappropriate use of credit cards, too much risk in investments, excessive spending on residences,” says Tom Warschauer, a finance professor at San Diego State University. “Virtually every type of financial decision was being made in a kind of fairyland atmosphere, thinking ‘This will lead me to be better off’ when in fact that was never the case.”

Warschauer, who also sees clients as a certified financial planner, predicts the new behavior could last for a decade. Other financial planners say people still believe in the market; they’re just more realistic.

“People were in shock for a while. Now they’re reassessing their situation and being very pragmatic, especially about their retirement,” says Mark Jamison, a vice president at financial services firm Charles Schwab Corp. “They are learning that if you’re willing to work a little more, spend a little less, take Social Security later, things can still work out all right.”

Still, the market turmoil has lengthened careers and delayed retirements.

David Sinclair, 62, of Rio Rancho, N.M., retired in 2007 from his job as budget officer for a federal agency. He was confident his savings of more than $500,000, bolstered by a government pension, would be enough to support him and wife, Debra. He had spent 20 years playing by the rules and carefully planning for retirement.

But then the value of his portfolio fell 33 percent, and he ended up back at work at his old desk.

“One of my goals when I retired was to do a lot of traveling,” he says. “With the way things were going, it became pretty apparent that I’d be lucky to take a trip every three years.”

The jolt to investors hurt so much because it hurt so many.

A generation ago, most people had no direct stake in the daily dealings on Wall Street. Fewer than 6 percent of households owned mutual funds in 1980. Four years later, that number had more than doubled, thanks to the birth of the modern-day 401(k) and an economic boom that followed the severe recession of 1981-82. It nearly doubled again, to more than 24 percent, in 1988. By the turn of the century about half of all households owned them.

Wall Street can thank the baby boomers for that. They bought the idea that stocks would always go up — or if they fell, that they would rebound quickly. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 23 percent on Black Monday in October 1987 — its largest one-day percentage drop. But it took just 15 months to make that up. And a decade later, the Dow had nearly quadrupled from there.

Boomers piled their money into the latest market fad — whether it was biotechnology stocks, the Internet or exchange-traded funds. They put the money for their children’s college education in 529 plans and saved for retirement by investing in 401(k)s and IRAs.

Then came the crash. The Standard & Poor’s 500 lost 55 percent of its value from October 2007 to last March. Even with the recent bounce back, it remains 32 percent below its peak.

And with three-plus months to go, it has been a lost decade. The S&P began 2000 at 1,469 and is now 27 percent lower. This decade trails only the 1930s as the worst in the modern investing era, and not by that much. Losses this decade have averaged 3.2 percent annually, compared with 5.3 percent a year in the ’30s.