Are you ready to retire?

 I retired 25 years ago (Oct. 2025), and I've lived through a number of down turns in the stock market, which now is my income. Dot com bubble hit just as I was planning what I'd do with all that time. Remember that one? It was during the Clinton years, although he wasn't responsible for the bubble or the burst. I was just learning how to read the WSJ and follow the stocks! Checking daily could make one faint. For those of you about to retire, here's a reminder.

"The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble."

Repeat. Giving up all its gains during the bubble.

If you sold anything since April 2 and the tariff announcements because you were listening to the legacy media, aka the "sky is falling and it's Trump's fault" media, then you're just not ready to retire yet.