Painful 2 days (April 3/4, 2025)

**EasyMoney00** · 2025-04-04T17:34:07-05:00

Yeah the ads are a disaster. Download the browser Brave. It blocks all that crap. Also blocks all YouTube ads. I was using this site on Chrome and it's a dumpster fire. Brave is where it's at, for blocking this sort of nonsense.

The early retirement forum also had a lot of ads. Not anymore!

**kork13** · 2025-04-04T18:17:32-05:00

Originally posted by EasyMoney00 View Post

Yeah the ads are a disaster. Download the browser Brave. It blocks all that crap. Also blocks all YouTube ads. I was using this site on Chrome and it's a dumpster fire. Brave is where it's at, for blocking this sort of nonsense.

The early retirement forum also had a lot of ads. Not anymore!

Agreed, I love using Brave. I never even see the ads, and supposedly it blocks more of the tracking cookies & such. but it otherwise functions just as well as Chrome.

On topic .... We're definitely in rough territory now. S&P500 back to levels from over a year ago. I have ~$15k of dry powder in my brokerage that I could pull the trigger on deploying for new purchases ... But I'll have to see what makes the most sense. Still very busy, so playing the stock market may not be high enough priority .... I've got my weekly auto-purchases that will execute on Monday, so I'll at least capture some of this precipitous drop.

**ua_guy** · 2025-04-04T20:29:15-05:00

Some of you recall I pulled out of stocks a few weeks ago. I was chastised by people saying I shouldn't panic, and they know of so many people who did the same in 2008 and missed out on some spectacular growth. I've also read a number of articles which encourage people to just pull back on spending first, don't do anything regrettable, don't bail and lock in losses. "This is a normal market fluctuation" so many sources said, the stock market does this throughout history! Yes, if we weren't living in a completely insane country right now, with a side of crazy sauce.

"You can't time the market." Actually, nobody can consistently time the market, but people are actually right about their convictions sometimes. It's easy to see truly bad policy coming, improper actions, and where this is all headed, and adjust our allocations accordingly. I won't stay in boring investments forever. And I won't be able to time the exact return of the market. But I can sense when we're stable again with economic policy that fosters growth, and political policy that isn't...insane. Once "whatever this is" goes away, it will be time to put my money back in.

There's a lot of "oh, ****!" going on with older people I know. They don't have the kind of timelines to wait out a market recovery that I do. They're living on their retirement, and a bunch of it just evaporated. Literally, overnight. Will it bounce back? I guess they'll find out, but I don't think it will, for a while. They said I was reacting too extremely. ...Or, did I see something bad coming, and get out of the way? Deep in my gut, "all of this" is wrong. So wrong. Time will tell, but, I'm sleeping at night earning a paltry ~4.3% and knowing I didn't just lose another 6% overnight on top of what's already been lost in 2025, most of which I sidestepped before things started descending quickly.

This isn't a correction. It isn't just time for the market to come down. It's reacting to really, really bad policy. And what scares me the most is from here, it will start reacting to economic indicators as we ride this little experiment down.

I am absolutely buying the dip through normal retirement contributions through my paychecks. I still have money invested in large cap, small cap, foreign. But the rest? It's out. What I contribute now, and what's left can go down, it can go up, it can take 10 years to be worth something, and that's fine. It's OK to go to Vegas and not gamble the whole house...

**kork13** · 2025-04-04T20:45:21-05:00

I can somewhat echo your sentiment ... I'm retrospectively grateful that, in December, I invested the proceeds from selling our previous home, plus about $150k from our brokerage, into a series of real estate LLC development deals. I got another update last week, and they're going very well, especially as weather is improving from the winter. Those $500k investments are definitely going to serve as an effective hedge against market instability.

I'm not personally super concerned about structural resilience of the markets, but I think we can confidently say that it'll be painful for a while until things level out into some form of stability.

**EasyMoney00** · 2025-04-05T06:28:01-05:00

I don't really understand tariffs. Someone made an apology that I guess makes sense, simplified of course. You have a friend and you take e turns going to each other's house for dinner. When you go, you pay $20. When they come over, it's free. One day, when the friend comes over, you ask them to start paying $20. They're in shock and all hell breaks loose.

I know people say this will make the "country" rich. Who is the "country?". Me, you? I'm assuming prices of everything will go up. We don't produce a whole lot ourselves. It's very confusing. I guess the "country" will get rich, and the people will get poor? Or, will everything eventually flatten out? Not sure, and no one else is.

**ua_guy** · 2025-04-05T07:06:11-05:00

Originally posted by EasyMoney00 View Post

I don't really understand tariffs. Someone made an apology that I guess makes sense, simplified of course. You have a friend and you take e turns going to each other's house for dinner. When you go, you pay $20. When they come over, it's free. One day, when the friend comes over, you ask them to start paying $20. They're in shock and all hell breaks loose.

I know people say this will make the "country" rich. Who is the "country?". Me, you? I'm assuming prices of everything will go up. We don't produce a whole lot ourselves. It's very confusing. I guess the "country" will get rich, and the people will get poor? Or, will everything eventually flatten out? Not sure, and no one else is.

Tariffs are easily understood. They are a tax imposed by the government on goods purchased by you and me to shape our behavior and steer economic activity. The revenue collected from tariffs go to the government imposing them.

It really is that simple despite what you may have heard.

A lot of people in the US are learning about tariffs for the first time this year.

**disneysteve** · 2025-04-05T09:08:40-05:00

Originally posted by EasyMoney00 View Post

I don't really understand tariffs. Someone made an apology that I guess makes sense, simplified of course. You have a friend and you take e turns going to each other's house for dinner. When you go, you pay $20. When they come over, it's free. One day, when the friend comes over, you ask them to start paying $20. They're in shock and all hell breaks loose.

I know people say this will make the "country" rich. Who is the "country?". Me, you? I'm assuming prices of everything will go up. We don't produce a whole lot ourselves. It's very confusing. I guess the "country" will get rich, and the people will get poor? Or, will everything eventually flatten out? Not sure, and no one else is.

Here's the problem, and I'll apologize if anyone reads this as being a political comment because it really isn't intended as one.

Tariffs have always been used as an ECONOMIC tool. The problem we are seeing right now is that tariffs are being used as a POLITICAL tool which is something entirely different. Typically, tariffs are levied on PRODUCTS. Now they are being leveled on COUNTRIES.

Example: Let's say the US realizes that cars from Japan and Korea are dominating the US market. They lobby Congress to do something and Congress (not the President who doesn't actually have the power to enact tariffs) decides to levy a tariff on Japanese and Korean cars. That makes those cars less attractive to US buyers in hopes of spurring more people to buy cars from American companies. Congress doesn't say that everything coming from those countries will be taxed, though. They only levy tariffs on a case by case basis after considering all of the factors involved and consulting with various economic advisors.

That isn't at all what has happened this past week.

**ua_guy** · 2025-04-05T09:33:23-05:00

I think it's also important to point out a line I've heard over and over the past few weeks, "It's time for other countries to stop taking advantage and treating the US unfairly with their tariffs!" But that isn't what's happening in most cases. This is designed to manufacture a victimhood which doesn't really exist.

As DS pointed out, tariffs are typically on specific goods, or specific volumes of goods. Tariffs are generally not placed on Nations or People. Tariffs on specific US goods by other countries help them balance their economies and it helps us balance our economy.

**Fishindude77** · 2025-04-05T13:36:44-05:00

[QUOTE=ua_guy;n751986Tariffs are generally not placed on Nations or People. [/QUOTE]

They aren't in this case either.
They are on goods manufactured in certain countries which are shipped into the U.S.

Put whatever spin on it you want, but this is reality.

**ua_guy** · 2025-04-05T13:47:02-05:00

Originally posted by Fishindude77 View Post

They aren't in this case either.
They are on goods manufactured in certain countries which are shipped into the U.S.

Put whatever spin on it you want, but this is reality.

Yes, the latest are on all goods coming from listed nations. That is reality.

Painful 2 days (April 3/4, 2025)