Over the last 25 years I have seen many, too many, retirement planning mistakes. One of the most serious retirement planning mistakes that you can make is to sell your portfolio at the bottom of a bear market. The problem becomes, when do you buy back in?
As we can see here from October of 07 to the bottom in 2009, the stock market, the S&P 500, went down 56%. For those who had sold at the bottom, they had to buy back in at a much higher price.
The last 14 years have been an incredible bull market for the S&P 500.
