June 2007...if only I had 20/20 hindsight

I keep a pretty good eye on my retirement investments. The pot is split up into five different holdings. One of them is an annuity that contains the money I received from my pension when I left MDU. That's probably the most conservative of my investments. I have an other holding which is composed of national and international stocks. It is probably the most diversifed.

Then I have small cap, mid cap and aggressive growth mutual funds. Frankly all three of these funds are underperformers, but I don't have a lot of money in them so I tend to ignore them rather than shift my money into something else. They contain my IRA accounts from when I first got married. My buddy at Smith Barney talked me into them, but he has since left and moved to the Twin Cities.

Since June of 2007, my combined investments in all five holdings have lost a combined 44 percent of their value. This is inspite of me continuing to invest 20 percent of my total compensation on new investments every month. If 44 percent sounds like a lot of money, it is...because I have been investing money in my retirement since my mid-20s. We bought our house when I was 26 so everything I had up to that time went into our down payment. Everything since then has gone toward retirement...except for a few trips to Alaska and Hawaii, along with college for the boys.

When I was in my 20s, I heard an investment counselor say that there are two ways to make a lot of money. One way is to start with a lot of money. The other way is to start with a lot of time. I had the time, not the money, so I started early.

However, the past 16 or 17 months have not been kind.

There is a bright side to this, but the glimmer is barely a sparkle at the moment. The bright side is that I continue to buy up a lot of low cost investments. You remember the adage, buy low and sell high?

Well, it would be nice if by the time I'm thinking about retirement -- which lately is every winter I live in North Dakota -- the price of what I'm buying would double or triple.

But really I wish that I would have had the foresight to take my money out of the stock market and to have put it into CDs, say about June of 2007. Then when the market starts to grow, I wouldn't have to dig myself out of such a hole.

This happened to my investments one other time -- it was called September 11, 2001. After the terrorists flew our jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a deserted field in Pennsylvania, my investments tanked. But they had regained their previous value in about two years time and kept growing...until July 2007.

At first the slide was barely perceptible, but in the last couple of months the spiral has been obvious. I don't quite feel like jumping off a tall building or a bridge like the folks did in 1929, but I do feel a lot poorer.

I know things could be worse. After all, I still have a job and my job pays me the same month after month, even if the economy is tanking. But still I'm a bit perplexed. There's been a lot of fingerpointing going on about whose fault it is that the economy is in the doldrums...but does anybody really know who or what is at fault? Because if we won't don't know what the problem is, can we really fix it?

Seems to me the government just keeps throwing money at the problem, but I don't think anyone truly understands what the problem is or what the solution is. Because of this, I have more confidence that we are heading toward a Depression rather than a Recession. Luckily, I don't have any debt and don't anticipate taking any on...however, it would be nice to have a bigger nest egg sitting in the bank.