Wall Street Anxiety: 8 Tips to Manage Financial Stress

This particular financial consultant approves! Great Job, Therese!!!!!!
ESPECIALLY numbers 4 and 5.
DON'T stop contributing to your 401k or 403b
DON'T forget that the market tends to move in 10 year cycles (dot-coms? wasn't that just about 10 years ago...yes. yes it was.... On and off from Q1 of 1980-1982, December of 1969-Nov of 1970)
Invest with your head, not the headlines.
That may mean learning more, reading more, watching less MSNBC/CNN and doing the research yourself =)
REMEMBER that unless you are close to retirement, this is a 'paper loss'--meaning it is a loss on paper with money you don't need at this moment.
(And if you are investing with money you need at this moment, it's time to re-evaluate your finances...)
wishing you all my best
mel

Great advice. Goes along with the idea that even though we want to solve everything, and some of us are in the business, even of solving most things, we can't.

Accept adversity or be doomed, basically. The challenge is in the head, not the pocketbook.

Since financial irresponsibility tends to be a symptom of bipolar disorder, these tips are PRICELESS in terms of being proactive rather than reactive, another downfall many of us suffer. And a one who was forced to retire before I had planned to, I can speak first hand to the admonition of reevaluating one's financial plan periodically. Although I know cognitively that I am better off than many, living on a fixed retirement income is NO FUN!!Eveything goes up EXcEPT your stipend(s)It hasbeen EXTREMELY helpful to me to learn to put everything down on paper, tracking ALL expenditures, no exclusions. It really makes it easier to tell where your dollars have gone each month. which makes it easier (for ME, anyway to help curb unnecessary spending the following month. If I can see, for example, that my long distance bill was higher, I might think twice before picking up the phone whenever I feel like "reaching out to touch someone" and use emailcommunications more frequently instead. Th same is true of unplanned late fees for overdue library books or video rentals. I don't have to completely deny myself, but I AM more likely to meet those deadlines if I can see in black and white what other little luxuries those accrued fees cost me the previous months in terms of discretionary spending. (No meals out, for example) Thanks for addressing this, Therese. It's made me more understanding of the terrible tolls the crash of the twenties took on people's lives.(Both of my grandparents lost family farms back then, and even though farming wasn't their occupation, the loss changed the remainder of their livesas well as those of their descendants. One of them actually had a family cemetary on the farm where generations had been buried; no longer! Now THAT proved to be a difficult adjustment for my paternal grandparents; they had to create aternative plans, change wills and everything.In addition to buying cemetary plots,italso meant not being buried next to children they had burid there earlier, which truly devestated my grandmother! Losing that was even harder on her than moving from her ancestral home!

Wow! I really needed to hear some tangible advice like this right now. Most useful is putting "Amy" to bed, and turning off the TV. I've been hanging on every word (torture)about the bailout. I have a fairly high risk tolerance but the drops in my stocks and this "crisis" are really wearing me down and causing me panic attacks. You are right in time the stock market will recover...Your advice will help me stay the course and not sucumb til it does. THANKS! .

Deal with finanical stress? Well let me tell you about mine, I am in big time debt, and the person who was helping me pay it back left me high and dry, Oh, they did not go into it blind folded, this person was my counselor, and told me " We are put on this earth to help one another." And do not worry about it. I will help you. Well they closed down there business put there home up for sale and the last thing they told me was they would not forget to send me the money each month. They moved out of state left no forwarding address, I emailed this person over and over again they ignored that never answered the cell phone they had, I finally ( which I will not say how) got the money, from them in the mail. And than the e mail came,
Now I have to pay this myself, and I cannot pay it all. I am in a debt repayment program too, And now well, according to a lawyer I spoke to I can do one of 3 things, hope they will get the payments down so I can pay it, do it my self with a formed letter to each creditor, or file for bankruptcy. Well I have finally told the debt repayment place what I can pay, and what I will have left after I pay them and the rest of my bills, It's 50.00 to buy gas, and food.
So, stress? I have depression already, and see another counselor, and now I cannot afford them. I am about ready to just throw in the towel, and file for bankruptcy. Or just end my life, I have had it.
There is stress.

Stress! Yeah- Bail out ! Why not bail out the american people - that would be a great start- don't you think. Divide the bail out money equally to every american over the age of 18 and you'll not only stop financial stress for everyone but it would boost the economy too, and help the housing market. At least we would have some control-some.

How glad I am that I don't have money to invest!
What I have to say sounds simplistic, maybe even un-American to some.
I can't help but wish the whole d*** system would come crashing down,
so we could all go back to barter or something, so no one would have to worry about this kind of thing anymore. No more credit, just everybody get out of this "buy-buy-buy" mentality, and everyone be content with what they have, realizing money doesn't bring happiness.
I'm so sick of all the fear-mongering tactics of CNN and all the rest!
I wish we could all just live simply, contentedly, and stop junking up Mother Earth with all the crud we really don't need to buy in the first place! Corporate greed has practically taken over the world!
Something's all gone wrong, and I don't know what it's gonna take to fix it. Robin Hummingbirdsongs

we live in a society where fear and bad news generate news coverage. Common sense and practicality are not news worthy and if people aren't watching the news, then advertisers aren't making money. Bad news equals advertising dollars and keeps you glued to the tv. I for one, have been turning the news off, in lieu of more uplifting programming, or even comedic relief. The lessons to be learned through all this are ones that should be followed to begin with...live frugally, live on less than you make, if you can't pay cash-don't buy. This may be a wake-up call for a lot of spoiled "want it now" ADULTS (using that term loosely). However, for those who have lived frugally all along, probably not as stressed out as the rest of the credit-reliant general population. Just something to think about.

yes i am but some people should be glad for what they have. there are a lot of us who can't even think about wall street a place to live or nothing else. the rich get richer and the poorer get poorer.

Well Thanks to the phone company I now can have my phone, my landline, I got that lowered to 1/2 of what I was paying. And now its work on other things, but this is still very stressful and makes me sick at times. My lesson has been learned and I plan not going around this mountain ever again.
The banks are more at fault for this, they should not be lending money to people who cannot put the 10% down. And they know they ( people and banks) that they cannot in anyway pay it back.
We are a country of plastic, and we love to have things, It's buy now pay later. The offers on TV, Radio, in the mail. Credit card offers, its horrible. If one wants to get rid of that get on optoutprescreen.com and you can get your name taken off the list, of the 3 big credtiors reporters, and you will not get any credit card offers in the mail anymore. I did that. We need to cut up the credit cards and just use cash. WE are all adicted to it, and need to get unadicted to it.