Edit: And to be clear, I know the value of almost everyone's investments went down, but unless your money was all in a single company it seems that most diversified portfolios bounced back.

The more financial AND emotional intelligence you have the less likely you are to fall into such life.

But let's have empathy because the majority of people have less financial intelligence and cold blod as the average hn reader. Let alone the chance of earning a very good salary for a few decades.

However, I think it is entirely reasonable to assume we will someday experience another similar event. If there was something about this event that caused some people who were following sound retirement investment strategies to lose all of their savings, I wanted to know about it. That is why I was asking.

Wait, are you saying it was actually financially rational to do so? Wouldn't they be better off by waiting it out until it the market rebounded?

I'm not blaming anyone, just asking what would have been the theoretically better decision.

I’ve wanted to move somewhere else for at least five of those years. I finally have, and my options with the old house are either to rent it out (rent would not cover mortgage payment) or try to deal with the bank to avoid foreclosure, via short sale or deed in lieu. In any of those cases, now I have two problems.

While I understand that people who are already retired can't just choose to keep working while their investments recover, I'm not aware of any retirement investing strategy that has you fully invested in stocks at the point you retire. The whole point of moving your retirement to safer investments around retirement age is so you don't have to take money out of stocks when there is a financial downturn.

I may be missing something, but you seem to be describing retirees with a very risky asset allocation. I'm not trying to minimize how devastating that was for people, but I am trying to understand what they were victims of. Were they victims of financial advisors recommending that type of asset allocation?

These commenters and down-voters know how to pattern match “he said a person is not a victim” with the knee-jerk response of “you’re bad.”

They don’t know how to articulate a sensible argument to back up their reaction though.

I know (lower middle class) people who went bankrupt in the Great Recession because they had 2 or more mortgages, obtained with a 5% down payment. To me, they took too big of a gamble, and lost.

I know others who stayed out of such gambles and survived the GR.

I know others who had to significantly downsize or live with family members because they lost their job and then spent their savings.

When this current bubble bursts, we will see the truth for all those who belive it's just not enough--what's the word--planning, or solid work ethic?

I was going to say we need a new Working book for the Sharing Economey, but I feel it would be pretty thin, and just say see "Chinese economy", or done other "they do it cheaper" country for more information.

It would be interesting to see a Studs Turkel type writing about a startup that produces absolutely nothing new, or a product that will be decimated by one of the monopolies.

I would like to read how a 1 percenter rationalizes their greedy, and narcissism though; while the safe, predictable, somewhat ethical country they grew up slides into chaos.

I know many people who have jobs equal to or similar to Studs Working.

And, more importantly, his book did not describe a paradise. He profiled whores, for example.