Exactly what I’m talking about

It’s been a rough month. The “mar­ket” has cor­rect­ed, and pret­ty much every stock and fund is down. At least the ones I own.

I logged in this morn­ing to look for my lat­est 401(k) deposit, and saw this unwel­come news:

Not fun.

My com­pa­ny uses Fidelity, a site I’ve been using for years.

There’s no oth­er way to get a per­spec­tive on my 401(k) than the one they have on my state­ment. Eight full months into the year, and my rate of return sucks.

How’s that moti­vat­ing? Am I sup­posed to be moti­vat­ed by some obscure vision of “doing the right thing for retire­ment”?

What else should banks do?

For one, my com­pa­ny match­es con­tri­bu­tions. I hap­pen to track this “free mon­ey” as part of my return, not as part of my con­tri­bu­tions so I know that I’m actu­al­ly up a few per­cent­age points. That’s bet­ter than 0.03%, and bet­ter than infla­tion.

When it comes to my over­all port­fo­lio I also track unique met­rics just as I rec­om­mend doing in my book, The Elephant in the Room has a Paycheck.

Regardless of how my main port­fo­lio is doing, it’s doing about the same as the mar­ket. Not very moti­vat­ing at the moment.

What is moti­vat­ing though is that even though the mar­ket has dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly, my Elephant’s Paycheck is UP 9.7% in the last 8 months.

I’ll keep repeat­ing myself until every­one buys my book — have you got­ten a 9.7% raise in the past 8 months at your job like my Elephant has?

That great result keeps me steady and focused on my strat­e­gy.

So does know­ing that I’ll be get­ting anoth­er raise again this month (and next, and the one after that…).