[Jtsummers]

https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?s...

Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund.

And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet.

So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason.

The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.

[insane_dreamer]

Wiping out a year's of gains is significant if you're already retired and counting on steady gains to provide income to live on.

[YZF]

Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement.

EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.

[CRConrad]

> Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income.

At least in the Nordic countries, utterly uncontroversial conventional wisdom says something like:

* In your youth save almost-only in stocks; via some index fund, if you don't feel like being an active investor, following the market every day;

* Start with (funds that specialise in) high-growth (= high-risk) stocks; then, as you near middle age, slowly move over to lower-risk (= lower-growth) stocks (or funds specialised therein);

* In middle age, move over to having some part in state bonds;

* As you near retirement age, eliminate high-growth/risk stocks/funds altogether, and draw down the proportion of stocks/funds as a whole, going to an increasing proportion state bonds.

* As you retire, possibly move all-out of stocks / stock index funds and all-in on bonds... Except put some in an ordinary old bank account.

[bananalychee]

As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".

[croes]

>Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income.

>your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing

The comment is kind of left leaning so I doubt that’s the reason for the down votes