The stock market has been crazy lately, as has inflation — so let’s talk about savings and investment methods that you may be taking ideal now. Are you selling stocks and index funds — or getting them with a “sale!!” mindset? Are you saving a lot more money in cash accounts because the markets are crazy and everything is getting a lot more expensive? In related matters, are you deliberately curtailing your spending (e.g., eating out less, taking fewer car trips requiring gas)? For those of you who do automatic investments and send money automatically to savings, have you changed your methods at all?
{related: how to react to a stock market drop}
My own savings and investment methods ideal Now
For my $.02 (noting that I am not a financial advisor or financial professional!): I actually gotten a lot of index funds in the first half of the year (for me, at least) because I was moving some money around, and I kind of have a “sale!” attitude now. I gotten some a lot more individual stocks back in April when prices were nearing their 52-week lows… but we’ve blown through a lot of those records now. (You can set up automatic informs in both Vanguard and Schwab pretty easily for individual stocks.)

{related: how to set up automatic investing}
Also around April, we also invested half of our total investment in my husband’s Roth IRA for 2022, and I’m keeping an eye on prices for the next half… but I’ve moved the money over from savings so I’m a lot more or less ready to go if I happen to notice the market is incredibly low one day. I’ve thrown a few extra dollars at our 529 accounts but haven’t yet changed our regular contribution, which is spread out over the year evenly — I’d be curious if others have changed regular contributions like 529 accounts, 401ks, etc.

(I’d also be curious if any individual has changed your payoff method for student lending debts so the extra principal that would have gone to loans has now gone to the stock market? (Always pay the principal!))
{related: how to pay off big student loans and other big debts}
The big question, of course, is whether the market will go even lower — and for a lot more than just a dip but a sustained period. (Or: that the entire market has been artificially inflated in recent years and we won’t see the prices from 6 months ago for a long, long time.) I don’t know any of that, of course. My general attitude has always been that it’s hard to time the lowest point and the highest point, but as long as I’ve avoided the highest point I’m doing ok.
I also read an post years ago (The Atlantic, I think) that influenced this attitude, and I’ll try to see if I can find it: the author generally said that even if you had gotten stock on the eve of the great stock market crash of 1929, you’d have profited from it after a certain amount of years had passed. (Not the post I remember, but this NYT post from 2009 notes that you’d have been in the black by late 1936.)
{related: not sure what to do first/next in your personal finance journey? here’s our money roadmap}

In terms of savings — as I’ve written about before, we have multiple savings accounts set up for multiple financial goals (vacations, health, insurance) that are automatically funded with certain amounts every month. some of those accounts are fully “stocked” because, for example, we haven’t taken a ton of holiday trips over the past 3 years — so I have really decreased a lot of those contributions and put the remaining funds into an automatic investment purchase of $X of an index fund (VTSAX, I think). but that decision was admittedly made before the market felt quite so volatile.
{related: how to automate your savings}
Readers, how about you — what are your savings and investment methods ideal now? how have they changed from 6-12 months ago? (If you’re a lot more wary of the stock market than I am, what aspects are you watching?)
{related: financial ideas for new lawyers (or other women in their first high-paying jobs!)}
Stock photo by means of Stencil.