This year we started paying into an investment fund for our future retirement. It figures the bottom would drop out of America financial institutions this year. I’m sort of wishing we’d just put that money in the bank instead. Slowly but surely over the course of this year, I have watched the graph representing how fell our fund is doing fall bit-by-bit every day. Occasionally it would rally and go up. Once or twice it went up quite a good bit. Today … it completely plummeted to the lowest it has been in five years.

Not that I am surprised. Every time we do the things we are “supposed” to do, we somehow end up getting the short end of the stick. Everyone insisted we were supposed to be investing for retirement at this stage of our lives, and so, even though we could have used that money for other things we need now, we did. Now look at the mess we are in, and the age-old gambling question is on the table — gambling and investing being pretty close to being the same thing: stay in the game or fold? Well, I guess we are staying in the game. We’ve already lost good money, and now all we can really do is hope that sometime in our lifetime the money we blow on investing every month is worth more than it was when we put it in. I have to tell you, it feels a lot like pissing in a bucket and hoping one day it will turn into wine.

So who are the people who are going to be most hurt by all these failures of major financial institutions? It’s not the fat-cats running them. They’ll be floating away on golden parachutes with bank accounts full of more money than we are likely to see in our lifetimes. It’s people like my husband and myself who were hoping not to have to eat dog food in our golden years. Nobody is sending us a big check or saying “I’m sorry for screwing everything up” are they? No, all we have are charts and graphs and reports telling us that what we had is now basically worth a small hill of beans.

I am not at all optimistic about this situation righting itself quickly. I’m not even sure about it not getting worse. All I can do is look at the stupid charts and graphs and read the damn reports and hope upon hope that sometime in the next 20 years our money is once again at least worth what it was at the start of this year. Feels like a pipe dream, but that’s all we have right now, and it is making me sick.