I draw my retirement income from a defined contribution plan, social security, stock dividends and rental property.

When the stock market was tanking in 2008, I decided to transfer all my assets in deferred comp to a stable value fund which was yielding 5 percent without any charge for switching funds. This is the beauty of these plans: you can switch funds back and forth very easily without paying any fees.

I lost some of my assets, but was able to stop the bleeding to protect my position.

In January, I decided to go back to mutual funds in my deferred comp plan and switched back part of my assets, again without paying any fees for the change. By hindsight, it was a little too early, but it's okay. I'll just sit tight and hope for the best.

My stock portfolio got creamed! I lost 49% from the peak in October 2007 to end of 2008. It's okay. The market should recover one of these days. In the meantime, I still collect good dividends from stocks like Verizon(VZ) and HRPT Trust (HRP), SK Telecom(SKM) and iShare Taiwan (EWT).

I have a fixed annuity that is yielding about 3.20%. In 2003, when I retired, I had a choice to invest that lump sum money into stocks or into the fixed annuity. I chose fixed annuity and now am I so glad I made that decision instead of being greedy and trying to maximize my returns investing in stocks. The assets are in a positive position and next year (holding period of 7 years) I should be able to withdraw all the amount without paying any penalty for early withdrawl.

The best way to manage your assets is to be diversified: invest in all kind of ways and don't put all your eggs in a single basket.

Thanks for all the good advice you share with your readers. They are helpful in making us better managers of our assets.

You have excellent feedback too.

I would like to make a point that no matter what your financial status is, why would you want to be in a long position when the underlying asset is going down? What your telling people to do is to hold their positions and buy more of a losing stock in order to lower your losses by averaging your already losing stocks with more losing stocks at a lower price?

The advice I am hearing, in which I hope is not true, is that you are suggesting people to not rely on a system that is in a bearish condition, but to maintain a long term investing strategy that is failing. I understand that people have jobs; they have lives, and cannot devote all the time in the world to their portfolios. But if you are the owner of a 401k or an IRA worth 6 figures, is it smart to ignore it, misguide it, and lose it over bad advice and carelessness?

I moved all my money into a cash position before the feces hit the fan in late 2008. Doing this took less than 5 minutes. Guess how much money I lost? Zero. Now guess how much more money I have to reinvest in those discounted funds. A whole lot more than I would have if I “rode the wave”.

Now with your picks. Long term, GE has been in a downturn since November 2007! It was about $40 per share November 7th, 2007. As of February 3, 2008, it is at $11.43 a share. How is that smart? If I invested $10k, I would have lost nearly 75%! What am I going to do, wait another year and a half to get my money back? Real solid.

Why not take a little time with educating, transfer your 401k to a self-directed account, hire a reliable accountant, and do covered calls with that great stock you are hawking. At least this way, you can earn 5-10% A MONTH selling the options for the current month. It is a hell of a lot safer than holding that stock for two years. Not to mention you would recover that 75% loss.

Let’ say you earned a meager 3% return doing a covered call with GE, with that great 75% loss we saw, at least with a covered call, your losses would have dropped to only 30%.

Now what if you found a strong reliable company that was overall trending upwards for the last 15 months. Earning 3% now would give you a ROI of 45% in 15 months! The worst that can happen is the stock goes lower, in which you let the option expire and resell it again next month, or the stock goes up, and you still profit.

Let’s help these people by guiding them in the RIGHT direction.