I used to be an expert at panicking. I had things down to fine art when everything came to a head for us as a family around about May 2020.
For the years and years before that, I was always able to just manufacture a panic about one thing or the next, but I think building the practice and then having an open day to launch the practice on March 11th, 2020, and then the world closing on March 23rd was the ultimate of panics.
I was able to stay in some sort of panic mode then for months, perhaps even years, until we came to the other side, and I was probably changed as a person, no longer someone who jumped into panic mode.
There are reasons why I might panic now, but it will have nothing to do with the stock market and nothing to do with the perceived crash or the events that have happened since Wednesday of last week.
The first time I remember the stock market going down was Black Monday in 1997; I was at school, and people were talking about this thing, but I didn't really understand it.
The second time was Black Wednesday, 1992; I had a little bit more insight into that. This is when dentistry 'went to private' in the United Kingdom due to the NHS pay cut, which effectively wiped 33% of everybody's profits in one go while wiping something like 7% off the fee scale in one go to try to balance the books.
From here and then, every so often, the stock market tumbles would happen; they generally coincide with something significant that I'm doing or decisions I have made from ages away, which correspond straight into a catastrophe of events coming together.
If I were someone who wanted to bet long-term on the stock market, I would speak to me regularly and ask me if I had anything significant coming up because you'll know that when my significant thing comes around in the calendar, the stock markets are going to crash.
I take you back to March 2020 when we opened the practice and the stock markets crashed in one of the worst and most unprecedented events in living memory.
That was not the first time that had happened to me, though.
In 2008, my bosses sold the practices that I worked at to Integrated Dental Holdings (IDH – Mydentist), and so I left everything and went into an entirely private practice to try to start again, just as the world crashed and we had the banking crisis.
In 2009, I went into partnership, forming a new business right in the middle of the worst recession in living memory, so I tend to have a history of these types of things.
It would seem to me that it's happened again.
As a family, we bought a new house a week ago on Friday, the Friday before 'liberation day'.
It's been a long time since I bought a house, and I needed to go back into that world of financial dabbling. So, on the Thursday after Liberation Day, our house went on the market, just when everybody decided that they weren't going to buy houses anymore.
At the same time, and as chance would have it, we've been planning for ages to pay down money on the practice, building and mortgage, and that happened on Monday of this week. The three of the most significant financial events in my recent living history all happened within the space of around 10 days, in the middle of which the markets crashed yet again.
So, as usual in the blog, what is the point?
The point is this: as I've said many times here, the thing about the long term is that it takes a long time.
It doesn't matter so much to me that the markets have crashed and that my pension might be affected because I'm not retiring, and so I don't need my pension just now (or maybe much at all if my life plan works out).
And so there's no point in me having an app on my phone that I can check every day to see how much my pension has dropped because I'm not cashing in my pension, so it doesn't matter.
The next thing to help survive the crash is to understand that crashes and crises like this happen all the time, something like 29 times since 1933, and on average once every 3.5 years.
The 'bear market' that we find ourselves at least heading towards is something which happens regularly and, on average, lasts between about 6 to 13 months, and so if you can sit outside of this and watch it, you know that everything's going to come back again in a minute.
We may well have a recession, and things will slow down, so what you have to do there is follow the advice below, if you fancy it, to help you through the other side as best you can.
Always remember in these circumstances that this too shall pass, and further down the line, there'll be a different time and a better place that you might be better fixed to enjoy and appreciate.
So, a couple of things that you can do (from hard-won experience) in these circumstances to navigate the next little while if you find yourself being worried or panicking or heading towards a crisis.
1) Trim the fat.There will be tonnes of things in your life that you don't have to spend or don't have to have; it's actually a joy to sort that out; spring clean, organise, and understand that you can live on way less than you're already living on, everybody can.
2) Don't spend any money.
You can apply this as hard or as soft as you want, but again, you'll find that you have a habit of spending money or just buying things because you can, and when you don't have as much money or you're trying to stop and save, you just spend less money.
For many people, this is easier said than done because they're caught in the trap of having to spend, but you don't; you never ever need to go to Costa or Starbucks; you can buy yourself a reusable cup and make your own coffee and take it with you, once you start to do this, you understand that you can save a lot more money than you think.
3) Do amazing things that are free.
Ride your bike, do your garden, go for a run down the river, and spend some time with your kids doing something that doesn't cost anything, like going to the park.
Once you understand that you can do free things, you realise that there is a life outside of consumerism and sometimes, these periods that we go through teach us that and make us appreciate things that we didn't have before.
4) Build your intangible assets.
Read, watch movies, learn, listen to music, do the stuff that you didn't have time for, but now you're not paying to do the stuff (meals, drinks, pubs, holidays), you can spend the time doing something else, building your intangible assets, so you feel a little bit better.
That is the stuff that works for me.
That's the stuff that I'll be doing in the next little while if I feel things get tight, or it's pinched, or there's a problem, and then we'll be through the other side and looking at the next, looking at this one in the mirror and talking about it like it was 1987.
Blog Post Number - 4134