this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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But if you don't sell, did you lose money. My 401k goes up and down all the time. But I didn't lose any money. Same with my house value.
Yes, my net worth went down.
The point of "you don't lose money until you sell" is to discourage panic selling, but it's total bunk. When you assets lose value, you do lose money, and how much that matters depends on when you need to access that money. As the article says, you may not care that you lost money if you don't need to access the money, but that doesn't change the fact that you're now poorer if your assets drop in value.
That is basically Schrodinger's cat. If you don't open the box, the cat is both dead or alive. So you "could" interpret "lost money" as lost net worth. But if you read it litterally, it wasn't money. It was an asset. You couldn't spend it and it doesn't meet the definition of money. Poorer, I suppose, because you could borrow against that asset, but not as much as before.