[olddog]

To some degree it depends on your time horizon (how many years until you retire).

It also depends on what you were invested in when the market went down.

If you were mainly in stocks (assuming you road the market down) and you have 20 +/- years until retirement, it is foolish to pull money out now. If you sell your stock now, you lock in the loss forever. If history repeats (and it usually does) sometime in the next 10 years the market will come back strong with double digit gains and you will miss out on it.

Even if you figure a modest 6% average anual gain over 20 years your money will grow 320%. A more typical 8% would give you 466%. So if you pull out $100,000 now, it could cost you a half a million when you retire. Your actual experiance may vary and past performance does not garantee $hit. You get the picture.

If you were close to retirement, you should have been mostly invested in more secure things, as you do not have time to recover from what just happened.