No Longer Ready to Retire

"This hasn't really sunk in yet," he said Friday afternoon, lighting another cigarette and peering into the computer at a five-day market snapshot of squiggly lines rising and falling like the lines that monitor an irregular heartbeat. "It's an emotional thing. I'm thinking, so I've got to work until I'm 80? Are we done yet? Is this what my mother felt in the fall of 1929?

"I'm used to stress. I'm used to risk," he continued. "But this is scary."

Kenney runs his own marketing and electronic music businesses out of his Bethesda home. Like most Americans, he's carrying more debt than he'd like and he started saving for retirement late, in his mid-30s. Still, over the years, he was able to build up "a nice chunk of dough."

Last spring, he noticed disturbing patterns in the market similar to what he saw just before the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. Preparing for it, he miscalculated badly: He sunk a substantial amount of his portfolio into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock. It was selling for $6 a share. Last Friday, a share was worth 60 cents. "The price was going down, and I figured it was a good time to buy. I thought, 'People are not going to stop making houses and moving into houses,' " he said. "I was a fool."

Instead, the two housing lenders, riddled with bad mortgage debt, tanked. By the end of Monday, 17 percent of his portfolio's value had evaporated.

Tuesday, his portfolio dropped an additional 12 percent. With a big work deadline looming, ironically for NASDAQ, Kenney struggled to concentrate, but found himself obsessively checking Internet news sites every five to 10 minutes to keep up with the swiftly changing story. He started drinking too much coffee and smoking. He kept a constant eye on his Wachovia portfolio, on major market indices and on the price of gold.

When he finally got a hold of his broker, he told him to dump all his financial stock. He only wanted to hold onto companies that "made stuff" and green businesses. He considered moving his money into money market accounts. And when they began teetering, he thought he'd just grab $10,000 in cash and stash it somewhere.

When he could no longer take the crush of bad news, he walked outside and weeded his garden.

Historically, the market has always recovered. He knows this. After the rally at the end of last week, his net loss had shrunk from one-third to 20 percent. The October 1987 crash sucked 30 percent out of the market in a few days, but the market recovered by the year's end. After the 40 percent drop in 2001, the market took two or three years to rebound. But at 58, Kenney doesn't know if he has enough time to wait for the recovery. Or if it will come.

"I'm wondering whether this augurs the end of the United States as a major power," he said. "This is the kind of financial instability that can pull a country down."

Kenney just finished putting his daughter through college. But he still has a 10-year-old son to educate. And he recently moved his aging mother out from California. He has not yet been able to bring himself to look at the hit her finances took and what that might mean for him. All he knows is this: "It just means you go back to work." He lit another cigarette and picked up the phone.

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