Welcome to Money As If, the gooey center of a $1.25 Cadbury Creme Egg you impulse-bought at the nearby Walmart.

In today’s basket:

• Can a bad market wipe out all of your retirement savings?

• The price of (Easter) eggs

• A $3,200 … scented candle?

— Jeanine

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IN THESE, OUR (POSSIBLE) END TIMES

Can you lose all your retirement savings?

So, yeah, the market is going through it this week, and everyone and their Elmo is talking about it and/or side-eyeing their 401(k)s.

I’m not going to recap the details because they keep changing. (Seriously, depending on when you read this email, the trade war causing all the market volatility may be on or off or kinda off, but kinda on again. Who knows?) Plus, the panic is my point.

I’m a worst-case scenario-type, meaning my mind tends to go to worst-case scenarios at the mere suggestion of trouble. So, even though intellectually I know the bromides around big market dips — stay calm, stay invested — are trite but true, I needed some emotional reassurance this week. (Especially after the bond market got weird.)

How bad could things get exactly? Is it possible to lose all of your retirement savings? And, if so, is there anything I — or you — should be doing about it?

Asking for a friend

Fortunately, while experts admit it's theoretically possible for someone to lose 100% of a retirement account's balance, it's also improbable.

“Most retirement accounts are diversified, meaning your money is spread across different assets and industries,” says Bob Chitrathorn, a Certified Plan Fiduciary Advisor (CPFA) and co-founder of Simplified Wealth Planning. “Losing everything would require every single one of those investments to go to zero simultaneously, which is virtually impossible.”

Think about it: The odds of, say, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, and Amazon — five of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average — having no value, let alone simultaneously, are probably lower than a zillion to one. Not to mention that the average investor's portfolio is usually even less concentrated.

“Now most people have mutual funds in their investments, and some mutual funds have partial share of 200 to 300 companies,” Chitrathorn says. “What’s the likelihood of all those 200 to 300 companies all becoming worthless at the same time?”

Built-in guardrails

If you have plain old vanilla individual retirement accounts (IRAs) or 401(ks), this type of balance is probably already baked in.

Traditional retirement accounts are made with market volatility in mind — and many have restrictions regarding risky investment strategies that could result in a total loss of assets, says Steven Fox, Certified Financial Planner (CFP).

Plus, “employer-based retirement plans, such as a 401(k) or 403(b), will only have a predetermined list of investment options available anyway, which would not include the very riskiest ones, in part because plan sponsors have a fiduciary responsibility to plan participants to offer prudent investment options,” he adds.

Most passive investors, too, follow the 60/40 rule, meaning their financial portfolio has 60% of assets allocated to stocks and 40% to bonds. Bonds, of course, are notoriously safe investments and provide a certain amount of insulation.

“If you hold bonds, you don't own part of the company, but you lend money to the company,” says Lei Deng, Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), CFP, and founder of Savor Financial. “The company pays you interest and pays you back after a certain period of time. Even in the case of a company going bankrupt, debts would be paid first before shareholders get paid back.”

So, TL;DR: Regarding total losses, worry less about your standard retirement accounts and more about, say, your meme coins.

So what can — or should — you do right now?

Stay calm, stay invested, essentially. What falls will inevitably rise. And “You only really lose if you sell when the value is down," Chitrathorn says.

Beyond that, make sure your portfolio is adequately diversified.

“Everyone should have appropriate asset allocation based on their risk tolerances and their time horizon,” Deng says. “If they have been positioned too aggressively when the market was up, this is a good time to re-evaluate.”

Best practices apply, incidentally, even if you’re one to three years out of retiring. (“You are still a long-term investor,” says Marguerita M. Cheng, CFP, Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor, and expert contributor at Annuity.org.)

If you're newly retired, consider consulting a financial planner about the best ways to take your mandatory withdrawals.

“There is such thing called 'sequence of return risks,'” says Deng. "A major downturn early in retirement can have a lasting impact on your portfolio — even if average returns eventually recover — because you're withdrawing from a shrinking base."

And if you're still suffering from general money malaise in our current economic climate, I've pulled together 50 steps to surviving a recession.

RECEIPTS

When inflation hits your credit card fees

I want to say I’m more annoyed that Chase and United buried the lead — a 58% annual fee increase — in an email touting upgraded benefits for my United Explorer Card than I am about the fee increase itself. But, no, I’m more annoyed about the 58% fee increase.

Mostly because I've never paid over $100 a year just to have a credit card. (Yes, I know $150 is less than what I spent at the Louis Vuitton cafe. No, I don't care; everyone's got their thing.)

Also, the new benefits are … annoying. Like, OK, you get up to $60 in rideshare credits each year, but you can only redeem them in $5 monthly increments. And the hotel, rental car, and Instacart credits work the same way, albeit at different dollar amounts.

I'd say the $100 travel credit is nice, but you have to spend $10,000 on the card to get it. That might have worked for us in boom times. In fact, it did. My husband and I spent a couple of years charging everyday purchases to this card to accrue enough miles to cover airfare for an annual vacation.

But these aren’t boom times! These are Recession Hair times! And I can’t say we expect to travel anytime soon. (Note: I asked Chase why they were doing this to me, but it did not respond to my request for comment.)

To close or not to close?

I bring this up to rant a little but also to flag that closing a credit card is a weirdly tricky decision. It can hurt your credit score by skewing your credit utilization rate. Plus, you could lose benefits, including unredeemed points, cash back, or miles.

I haven't decided what to do with my United Explorer Card yet. I'm not worried about lost benefits. In this case, United would let me keep my miles because I'd still belong to its loyalty club. And, while I could lose my yearly airport lounge passes, they aren't much use if we aren't going anywhere.

But this card has more spending power than any other in my wallet, thanks to its silly high credit limit. And even though we're not over-leveraged, I like the idea of having a buffer. So I'll probably shoulder the new fee … for now.

Next steps

There are some things you can try if a bank raises your credit card’s annual fee and you absolutely do not want to pay it.

• Ask to downgrade to a no- or lower-fee version of the same card. United and Chase don’t have one, but that’s a bit of an outlier.

• Pay down debt on other credit cards before the closure to keep your credit utilization rate (the amount of credit you have vs. the amount of debt you’re carrying) intact. Experts suggest keeping this rate below at least 30% or, better yet, in single digits.

• Ask for a higher limit on other cards in your wallet. If your credit is good, a different issuer might agree to extend you more buying power.

• Redeem rewards you've earned to minimize losses, especially if you've already paid that year's annual fee.

PRICE TAGS

Easter Egg edition

Forget the price of eggs; look at the price of eggs!

 🍫 $35

for a 3.5 x 2.25" andSons’ Chocolate Cake Easter Egg, made from chocolate ganache, toasted hazelnuts, candied cocoa nibs, hazelnut feuilletine, and devil’s food cake. Served in a decorative box for good measure.

🎁 $42

for a 1.7-ounce Signature Easter Egg from Dandelion Chocolate, a lifelike cocoa butter eggshell filled with chocolate ganache, vanilla marshmallow, and caramel. Also served in a decorative box for good measure.

🥚 $49.95

for a set of six decorative Easter eggs from Williams Sonoma, made from solid alabaster in the City of Alabaster (Volterra, Italy), painted and varnished by hand.

🇨🇭 $70

for a FrischSchoggi Egg from Swiss chocolatier Läderach, a 15.87-ounce treat handmade from seven oval chocolate bars. Flavors include white chocolate with fine fruit and dark chocolate with caramelized almonds.

🐰 $130 

The original price for an Ultimate Egg Hunt kit from Dylan’s Candy Bar, which includes 130 metallic Easter Egg cups and 150 pieces of candy (plus sticker tattoos) to stuff them with. Currently out of stock.

 🦖 $300

for a GIANT Speckled Dinosaur Egg from the Danish House of Knipschildt; a 14″ × 8″ × 8″, 15-pound milk, white, and dark chocolate confection marketed as a show-stopping centerpiece for your Easter celebrations.

FRESH GREEN

Nowadays, most financial takes are boilerplate. These aren't.

• The recession isn’t coming. It’s already here (and there).

• Not new news as it confirms a decades-long trend, but if you’re suddenly wondering whether you should start micromanaging your investments (for, you know, reasons), a new S&P study finds passive investing in index funds outperforms a majority of actively managed accounts.

• Maybe, just maybe, we need to re-evaluate the 4% rule for retirement budgeting.

THIRST TRAP

And, finally, today, in things I would buy if, you know, I could just buy things …

Hot stuff

The Lalique Épines Édition, a $3,250 scented candle made of crystal and platinum, handcrafted in France. Can be used as a vase once the wax is out.

The sort of thing you just have to have not because it's expensive, but because it costs more.

Got questions, comments, receipts, tips, thirst traps, etc. you’d like to share? Send them to [email protected].

_{This article is for educational purposes only. We don’t recommend or advise individuals to buy, not buy, sell, or not sell particular investments or other assets, as everyone’s circumstances are different. Also, it’s your money and ultimately up to you to decide the best use for it.}