Like many advisors, Dennis O’Brien spent much of his time on Monday, September 30, the day that Congress failed to pass the financial rescue bill, calling clients and responding to phone calls and e-mails. “From 8:30 in the morning until 6 o’clock I was pretty much on the phone all day,” he recalls.
Some clients took it all in stride with a “Don’t worry about it, everything’s okay, we’ll make it” attitude.
“And then I have a couple of other clients who were worried about their 401(k)s. I had one client who sent me an e-mail saying his 401(k) is down 17.7% and he was concerned. I told him everything’s going to be okay, we’re just in this turbulent, volatile environment; in another year or two we’ll look back, just like we did with the dot.com boom and other events that have happened in the past, and we’ll just look back at it, like it never happened.”