Did basically all mutual funds have a significant crash in 2008?
In 2008, the S&P was down 37%.  I love charts that show sector performance by year, as it helps show that 2008 wasn't like the crash of 2000-01 which was more tech-centric. Funds that were more geared towards bonds would have been up as the 10 year Treasury was up 20%.  I understand you have a low risk tolerance. Over the long term, this will cost you. The CAGR for the S&P from 1928-2011 was 9.23%, for treasuries, 5.14%. This difference adds up dramatically over time. These rates double your stock investments every 8 years on average vs nearly 14 years for bonds.  See the MoneyChimp site to tinker with start/finish years to understand long term returns. "I will solely address your fear because from what I read you fear investing in something that could possibly go down in the future.  This is almost identical to market timing, so let's use the SPY as an example.  Look at the SPY on Yahoo Finance, specifically in 2011.  The market experienced a little bit of a pull back during the year, and some ""analysts"" claimed that it would fall below 600 (read this).  In fact, a co-worker of mine said that he feared buying the S&P 500 in 2011 (as well as in 2010), so he bought gold (compare the two from 2011 to now - to put it bluntly he experienced 50% less gain than I did). Did the S&P 500 ever fall below 600 in that timeframe, or according to the linked analyst (there were plenty of similar predictions then)?  No.  If you avoid doing something because you're afraid it could drop, technically, you should be just as afraid of it rising (Fear of Losing Everything, FOLE, vs. Fear of Missing Out, FOMO - both are real).  That's not to say invest out of fear, but that fear cuts both ways, and generally, we only look at it from one side. Retirement investing should be a boring, automated process where, ideally, we don't try and time the market (though some will try, and like in 2011, fail).  If you can't help your fear, you can always approach retirement investing with automated re-balancing where you hold some money in ""less risky"" forms and others in ""higher risk"" forms and automate a rebalance every month or quarter." The literal answer to your question is that a number of different types of mutual funds did not have significant downturns in 2008. Money Market Funds are intended to always preserve capital. VMMXX made 2.77% in 2008. It was a major scandal broke the buck, that its holders took a 3% loss. Inverse funds, which go up when the market goes down, obviously did well that year (RYARX), but if you have a low risk tolerance, that's obviously not what you're looking for. (and they have other problems as well when held long-term) But you're a 24-year-old talking about your retirement funds, you should have a much longer time horizon, at least 30 years. Over a period that long, stocks have never had negative real (inflation-adjusted) returns, dating back at least to the civil war. If you look at the charts here or here, you can see that despite the risk in any individual year, as the period grows longer, the average return for the period gets tighter and tighter. If you look at the second graph here, you see that 2011 was the first time since the civil war that the trailing 30-year return on t-bills exceeded that for stocks, and 1981-2011 was period that saw bond yields drop almost continuously, leading to steady rise in bond prices. Although past performance is no guarantee of future results, everything we've seen historically suggests that the risk of a broad stock-market portfolio held for 30 years is not that large, and it should make up the bulk of your holdings. For example, Vanguard's Target retirement 2055 fund is 90% in stocks (US + international), and only 10% in bonds.
And it'll be a big issue again when our current housing bubble bursts. Housing is even more expensive now than it was in 2008 before the crash, that just means people have even more equity to borrow against and end up underwater.   Our next real estate crash is going to be much worse than 2008's. they did crash because supply caught up to demand.  &gt; because the only reason people were buying them is because they would go up in value  that is the explanation for why price shot up so quick.  &gt; Sounds exactly like Bitcoin in my opinion  There's genuine utility in cryptocurrency.  Bitcoin is the anchor to all of them.  Btw, there is significant cost to mining bitcoin  &gt; How many people do you know using Bitcoin as a currency?  You can pay bills with it.  A lot better than gold in that regard.  &gt;  It isn't backed by a government or military  historically always a terrible thing for every currency.  The freedom from political whim based valuation is a plus.  &gt; When it crashes and criminals are the only ones using it, then what is it worth?  Criminals would be better off using cash or Monero (a crypto with better privacy safeguards).  But criminal can be a bit subjective.  Bitcoin for instance is the best vehicle for transporting money protecting from thieves whether or not they are government employees.  &gt;  Maybe $100 a coin? $10? Who knows, it sure as hell isn't $5,000 a coin though.  I think we'll see $5000 again, before $3000 or $1000. The S&P 500 is a stock market index, which is a list of 500 stocks from the largest companies in America. You could open a brokerage account with a broker and buy shares in each of these companies, but the easiest, least expensive way to invest in all these stocks is to invest in an S&P 500 index mutual fund. Inside an index mutual fund, your money will be pooled together with everyone else in the fund to purchase all the stocks in the index.  These types of funds are very low expense compared to managed mutual funds.  Most mutual fund companies have an S&P 500 index fund; two examples are Vanguard and Fidelity.  The minimum investment in most of these mutual funds is low enough that you will be able to open an account with your $4000. Something you need to keep in mind, however: investing in any stock mutual fund is not non-risk.  It's not even low-risk, really.  It is very possible to lose money by investing in the stock market.  An S&P 500 index fund is diversified in the sense that you have money in lots of different stocks, but it is also not diversified, in a sense, because it is all in large cap American stocks.  Before investing in the stock market, you should have a goal for the money you are investing.  If you are investing for something several years away, an index fund can be a good place to invest, but if you will need this money within the next few years, the stock market might be too risky for you. "I compared investing in real estate a few years ago to investing in stocks that paid double digit dividends (hard to find, however, managing and maintaining real estate is just as hard).  After discussing with many in the real estate world, I counted the average and learned that most averaged about 6 - 8% on real estate after taxes.  This does not include anything else like Dilip mentions (maintenance, insurance, etc).  For those who want to avoid that route, you can buy some companies that invest in real estate or REIT funds like Dilip mentions.  However, they are also susceptible to the problems mentioned above this. In terms of other investment opportunities like stocks or funds, think about businesses that will always be around and will always be needed.  We won't outgrow our need for real estate, but we won't outgrow our need for food or tangible goods either.  You can diversify into these companies along with real estate or buy a general mutual fund. Finally, one of your best investments is your career field - software.  Do some extra work on the side and see if you can get an adviser position at a start-up (it's actually not that hard and it will help you build your skill set) or create a site which generates passive revenue (again, not that hard).  One software engineer told me a few years ago that the stock market is a relic of the past and the new passive income would be generated by businesses that had tools which did all the work through automation (think of a smart phone application that you build once, yet continues to generate revenue).  This was right before the crash, and after it, everyone talked about another ""lost decade.""  While it does require extra work initially, like all things software related, you'll be discovering tools in programming that you can use again and again in other applications - meaning your first one may be the most difficult. All it takes in this case is one really good idea ..." Interesting to me.  Index funds are known for hurting active management. Fund flows have been toward index funds, not active funds.  But apparently S&amp;P and MSCI are making hundreds of millions just by licensing out the names of their most popular funds.  Vanguard also had a sweetheart deal at one time:  &gt; Index funds weren't always a big business, and S&amp;P didn't always know just how valuable the indexes it owned really were. Before the first ETF ever hit the market, S&amp;P agreed to a perpetual license with Vanguard that entitled the index owner to a maximum annual fee of $50,000 from Vanguard's premier index mutual fund, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.  &gt;As Vanguard popularized the index fund, S&amp;P began to realize just how much it had left on the table. By 2001, the Vanguard fund had $90 billion in assets  &gt; To this day, Vanguard's premier S&amp;P 500 index fund is reportedly operating under its perpetual license, paying just $50,000 per year to S&amp;P Global, but subsequent funds based on S&amp;P's indexes are likely paying full freight. For S&amp;P, it was a very costly lesson to learn. "Let me start by hedging a little bit: our industry (finance, I mean) is cyclical, and disciplines tend to surge, to fall, then to rise reborn from the ashes. Fixed income was dead, then fixed income was the place to be, then everyone got laid off, then there was a huge rally, etc. etc.  BUT... if you get into the wrong area at the wrong time, well it doesn't really matter if it recovers in 20 years, does it? As the great man wrote: **""in the long run, we're all dead.""**  Regarding equity research (and here I especially mean **sell side** equity research), the super-volatile markets have made it harder for traditional equity funds to eke out a living, much less to meet investor expectations, so margins have gotten thinner. The increased correlations and increased volatility has just made stock picking less productive as a strategy.  As a result, traditional equity funds have cut back on their trading activity, have consolidated their business to one or two brokers, and have stopped explicitly paying for research. This means fewer soft and hard dollars flowing to less research. Furthermore, sell side research is less productive these days, it was just easier in the ""old"" bull market, there was more room to find value and pick stocks.   All of these factors are contributing to a decline in the research business, as evidenced by the layoffs we can all find by searching google news.  All that having been said, buy side research is a different story, but the strategies are more complex and you really have to deliver value to your PM in a timely manner." The Telegraph had an interesting article recently going back 30 years for Mutual's in the UK that had beaten the market and trackers for both IT and UT  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/11489789/The-funds-that-have-returned-more-than-12pc-per-year-for-THIRTY-years.html "Yes, many hedge funds (for example) did not survive 2008-2009.  But hedge funds were failing both before and after that period, and other hedge funds thrived.  Those types of funds are particularly risky because they depend so much on leverage (i.e. on money that isn't actually theirs). More publically-visible funds (like those of the big-name index fund companies) tended not to close because they are not leveraged.  You say that ""a great many companies"" failed during the recession, but that's not actually true.  I can't think of more than a handful of publically-traded companies that went bankrupt.  So, since the vast majority of publically-traded companies stayed in business, their stocks kept some/most of their value, and the funds that owned those stocks stayed afloat. I personally did not see a single index fund that went out of business due to the recession."