I wonder how people experience it too. For example, if you have a drawdown which wipes out your last x years of savings, is that very discouraging?
Or if movements in a given day/month exceed your monthly paycheck, do you start to question why you even bother working?
My mental accountant says that to have either of those worries you need minimum 500k invested, and I am not there so…don’t have them 
how so? if you save for 2x years and experience a 60% drop, then about x years of savings would be wiped out.
and big moves can happen when you’re invested in bitcoin! 
Well, that’s my point, when did VT/ACWI experience a 60% drop?
I’m not
I already had that - and it was no big deal for me. I just stopped watching my portfolio for anything other than buy orders and within a year or two it was back to normal (Ukraine War)
In fact I just started investing on margin as well - so I had 1.5x the drawdown. But when we bought our apartment, I had good margin timing. You win some, you lose some ig 
What happens if you’re investing with margin like 1.5x and there’s a huge drawdown? Can’t ibkr decide to sell your shares at a loss to recover the margin, because they suddenly consider the margin/leverage not safe anymore?
The margin requirements on portfolio margin are very generous - I also don’t expect to lose that much in a single day or even month. I have many possibilities to replenish the negative cash balance if needed.
A broad index fund like VT or VWRD needs to crash > 60% in order for this to happen. AND I’m now actually less leveraged than 1.5x 
I also don’t plan to extend the margin - it’s just the down payment for my apartment - the more I naturally contribute now, the smaller will the relative leverage become.
Note that in time of market stress margin requirement could change.
Yeah! I meant the 2nd poll
Yes, IB had a lot of these… I don’t expect margin requirements to become unreasonable as long as there is liquidity.
A thought I had- what defines a real drawdown/crash?
In my experience from dotcom and GFC, a real drawdown is when you stop watching your net worth, you stop watching your positions (be VT or else), you’re not interested anymore, you trade less, you probably don’t want to see a financial forum anymore either. You also see real world economic impacts, corporate bankruptcies in the news, job losses, fear for the own job, you cut your expenses etc. That’s the true test. Hasn’t happened since 2008/09.
2001-2009
Or when you work at an insurance company, see that their hybrid bonds trade at 25 cents ler dollar. Personally hear from the CFO that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy as both, he didn’t expect the company to go bust… and indicating that the perpetual instruments may actually not be that perpetual (goven change in legislation). Meaning the CfO indicates you had to hold these for max 2-3 years until they were bought back at full nominal value - AND you still decide to not invest any more money as you were ccompletely out of liquidity, scared as heck about your job and truly worried about your friends and families job.
The “blood on the streets” scenario…
My 2009 scenario. It goes further - i could have had bought company shares at 35% discount (ESPP). This in a fairly solid blue-chip company. The shares had already gone down by about 60%. Meaning that I could have had bought at about 65% of 40% of what the shares were 2 years ago. Meaning 26% of the original share price from 2007. AND i didn’t buy as I was just too scared.
this is a crash. And always remember - when indices go down by 50%, your individual shares will have gone down by 60%+. Individual shares alwas tank harder than the broad Index. Sounds illogical, but thats how it is. And by the way, this even applies to robust, defensive shares…
Yes, but imho the upside is just much higher than the downside at least in my case. I either FIRE or I don’t having 800K in my portfolio doesn’t really do much for me and if I never FIRE, then so be it .
And if people have the risk aversion that they want to be safe and not adjust their spending / lifestyle at all, even in a 2nd WW type crisis, so be it.
My experience is: You live with how much you have and instead of stressing out, I know that 1000s of people are much less of than me either way.
Right, that was my point, one that you’ve correctly made repeatedly: that most here haven’t experienced it.
To my understanding VT was introduced in 2008. Which data are you referring to before 2008?
MSCI World. VT is new, but you could kind of investvin global market cap (just not truly global and only mid/large cap) for longer than that.
I guess this is where the 60/40 portfolio comes to the rescue. your stocks fell by 50% so now looks like 30/40 so you automatically rebalance to 42/28.