We flew home from the Dominican Republic a few weeks ago with five checked bags. Four of them came off the carousel. My daughter's did not.
Hers held everything that mattered to a teenager. Her clothes, her expensive makeup, the fancy Dyson hair dryer. And it was gone.
Except it was not gone. It was late.
We had all the bags in our hands at our connection in Miami, checked it onto the Miami to Denver leg ourselves, and figured we’d see them soon. But one didn't show up in Denver. It took eight days for that bag to finally make it home.
Eight days. And the whole time, my daughter was grieving that suitcase like it had been thrown into the ocean.
Here is the thing I could not stop turning over. The bag was never actually gone. It existed the entire time, sitting in some facility with her clothes still folded inside. The only thing tracking it, the paper airline tag, had come off somewhere along the way. We had no AirTag, nothing of our own. We were completely dependent on what the airline could see, and for eight days, the airline could not see much either.
The dread was real. The loss was not.
I do this for a living, so of course my brain went straight to money.
A bad day in the market feels exactly like that empty carousel. The number is down five figures and your body reacts like something was stolen. Your brain files it as a permanent loss. Gone.
But a decline on paper is a bag in transit. Your shares did not vanish. What changed is the price someone would pay for it today, not what it's worth to you over the life of your plan.
A paper loss only becomes a real loss when you do something to make it one.
Picture the traveler so certain the bag is gone that they run out and rebuy the whole suitcase at full price, and the next morning the original shows up on the carousel. Now they've paid twice, and the panic is the only thing that actually cost them money.
Selling everything on the scary day is that same move. You take something temporary and uncertain and spend real money turning it into something permanent.
I'm not going to tell you every bag comes back in eight days, or that a rough stretch in the market resolves on a schedule. What I can tell you is the most expensive decisions people make with their money are almost always made during the scare, not because of it.
The real job is to not make the eight-day-panic decision. That's what a plan is for.
My daughter got her suitcase back. The only thing she lost was a week of imagining a disaster that never happened.
Most money disasters are the same story. The question is whether you let the empty carousel talk you into paying for a loss you never actually had.
Pro tip from a hard week: there's an AirTag going in every international flight we go on now. You can now help airlines locate your bag quicker for you by using your AirTags. Happy Travels! 🙂