: 401K Enrollment Benefits I have enrolled in my 401K plan from 2016 onward. While looing into the investment portal, right now I am having only 68K but I contributed for 69K. Is it still worth in enrolling 401K? If I invested

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"right now" is a very strange time. If you've invested consistently in, say, the S&P 500 over the past 4 years, about half of your investments would be made below the current level and half above, so it's not shocking that you're at about the same level of your investments. (I'm assuming that you don't get a company match or that you're accounting for it separately) And gold is at a 5-year high, so if you had invested in gold (presuming you can do that in your 401(k)), then yes you'd be better off.

But that's hindsight. You have k in a retirement account, regardless of how much of that is contribution and how much is growth. So the only question is, what should you invest in going forward?

This is not the first (or the last) large market drop. On average we've seen one about every 10-12 years (1987, 2001, 2008, 2020). In between, the market has rebounded and grown significantly past its previous highs. So history tells us that it will probably happen again.

That said, if you are close to retirement (like within 5 years), then it's time to start putting some of your investments in less volatile markets like bonds or CDs. If you have a long time to retirement, you have the ability to take risk by investing in equities. If you don't have the appetite for such risk, then you can diversify now, but you could be missing out on some gains (lower risk means lower rewards on average).

And stay away from gold - it's a volatile commodity that does not show long-term growth (if you had invested in gold in 1980 and left it alone, you'd have about the same or less today) it's at a high now, but very likely it's because investors have "fled" to gold away from the equity collapse. Once equities start rebounding (and I believe they will), gold will likely drop.