Those who are losing that much on their RSP's should seek a different financial advisor - they should have a mix of investments and not just mutual funds and stock...

Ben,I think it may be a little bumpier than "THEY" may like us to believe.The forest industry has shown us a bit of what is ahead.Next year the oil and gas industry in BC will follow the steps of the forest industry.No one billion dollar windfall to count on from royalties and lease sales.What else do we have besides mining to carry us through this storm.

We need more doom and gloom to help us through this thing. NOT!!!!!!!

Stop buying = Stop manufacturing = stop working = stop maintaining value of property and on and on the viscious circle will go until when? Until someone says, hey I have confidence and I am going to buy something or I am going to make something because I know someone who will buy that from me or give me something in trade.

We don't need "tell it like it is". We need "tell how it can be".

hey ragtop what makes you think that the mining industry will surive the fallout if lumber oil and gas go in to a slowdown mining will be right there with them. Its call supply and demand. No money no demand

Good advice Gus!
We are still dealing with panic!
Settle down,stop selling, and things WILL improve,it's just going to take some time.
There ARE some great buys on some blue chip stuff right now, and those that can should take advantage of that.
Winter is coming and oil WILL go back up!
And so will gold.
It's tough right now, but we all need to relax and try and look forward.

"Canadian Rich Dad" (Darren Weeks) is hosting a seminar tonight at the Ramada. A group of us is going. Google him, google Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad Poor Dad). I did and am going tonight with a group of gals to listen to Darren. Was free if you register online. (Not sure if it's still open to register online or not as it's tonight).
There is a local business here in town who I contacted after reading their success story after attending one of Darren's seminars. They rated him an enthusiastic 10 on a scale of 1-10. Times are changing and we need to change with them.

Robert Kiyosaki is a joke and his "Rich Dad, Poor Dad books are total garbage. Financial porn to the unenlightened. John T Reed wrote a scathing expose exposing Robert Kiyosaki for the fraud that he is. It is a fantastic read. Everyone can read it online. It will afford you a huge paradigm shift when it come to Financial Gurus. Google it.

I don't know Junco, he seems pretty smart. Linked to Donald Trump...must be doing something right???
I'm open for learning new things well because I'm poor so hey can't get any worse right? Seminar was free for me, I registered online.
Let's hope it goes well tonight!

I just read through John T Reed's site about Kiyosaki. I guess it's who you believe and whose book you'd rather buy. John T Reed seemed to bash Kiyosaki an awful lot and at the end of each bashing he had a link to buy his own book "Succeeding" with another link box right beside it to go straight to the shopping cart.
I guess we can take info from whoever we want, think about it and do what our own brains and guts tell us to do with it.
I was sort of turned off by John T Reed though. I got the feeling he was bashing someone to make himself look better and to be the go to guy? Who knows, hey?...lol..

My opinion is that we in this region will make out ok. We have lost endless opportunities to diversify and make our economy more sustainable because our government policy is multinational centric, but when you've been as miss managed as we have been it means we have a lower height to fall from.

Our economy has always been based with a strong foundation of real wealth producing real value for real dollars. That is going to be our saving grace. Elsewhere they have economies based heavily on over leveraged fake money growth that fuels their speculation bubbles and facilitates their service based economies. Elsewhere they have been subsidized buy the creation of fake money wealth through appreciation, speculation, stock markets, and goodwill valuations and they will be the ones taking the hardest landing.

I look to see a complete realestate valuation collapse in Vancouver unless they can find more foreigners to step up to the plate with their fake foreign currencies. The people of Vancouver and area, the Island, the Okanogan and such are losing wealth they never really had and the reality will drag the whole province down as the government spends money to bail out the majority voters. IMO that will be the biggest negative impact on this region.

I think forestry is nearly bottomed out. Canfor may shift some more chip production from sawmills to chip plant and that is probably the biggest threat now. Home sales in America are holding up, its the new homes and the valuations that are not. I think the quicker we can get the valuations in order the quicker we will see a recovery. Therefore the faster the North American housing market crashes the better it will be for us in the forest industry.

IMO PG will see slow times, but nothing like what Vancouver and other areas of this province are about to experience. All the future economic activity in this province will be in the North with pipelines and related spin offs, a new Peace river dam, Alcan-Rio, and the new transportation efforts underway mean any slow times will be maximum two years if that. PG may benefit as a service center, but has a lot of negatives to go with that so I think were ripe for the picking by competing service centers in the north and that is where most of the future growth should be coming from? Time will tell.

If the advice is free then great if it makes sense, but most of the people selling their advice are not accountable for their advice. They make a living telling other people how to invest, and so their sales pitch is always fine tuned for the sale. Be suspicious, very suspicious should be the order of the day and don't follow the herd for the sake of following the herd. If you can learn about investment options then its good, but if they are telling you how to invest, then it probably isn't so great. AIMHO

Re: RSP values

If you haven't lost your initial investment you haven't really "lost" anything have you? Just don't panic and think smarter. Consider what you can do now instead of mourning unhatched eggs.

It is the same with real estate. You haven't lost value in your home if you still own it and have not sold it. If you do sell and you receive less than you paid for it, well yeah, you lost value at that point.

Its the leveraging that gets people. They have no choice to hold when they are over leveraged. Margin calls don't allow for one to wait and that is a lot of peoples problems.

called spending money you don't have and have no back up for [assests] people just being greedy

I am somewhat confused by some of the comments posted here. You have not "lost" anything in your RSPs unless you actually sell your units; panic and scaremongering makes the whole situation worse. Interestingly enough 4 years ago we had many of the same headlines and the TSX dropped to below 9000 then too. Check your news histories and you will see what I say is true. Yes, the situation is very unstable but does this mean that the sky is falling and our assets will never increase? No! Personally, I look at this as an opportunity to buy at a great price, but that is my opinion based on the facts as I see them. Historically, our economy actually has little to do with the value of our investment funds. By listening to an overview of many of the financial experts out there and not focusing on only one, it seems clear that the media, as usual is focusing on headlines that get the public encited. Get educated and form your own opinion based on the facts not the media.