"Tell me, OCU, how brutal was that on your 401K?"
Yes, my 401k did take a hit, along with everyone else, but since I've always spread my contributions across several diversified funds, this somewhat mitigated the overall impact. And since I continued to contribute the maximum allowed by law and with my company matching, I was able to purchase additional 'shares' at reduced prices (and 'catch-up' contributions were introduced in 2001 for those of us who were over 50, just in time to take even more advantage of the lower 'prices'), which have paid handsomely in the years since.
Same thing happened in 2008 and again, my mix of small and large cap, domestic and international, indexed and money market/bond funds, have done well for me and again, I never wavered in continuing to make the maximum contributions allowed. So if you were to look at where I am now compared to where I was in 2000, I'm in damn good shape. My current net worth has reached a level that if someone had told me, when I was back in high school working for 50 cents an hour stocking shelves in the local grocery store, that I would be worth that much by the time I retired (which is still better then 18 months off, if all goes well), I would have asked them to share whatever it was that they were 'smoking' 