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I started hearing the sirens go by my apartment long before the coronavirus panic spread to the rest of the US. That’s because I live only one mile away from the nursing home that’s the center of the coronavirus outbreak in Washington, and I’m on the most direct route between that facility and the nearest hospital. 

What started out as a worrisome local affair has now spread to the entire US economy. My net worth — which only within the past couple of years passed above zero, thanks in part to the stock market’s bull run — tanked from a high of $250,000 a few weeks ago to just over $172,000 as of this morning, according to my net worth tracker. I expect it’ll go down even further. 

A lot of people are panicking right now, and understandably so. I also have two degrees in biology and I’ve worked in infectious disease facilities. I know this is one of the biggest biological threats we’ve faced in my lifetime. I expect I’ll even get the coronavirus myself sooner or later, given where I live.

But here’s what I’m not doing: Changing anything about my investment strategy. 

I’m using a dollar-cost averaging strategy

A lot of people are dumping money into the stock market right now because stocks are essentially on sale. But I’m in this for the long game, putting in a set amount every month regardless of what shenanigans the market is up to. This is known as the dollar-cost averaging strategy (as opposed to lump-sum investing), and it means ignoring downturns as much as upticks. 

This dollar-cost averaging approach has been shown many times to be the best approach in the long run. Besides, by picking and choosing when to buy and sell, you need to be right twice: you need to buy the stocks at their lowest point, and sell them when they’re at their highest. 

Frankly, I’m not interested in playing that game quite yet, and so I’m continuing on with business as usual and setting aside my normal 10% into my SEP IRA.

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I don’t have a reserve investing fund

Some of the smarter folks who are dropping money into the stock market now are doing it from reserve funds that they’ve set aside for just a scenario like this. 

But I don’t have an investment reserve fund. All I have, aside from my retirement accounts and various savings accounts, is my emergency fund. 

Although this is an emergency on a national scale, it’s not yet an emergency for me. That money is meant to take care of me if s**t personally hits the fan, such as if I lose a lot of clients overnight, my husband loses his new job, or we get sick. Until then — if we even need it — that money stays put. 

I’m focusing on debt payoff first

I’m lucky that my husband and I earn more than we need to make ends meet each month. That hasn’t always been the case, and so now we’ve got a plan for that extra income. With that extra cash, we’ve been paying down our student loan debt, and this downturn in the stock market isn’t going to change that. 

I’m not interested in playing a short-term game with the stock market. Even now, with stock prices as low as they are, that’s just too risky for me. But what is known is that I can decrease my debt levels today, for a known rate, by paying down my debt first. 

Last month, I paid off the last of my student loans 14 years early, thereby eliminating a $412 monthly payment from my budget and saving thousands of dollars in interest in the process. But my husband still has student loans we’re paying off from when he was in college. That’s still a $368 monthly payment we need to come up with, and according to my Undebt.it account, $99 of that is going towards just interest this month. 

By focusing on paying off our obligations first, we’ll get a known return on our investment. And it’ll reduce our monthly bills so that if this really does take a turn for the worst, we won’t be unable to make a burdensome student loan payment each month.

I’ve got a long way to go before retirement

I am 32 years old. I’ve got a long way to go before I need to start worrying about market downturns in retirement. 

If I was older, then sure, I might be panicking a bit more. But there’s plenty of time for this (relatively big) hiccup to recover. If it doesn’t, well, then we’ve got bigger problems to worry about than the stock market. 

Big downturns are to be expected

It’s scary that the market is tanking right now, sure, but it’s only normal. There have been many, many big downturns over the years, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. There’ll also be many more to come. 

This is only one blip in a long series of blips. This blip hits much closer to home because literally dozens of my neighbors down the road are sick or have passed away, unfortunately. But that doesn’t make me perfectly poised to take advantage of a downturn in the stock market, and it’s not my long-term strategy even if I wanted to. And so, I’m staying the course.

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