<prompt> Human: Been following pf for a decent amount of time. In the last few years me and my wife have gotten some good promotions and are making some decent money. Ive done the following:paid off all debt, maxed out Roth IRA, maxed out 401k, dumped the rest into non tax advantaged accounts 3 fund lazy portfolio. I had to convince my wife to dump all this money into investment accounts because she was initially very weary.Right now we have 178k between all investments. I just checked Vanguard which has about half of that, and I saw my personal returns are -4.7k All my investments everywhere are about the same, so im guessing im down over 8k.Now I know I shouldnt worry about this and I should just let it sit as long term as possible. I just need to be able to justify this to my wife. She was hesitant about putting so much in investments in the first place, and shell be upset once I mentioned were down 8k. Weve been investing for about 3 years, so I really wasnt expecting to see such a loss over all 3 years. I expected short term losses, but I guess I just didnt consider 3 years to be short term.  <response>: Remember this concept: you havent lost any money until you withdraw it. If I invest 10,000, my rate of return can only truly be calculated when I take that money out of the account. If I dont touch it until 30 years from now, it might be 100,000 but only if I ride out the rough times. 