Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, you really can't say because 401Ks and mutual funds are not types of investments. They're ways of investing, and I think that this has perhaps come as a big shock to people. In fact, you hear a lot of people talk about, as you said, 'Well, my 401K is going down, mutual funds are going down.' Well, not all of them are because they can invest their money in a different way. So I think one of the lessons that people ought to take out of this financial turmoil that we've had over the past couple of weeks is, for example, to look at their 401K and ask, 'Where's that money being invested?' Is it going into safe things like CDs or is it going into more risky things like stocks? And most people have some control over that. You're given options in your 401k of where you want to put your money, so this is an excellent time to review that for the future and decide where you want to put that 401K money. Same thing with mutual funds. There are thousand and thousands of different kinds of mutual funds. They're not all in the stock market. Some are in very safe investments. So find out where your money is going in these two crucial ways of investing money, track that, make decisions so that you won't be unaware in the future about how your money is doing."