Trying to demonstrate to my husband that you can't time the market. He didn't want to fund our roths at the beginning of the year because he "knew the market would drop" because of politics. Can someone help me calculate how much interest we have "lost" this year by not doing this?

Hey there. So let's say we funded our roths this year with the max allowed. (5,500 each if I am not mistaken.) So that's 11,000 in an index fund at vanguard that would have been growing from then until now. (VFORX target date retirement fund.)

Can someone calculate the paper interest we have "lost" by not doing this? I'm not quite sure how to do this propeerly and I don't want to be wrong. I just want to show him how you can't time the market on a hunch like that and I think if I could say "We would have had xxx of dollars more in interest this year if we had funded it as normal" might help him understand a bit more.

Thanks in advance!! :)

EDIT: As someone pointed out below, I know I'm not "right" and he's not "wrong" given the fact that simple luck would have me up right now in this scenario. I just want to point out to him that what you Can control is how long your money is in the market...you can't control what the market does.

Thanks guys!!

Submitted August 24, 2017 at 09:02AM by Feed_Me_No_Lies http://ift.tt/2v8Tsrs