Now what? Dow dives despite bailout plan

Tampa, Florida - The government bailout was supposed to shore up the economy. But some investors are scared straight over what happened Monday. Robert Forsythe is the Dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of South Florida and says, "It's way too early to think about panicking."

But Forsythe admits that when it comes to your 401K there are some people who should be concerned. "Certainly, if you're 60 and planning on retiring in five or six years and you're holding onto risky investments that you just saw decrease in value, it's going to be hard to make that up in a couple of years and get that back to where you were. On the other hand, if you're 30 years old this is a great time to go in and buy underpriced securities. "

Forsythe says if you're not close to retirement age you should keep it in perspective. "Even as recently as four years ago this month it was below 10,000, so yes it's down but still relative to where we've come. It's way too early to think the sky is falling."

So what about our mortgages? Forsythe says, "There was a trend in this country starting in the mid 90's where we started pushing very hard to make housing affordable for all Americans and, as noble a cause as that sounds, it led to making loans to people who couldn't afford those loans."

He believes Uncle Sam will step in and try to do even more to solve the sub prime mortgage mess. "It's going to be real interesting what happens with the sub primes. These are quite frankly the mortgages that never should have been made in the first place. But now we have a lot of people trying to make the payments and they're struggling."

Forsythe says for those who didn't sign up for a risky mortgage brace yourself because refinancing and borrowing money for things like college or a new car is going to be difficult.

"I would hope so. What led us to these problems is that we make it far too easy to get credit and we were making loans that we should not have been making and so I think we're going to see things tightening up quite a bit."

Some people are already having credit issues as some credit card companies are reducing some customers credit card limits even if they've been paying on time and have stellar credit.