if it's a corporate 401k you can move it to something very conservative and probably protect yourself from the worst of it. I've built up a decent college fund for my boys in a standard issue vanguard brokerage account and one of their SP500 index fund. I'm going to go mostly to cash on Jan1 and wait a year and see what happens. I need that money in 2 years (my oldest will be starting college then) so I don't have a lot of time to recover from a full on crash.