What to do with your money if you’re worried about the market

livemint.com:

A global market rout like the one on Monday is enough to make even the most Zen investors a little anxious about their money.

​​The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 1,000 points Monday, rattling investors after several months of relative calm. Some of the year’s biggest winners led the declines in stocks, with Nvidia, Amazon and other technology companies among the day’s losers.

Such a broad decline makes the standard advice from your portfolio manager and financial adviser—do absolutely nothing—awfully unsatisfying. It is also hard to do. There are reasons to be anxious about the economy, including a job market that shows signs of cooling, sluggish consumer spending and rising geopolitical instability.

Still, keep in mind that our portfolios are, ideally, set up to weather ups and downs. Better to stick to a plan than act impulsively.

“If you’re tweaking based on today’s decline, you’re doing it all wrong," said Noah Damsky, a financial adviser in Los Angeles.

Though doing nothing is often the right move when markets drop, there are some exceptions. Investors can use a market selloff as an opportunity to lower their future tax bills or to invest extra cash parked in savings.

A steep drop in stock prices can boost the tax advantages of financial moves that you may already have in the works.

One is a lighter tax hit when converting a traditional retirement account into a Roth IRA or Roth 401(k). With a Roth, investors get spared having to pay taxes on future investment gains, but the upfront tax bill can be steep since the converted balance counts as taxable income that year.

When stock prices fall, the tax bill for the conversion often falls too. If one day you had a $50,000 portfolio in a pretax retirement