No, you can’t take your money out of the company retirement program and stick it in your mattress.  You can’t even buy gold in your retirement plan (although you might be able to buy a gold fund that invests in gold and gold miners, but that’s not exactly the same).

The bottom line is that when you want to hold onto the balances in your retirement fund, you need to search among the holdings and find a fund that is essentially a conservative bond fund, or even a money market fund.

These money market funds are many times labeled “Stable Value Fund”.  Normally, that’s code for “money market fund”.

A money market fund is a fund that has a per-share value of $1 and will always have a per share value of $1, so there is no fluctuations at all.

The only benefit to holding such a fund is the interest rate you will receive which these days is probably around 1.5-2.5%.

But even if you convert all your holdings to a money market fund, you probably do NOT want to change your contributions to go into this money market fund.  Remember, one of the beautiful things about your retirement program is that you are regularly contributing to the fund.  In essence, you are dollar cost averaging your contributions and buying shares in really cheap mutual funds at very low prices.  And eventually these funds will come back and the purchases you make during these dark days will look very good to you in a year or two or three.