A recent piece from Yahoo Finance walked through the recovery times for every S&P 500 crash of 30 percent or more since 1957, and the range is worth sitting with. The fastest full recovery took about six months. The slowest took seven and a half years. Everything else falls somewhere in between.

That spread is the whole article, really. Six months feels like a bad quarter. Seven and a half years feels like a sentence. Same event, same index, and a very different experience depending on when you bought and whether you held.

I've lived through my share of these, and my memory of the recoveries is that some felt quick and the dot-com era felt endless. But I'll leave the specific timelines to the historians and the data tables, because my recollection isn't a source and yours shouldn't be either. The numbers that matter are the ones in that source piece: six months on the fast end, seven and a half years on the slow end. Those figures sound abstract until you're three years into one and your statement still shows a loss.

Here's what I'd underline, though. Every single one of those recoveries happened. Six months or seven years, the patient investor who kept contributing through the decline came out the other side with more shares than they started with, bought at prices they'd never have accepted voluntarily. The crash is the discount. Nobody enjoys it, and I won't pretend I did. The math doesn't care about your mood.

Simple illustration. Say your fund trades at $5 a share and you're dollar-cost averaging $500 a month. At $5, that buys 100 shares. Now the market drops 35 percent and the fund sits at $3.25. Your same $500 buys about 154 shares. When the index eventually claws back to its old high, you're not back to even. You're ahead, sometimes well ahead, because you spent the whole downturn accumulating at sale prices. That isn't cleverness. You just kept showing up.

The question worth asking yourself isn't whether a crash is coming. At today's valuations, I've written before that skinnier returns over the next decade are more likely than an imminent collapse, but crashes arrive on their own schedule, not mine and not yours. The question is whether your timeline can absorb seven and a half years of patience. If you're 62 like me and drawing from the portfolio, the answer shapes how much you keep in stocks at all. If you're 35, a long recovery isn't a threat to your plan. It mostly is your plan.

So do the boring work now. Know your allocation, keep an emergency fund so you're never a forced seller, and write down what you'll do when the next 30 percent arrives, because it will. Decisions made in advance age much better than decisions made in the middle of a panic.

As always, I'm sharing perspective from forty years of managing my own money, not professional financial advice.