One of the more common discussions I have with clients these days is the one in which I explain that their house was never really worth a million dollars, and 10 months ago the Dow Jones industrial average was overpriced by the 5,000 or so points it's lost since then. The marketplace has spoken, and it's time to move on. That turns out to be easier said than done.

Missed opportunities and soured investments often register in the psyche as a death. Like a death, these losses set off a grieving process similar to the one described by noted Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the 1960s; the famous five stages, from denial to acceptance. I find many people get hung up in the middle, at the bargaining stage, and this makes it harder for them to think clearly and act decisively about the future.

How many times have we all heard people bemoan the "lost" equity in their homes? In my practice, I hear it almost every day, and almost every day I have to explain to someone that even though their house appraised for a million dollars before the crash, or even if the identical house across the street sold for that much, THEIR million-dollar house was clearly overpriced. They just didn't know it yet.

The same is true for portfolio losses, realized or not, caused by the huge decline in stock prices since last spring when the Dow industrials flirted with 13,000. People tend to become so emotionally invested in how much they've lost that it's hard to get them to plan for the future. They're bargaining with the financial gods: Please let the real estate market rebound; please let the stimulus work and the economy rebound so my stocks will go back up; please don't let my company lay me off; please make my customers pay their bills on time. If you do that, financial gods, I PROMISE I'll be more prudent in the future.

It's one of the toughest aspects of my role as a financial adviser to help clients through the bargaining stage. One way I do that is by trying to get them to accept that the distortion of reality is not what's happening today, it's what happened when we had those ridiculously high prices. Just as the big financial institutions have had to write down the real value of their so-called toxic assets, individuals need to adjust to the real worth of their assets today, and then move on.

"Get over it!" is a bit harsher than I put it, but that's the message I'm trying to convey. No, you didn't lose $200,000 on your house. That's not the problem. The problem is you had an inflated idea of what your house was worth, just as the financial markets had an inflated idea of what stocks were worth.

No, all the rules about money and wealth didn't go out the window. The problem is too many people were so busy chasing reward that they completely ignored the risk of a global financial crisis, even though history shows that we periodically have them.

This is human nature, of course, but in our culture this flaw in our DNA is exacerbated by too much short-term information that sounds like investment wisdom but often turns out to be pure folly. At the extreme end of the scale, the Jim Cramers and Suze Ormans of the world are entertainers, not financial planners.

But you don't have to act like a clown to look foolish. Fortune magazine rated AIG one of its top 10 stocks before it collapsed, and Business Week advised readers not to worry about Lehman Brothers before it went bankrupt. How can an ordinary investor successfully manage his or her financial life when the smartest people in the world couldn't tell that Bernard Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme?

Our current crisis reminds us of a basic truth: Markets don't create wealth, it's created by financial planning that recognizes there will always be another bear market. As Boston Archbishop Cardinal Cushing once observed, "It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark."

My advice to investors includes:

• Stop calculating your losses. Yes, your $80 a share stock may have fallen to $8, but if it goes up from $8 to $10, you've got a healthy 25% gain. The market has decided it wasn't an $80 stock after all, so stop thinking of it as one.
• Avoid comparing yourself to others. Your financial life is not a competitive sport. If your neighbor, friend or family member has done better than you in this financial cyclone, it didn't cost you a cent. As the Roman poet Horace wrote, "The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor."
• Today is the only reality. Your real net worth is your net worth now, not the net worth you think it should or could be because it used to be a lot higher. Plan forward from today, as opposed to planning to get back where you used to be.
• Crisis is a perfect time to plan. We're dealing today with a new set of economic conditions. Conventional wisdom no longer applies. Investors should be taking this opportunity to sit down with a professional adviser and make or update their financial plan based not on where they were, but where they're going.

John E. Girouard (www.johngirouard.com) is author of The Ten Truths of Wealth Creation, CEO of Capital Asset Management Group in Bethesda, Md., and founder of the Institute for Financial Independence, which provides investor education programs to financial professionals.