Pay Dirt Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by dszc/Getty Images Plus.  Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Kristin and Ilyce here . (It’s anonymous!) Dear Pay Dirt, My mother-in-law recently asked if I could help her with taxes. Since I didn’t have my laptop on me at the time, she just handed me the entire packet of paperwork, and I took it home. During the process, I noticed a five-figure short-term capital gains loss carried over from the previous year. This seemed quite unusual, given what we know about their finances and how incredibly conservative she is about investing. I followed the carryover back to a transaction in 2022. It seemed she had pulled most of her savings (a little under $300,000) out of the various (reasonable, diverse) investments it was in and reinvested in mostly treasury bonds. I think this was likely as a reaction to constant news coverage about drops in the stock market. Sadly, she did this at the lowest point of the market.…