``Turn off the TV.''

That's the advice financial planner Harold Evensky is giving to skittish clients concerned about their dwindling investments amid the financial crisis.

''I know no one likes to hear it, but the answer is, hang in there,'' said Evensky, a partner in Coral Gables wealth management firm Evensky & Katz.

By selling stocks now, Evensky said, investors could exacerbate their financial problems. U.S. stocks fell again Friday, ending a volatile week that was the worst for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

''All investors say I want to buy low and sell high,'' he said. ``What happens at times like this, in hindsight, is that investors wind up buying high and selling low.''

Nonetheless, the ongoing credit crisis, bank failures and a plunging stock market have conservative investors looking for safer places to park their money.

At this point, they're not so concerned about making money as just not losing money.

Among the options for those simply looking for security are bonds and certificates of deposit, or FDIC-insured savings accounts. All are very secure, but none pay high interest rates.

Of course, individual investment strategies are case-specific, and what makes sense for a young professional might not work for a retiree. Some investors may need to adjust their portfolios to take care of short-term needs; others may be in a position to wait it out until the market recovers.

''It comes down to identifying your time frame,'' said Chip Bender, president of Fiduciary Financial Consultants, a Miami financial advisory firm. ``If you're looking at a two-year time frame, you want to be weighted towards fixed income. For that, there's only one place to go, and that's the Treasury.''

For example, short-term U.S. Treasury bills that mature in less than a year are regarded as extremely safe, but they don't pay much. Longer-term Treasury notes and bonds mature later but offer better yields.

Investors flocking to the safety of Treasury bills last week caused the yield on three-month T-bills to plummet to less than one percent, a sign that investors would rather make no money at all than risk holding investments that might depreciate. The three-month T-bill started the year with a 3.26 yield. By Friday, it had dropped to 0.63 percent.

Muriel Siebert, the Wall Street veteran whose eponymous brokerage firm has several South Florida locations, said investors who need short-term fixed income, such as retirees, should at least partially divest their stock portfolios.

''Sell enough of your stocks and buy municipals, so you have your basic expenses covered tax-free,'' she said. Municipal bonds are tax exempt, but have lower yields than Treasury or corporate bonds.

One local investor, Linda Dunn, 59, has begun following a more conservative investment strategy. Dunn, a recently retired schoolteacher from Coconut Grove, invested for the first time this summer, and was aiming for a traditional 60-40 split between stocks and bonds.

But as the financial crisis swelled, Dunn and her financial advisor, Cathy Pareto, decided to move away from stocks. ''We decided it would be better to be much more conservative,'' Dunn said. ``There's just so much going on with the economy.''

Dunn now has 50 percent of her investments in short-term domestic and global bonds, 25 percent in a money market account with Charles Schwab and the remaining 25 percent in the stock market.

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