Investing in a Post-COVID Era
Key Points – Investing in a Post-COVID Era:
- What Do Overvalued Markets Mean for Us?
- What Would It Take to Get Valuations Back to Normal?
- Financial Planning is the Difference Maker
- Fading Economic Tailwinds
- 23 minute read | 37 minutes to listen
What’s more important when you head into retirement – your asset allocation or the financial planning techniques employed in your retirement plan? Join Dean Barber and Bud Kasper as they tackle investing in a post-COVID era. You’ll understand why financial planning techniques are far more critical than just looking at the asset allocation.
Video: The Next Ten Years: Investing During (and Beyond) COVID-19
Video: Retiring with $1 Million
Investing in a Post-COVID Era
Dean Barber: Thanks so much for joining us here on America’s Wealth Management Show. I’m your host Dean Barber, along with Bud Kasper. Bud, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that we are in a post-COVID era, even though we know that there’s the Delta variant out there.
Based on what we see today, I want to talk about what the investing world will look like over the next decade or so. And what that actually means to people heading into retirement, or soon to be retired or even retired now.
Bud Kasper: Yeah. And I’m going to encourage people because when we were looking at the show’s content today, this will be a good show. We’re going to release information today that you need to know about and your neighbors and your friends and their family need to know about. So give them a call, go ahead and text them, whatever the case may be, because this information will be very special.
What Do Overvalued Markets Mean for Us?
Dean Barber: So we’re going to talk about investing in a post-COVID era even though we know that there’s the Delta variant. We’ve been talking for the last several months about how the markets are extended in their valuations.
We put a video on The Next Ten Years: Investing During (and Beyond) COVID-19, where we’ve got all kinds of charts and graphs to back up what we’re going to be talking about today.
So basically, if I can start, Bud, by saying this: the markets are overvalued. There’s zero question about that. Nobody’s going to argue that the markets are overvalued.
The critical thing is that markets can remain elevated in their valuations for a long time. And some people would make the argument that even though valuations are high, they’re justified because we have such low yields on the treasuries.
Bud Kasper: Right. Yeah. And most certainly, it’s having an impact on the stock market when you look at that. But we’ll refer to an old phrase from the past: the new normal. Is the new normal having multiples, meaning earnings above price on stocks that are 21, 22, 23? When in the past, we’d say, “Oh my God, 23 times earnings, this thing’s going to implode any second.”
Valuations Are Significantly Lower 85% of the Time
Dean Barber: Bud, only 15% of the time have the markets been valued as high as they are today. So 85% of the time, valuations are significantly lower than what they are today. So to get valuations to the level where they’ve been 85% of the time, we need almost three full years with all of the S&P 500 companies hitting their earnings expectations and zero increase in the market. If that happened, we would get valuations back into the 85th percentile.
Bud Kasper: Right. I think one of the things that people are aware of and worth mentioning when you look at the various industries and the P/E’s associated with each of those, what’s the one that the multiple is the greatest on? And the answer is going to be technology.
So when you look at the multiples associated with that, is that the new normal for that industry? And my reply is yes, it very well could be. And Dean, you had mentioned this before we came on the air when we go back to the late 1990s leading up to 2000 when we had the.com bubble, when we had the collapse of the NASDAQ 100 and the S&P 500, simultaneously, S&P 500 lost over 46% in a three-year timeframe. Is that repeatable?
Bud Kasper: And the question to answer is, of course, it’s repeatable; that could happen. That was based on anticipation the price was so far ahead of the earnings it needed to correct and come back down. But as I said a moment ago, is the new normal going to be a multiple, which is well above that?
Coke Versus Tech
I mean, look at it this way, Dean. Five American companies are worth over a trillion dollars. Now, I don’t know what the evaluation is of Coca-Cola. Do you have any idea?
Dean Barber: No.
Bud Kasper: But let’s say it’s $500 billion, just for grins and giggles, okay? If that’s the case and you look at these technology companies at a trillion, it’s almost hard to believe that they possibly could have that much more worth than what Coca-Cola has done over the last, what, 50, 60 years?
Dean Barber: Yeah, but those companies reached the masses at lightning speed, Bud. And they’ve changed our lives. They’ve changed the world.
Bud Kasper: Really, absolutely. I agree.
Dean Barber: Yeah. But the whole point here–
Bud Kasper: Coca-Cola changed my life.
Dean Barber: Well, I know.
Bud Kasper: Put peanuts in it, and away we go.
Dean Barber: Put a smile on your face, right? Have a Coke and smile.
Dean Barber: So I want to go back and do something here, Bud, because I think people believe that what they’ve experienced in recent years is what the future reality is going to hold. We learn from our experiences. And we think, “Well, that’s what’s happened, and that’s what’s going to happen now.”
Looking Back at 1980 to 1999
So I want to take you back from 1980 to 1999. I want to assume that you invested a million dollars and that you’re going to start with a 5% withdrawal rate. You’re going to increase your withdrawal each year to keep up with the actual rate of inflation that year.
Imagine somebody who retired in 1980 and did that withdrawal stream, and they had a 60/40 portfolio that they rebalanced at the end of each year wound up spending a total of $1,659,000. In the end, they had $7,285,000 left.
Bud Kasper: I’d say that’s successful.
Dean Barber: That was a success, okay? So somebody retiring in 1999 with a 60/40 portfolio would think, “Well, that’s what’s going to happen during my 20-year period.” But guess what? That’s not what happened from 2000 to 2019. You wound up spending $1,279,000 because there wasn’t much as much inflation, but you only had $647,000 left at the end of the day.
Dean Barber: I need you to watch the video on Retiring with $1 Million. Understand that in this world that we’re in today, it’s going to be far more critical for you to understand financial planning techniques than what your investment asset allocation is.
What Would It Take to Get Valuations Back to Normal?
Dean Barber: Okay. So, back to this discussion about investing in a post-COVID era. We were talking about how the markets are overvalued to a point where if all the companies in the S&P 500 meet their earnings expectations over the next two and a half years, and we have zero return in the market, that we would get back down to a valuation that would be more normal.
Bud Kasper: Yeah.
Dean Barber: It would still be elevated a bit, but more regular. So that means two and a half years, Bud, of zero growth, or we wind up with a correction or a bear market that takes those valuations back down.
Bud Kasper: Which is most likely what’s going to happen. And also, when you look at it from that perspective, about 26% of the time over the last, I’ll say 40 years, we have a bear market.
Even though bull markets last so long, it’s still a good idea to ask the question, “Do we get to wipe the slate clean and see what the growth is going to be moving forward from here?”
Is Today Like 1999 or 2000?
Dean Barber: Well, the problem we have today, Bud, is the same problem people experienced when they retired in 1999 or 2000.
Bud Kasper: Right.
Dean Barber: And so what happened-
Bud Kasper: The sequence of returns.
Dean Barber: Well, look. Remember, I said this before we went on the break, that if you retired in 1980 and lived through 1999, you had a 20-year retirement, you had a million dollars invested, you spent $1,000,000 because you kept up with inflation, and you wound up with $7 million leftover.
Bud Kasper: Yeah.
Dean Barber: Okay?
Bud Kasper: Right
Dean Barber: But then somebody who retired a year later in 2000 didn’t have even close to the same experience. They wound up with only $647,000 left. Okay? And it was because they invested in a time when market valuations were out of sight.
Alan Greenspan and Irrational Exuberance
Remember the Dot Com Bubble? We had, I remember Alan Greenspan talking about irrational exuberance-
Bud Kasper: 1996.
Dean Barber: Right. So what happened was the markets continued on a tear for four more years after he uttered those words, irrational exuberance, which everybody was like, Alan, shut up. You’re ruining the party.
Bud Kasper: No, I remembered vividly. Yeah. The stock market hated him for making that comment, even though it was overvalued in his own mind, and I have to agree with it.
Dean Barber: It was, and it proved that in 2000.
Looking at the Next Ten Years
So the point is if we look forward and say, what do we have in store for the next decade if you have a 60/40 portfolio? So there’s a video that I did along with–
Bud Kasper: By the way, to make sure 60% stocks, 40% bonds.
Dean Barber: Yeah. 60% stocks, 40% bonds. So I did a video with the regional director of AllianceBernstein. One of the things that you need to understand is that AllianceBernstein’s prediction, their forecast for a 60/40 portfolio for the next decade is somewhere between three and 4% total return. Okay. That should frighten you because most people today are looking at what’s happening in the market and think it will continue.
Bud Kasper: Right. Because people think their anticipated average return is going to be somewhere around 6%.
Dean Barber: Yeah, they think it’s probably better than that.
Historical Perspective
If you look from a historical perspective, Bud, over 20 years, I’ve got a chart in front of me where we go through all 20-year periods from 1972 forward-
Bud Kasper: Yeah. Actual periods.
Dean Barber: Right. And we don’t have any 20-year periods that were under 6%. No 20-year periods were under 6%. In fact, if you go from 1973 to 1992, you had an average annual return of 11.49%, but get this, you only had $68,000 left out of that million after spending 5% and then adjusting it for inflation each year.
Bud Kasper: Over what timeframe?
Dean Barber: 20 years.
Bud Kasper: 20 years. Okay.
Dean Barber: 1973 to 1992.
Bud Kasper: Okay.
Dean Barber: Again, so you’re only taking 5% per year, the first year, and then adjusting it for inflation. And you had an average annual return of 11.49%. You almost ran out of money. How does that happen? It’s called the sequence of returns. And we have talked so much here on America’s Wealth Management Show that you cannot spend average annual returns.
Bud Kasper: Right.
Dean Barber: You can only spend actual earnings. If you experience a bear market, or if you’re investing at market highs or retiring at market highs, the results can be devastating, which is why we want to talk to you about actually using financial planning techniques to enhance your retirement income.
Retiring with $1 Million
So we recently did a video with a couple of our CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professionals, called Retiring with $1 Million. And so what we’re doing in that video, I’ll give you just a quick heads up, is we showcase four different couples, all have exactly a million dollars, all had the same earnings history. So Social Security benefits are going to be the same.
But the difference in total spendable income from what we’ll call the ‘ideal couple’ to what we call the ‘average couple’ is over half a million dollars additional spending with the same investment, same Social Security, just using financial planning techniques.
Bud Kasper: Yeah. And I think the takeaway from this and that our office is in Missouri is the “Show Me State.” So show me, we’d love to be able to show you. When we sit down with you, and we go through the financial plan, we get every piece of detail we can get from you. And then we put it in a format of trying to maximize the results, rather than just going with the average results. This is what Dean’s talking about, and this is the impact you can have in retirement.
But so many people lack that information. They lack that critical factor to understand that there is uncertainty out there. Still, we can erase part of that uncertainty by maximizing the results of things other than just your portfolio.
Financial Planning is the Difference Maker
Dean Barber: Right. And financial planning is so much deeper than just investments. And, Bud, we’ve talked about this on America’s Wealth Management Show here many, many times, and the fact that you shouldn’t even be discussing how to invest your money until somebody has laid out a complete holistic financial plan for you. Because if you don’t have that done, the riddle that is in everybody’s head, that you want to have the answer to is, what does my money need to do for me to do the things that I want to do?
Bud Kasper: Right. And then you need to change the factors. And what I mean by factors, what’s the anticipated inflation rate? What’s the average rate you think you might anticipate in terms of what your investments are going to make? How much is Medicare going to cut into my spending? What percentage of my total income will be represented by the cost of healthcare? These little nuances are enormous in terms of the outcome, especially when you extrapolate that over a 10, 15, 20-year timeframe.
Speaking of Inflation
Dean Barber: Speaking of inflation, Bud, and this is going to be crazy, but what do you think if you started in 1973 and you needed $50,000 to live on, and you wanted to have the same standard of living, so that means you got to increase your income because of inflation, what do you think that you needed in 1981?
Bud Kasper: I’m going to say 8%.
Dean Barber: Well, you had to go from 50,000, and you had to have $106,000 a year to buy the same thing that $50,000 bought just eight years earlier. Okay?
Bud Kasper: Amazing, isn’t it?
Dean Barber: That’s inflation. Right?
Bud Kasper: Right.
Dean Barber: So if your portfolio can’t do that for you, that is when you start to experience a decline in your standard of living.
Financial Salespeople and Annuities
This is the biggest problem I have right now with these financial salespeople out there trying to tell you that an annuity is the answer. Because if you do an annuity where they’re going to say, I’m going to guarantee you 5% for life, okay, that might be true, but guess what just happened in those eight years. Because of inflation, your lifestyle was cut in half. Okay?
Bud Kasper: Right.
Dean Barber: You’re basically giving your money to an insurance company to allow them to give it back to you over 20 years.
Bud Kasper: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And that’s such an unknown factor, and how devastating that can be as you go into the future 10, 15, 20 years.
Dean Barber: And I’m not saying that all annuities are bad, but I’m saying that if you ever use an annuity, you better understand what you’re doing.
Look, all of you listening right now; we’re in a critical time here. And I’m not trying to be an alarmist. I’m just saying that things, as we go forward over the next ten years, are not going to look like they did over the last ten years. And you need to get your plan together.
Fading Economic Tailwinds
Dean Barber: Bud, I want to tackle some more of the tailwinds that have been pushing these earnings and markets forward. And those tailwinds are beginning to fade. So we want to talk about what that looks like.
Dean Barber: So, we’re talking about investing in a post-COVID era. In the last segment, we talked about how expectations, if you look at a 60% stock, 40% bond portfolio over the next decade, the anticipated total return for that mix is somewhere between three and 4%. So let’s call it three and a half percent. Okay. Now, why is that? There are two factors, it’s the valuations of where markets are today, and it’s also where interest rates are today.
Bud Kasper: Absolutely true.
Dean Barber: Okay. If we start to have inflation, what are interest rates going to do?
Bud Kasper: Yeah, they’re going to go up.
Dean Barber: They’re going to go up. What’s that going to do to the value of bonds? It’s going to reduce the value of bonds-
Bud Kasper: It’s going to go down. That’s what we’ve seen.
Dean Barber: So, the point is, there is no way that we go over the next decade and repeat what we’ve had in the last decade.
Bud Kasper: I would agree.
Dean Barber: It’s just mathematically not possible. Some of the tailwinds pushing the market’s higher, our GDP growth has been in decline now for quite some time, a decline in peak earners.
Okay. So the number of people that are working in their peak earning years is on the decline. Why? Because we’re at the tail end of the baby boomer generation. Your peak earning years are in your mid-fifties to your mid-sixties.
Bud Kasper: Exactly.
Decrease in Population at Peak Earning Years
Dean Barber: Okay. And we’ve got more and more people retiring, and there aren’t as many people behind them to pick up that slack, so we’ve got fewer people making the significant earnings, which means that spending will be lower.
That’s why our GDP number is tough. That’s why when the Fed’s trying to target 2% inflation. They’re having a hard time getting inflation really to go on any kind of a consistent basis because there’s no money velocity.
Money Velocity
Money velocity is defined as how many times a dollar changes hands and how fast people spend money. Well, the people that are in their peak earning years, and the baby boomers that have already retired, are doing two things. They’re saving as much as they can, and they’re paying down their debt as fast as they can so that they can have that option of not working in the future.
Well, what does that do? It slows the money velocity, which makes it very, very difficult to have inflation. And the Fed keeps trying to think, gosh, if we just buy bonds, we put interest rates at zero, it’s going to force people to go out there and put their money at risk.
Bud Kasper: Well, it’s so true. You and I learned from a guy who is a kind of a wildcard, but he’s accurate a lot of the time as well, and that’s Harry Dent. He talks about the demographics associated with the impact that it can have on markets and interest rates.
Demographics and Population
You’re absolutely right. The best example of what happens to an economy when you don’t have a solid birthrate is Japan. After World War II, our guys came back, met their ladies, and formed their households. Okay. In Japan, they came back as a beaten nation and had to resurrect their cities and everything else associated with that. And so they didn’t have that. By the way, how long has that lasted? It’s still in existence to some extent, even today.
Dean Barber: Yeah. Their birth rates are still so low that they’re not replacing the people that are dying.
Bud Kasper: The point I’m trying to get here is we have something we call recency bias. What that talks about is what’s happened to me recently. If you went back and you’ve already illustrated this, we go back to 1996, which was a significant period of stock growth. I’m talking about double-digit returns in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. At that time, then the bubble popped.
Y2K and the Dot Com Bubble
Bud Kasper: That was what we called, at that particular time, that’s when what was going to happen, Y2K. Right? And then we were going to have to deal with the fact that you couldn’t get money out of your ATMs and all the other silly stuff that was going on-
Dean Barber: Things were going to fall out of the sky; your alarm clock won’t work.
Bud Kasper: But what happened in the next three years, meaning 2000, 2001, and 2002 was a 46 and a half percent drop in the S&P 500. If you were in a 60/40 portfolio, 60% being stocks, and those stocks follow the S&P 500 to some extent. The S&P 500 dropped that 46.5% in that three years, you think that’s going to help the longevity of your retirement money?
Dean Barber: But here’s the problem. Okay? This is where we’re different today than we were Y2K. The yield on the 10-year Treasury then was north of 5%.
Bud Kasper: So you had a place to go safety-wise and still get a return.
Bonds in 2000
Dean Barber: Well, in 2000, if you owned the 10-year Treasury, you got a total return of 17.28%, followed by a total return of 5.4%, followed by a total return of 15.45%. So in those years where your 60% was declining, your 40% was increasing, so your 60/40 portfolios were up. I have a percent in 2000, down four and a half percent in 2001, and down 6.4% in 2002.
Bud Kasper: You can tolerate that.
Dean Barber: You absolutely can. But today, you’re not going to get those types of returns in bonds. It’s physically impossible. It is mathematically impossible to happen because you don’t have the downward trend to push interest rates because they’re already on the floor.
Federal Reserve and Interest Rates
Bud Kasper: You’re right. Then you look at what the Federal Reserve is doing to keep interest rates as low as possible to sustain growth into the future. What are the chances that they’re going to be raising rates in the near future? Probably somewhat limited at this point.
Dean Barber: Look, the whole point of what we’re talking about here is investing in this post-COVID era is that the tailwinds that have been pushing the markets higher are fading, and then they’re not.
Debt is going through the roof, and it’s going to be difficult for the 60/40 portfolio to keep up with a 4% withdrawal. Okay? So, you need to employ financial planning techniques.
The Power of Financial Planning Techniques
We have a video that we recently did showing you the power of financial planning techniques.
In this video, there are four couples, and we give them funny names. They’re fictitious people. All four couples had the same earnings history, age, investment strategy, a 60/40 portfolio, and all had exactly a million dollars.
Dean Barber: What we show you is the difference between the person who does know financial planning techniques and the person who is paying attention to the financial planning techniques and employing them is half a million dollars plus.
So a half a million dollars more to spend by using financial planning techniques. Same Social Security earnings, same million dollars, and same investment strategy. When you are talking about retirement, whether you’re five years out, ten years out, or already there, your retirement plan will depend on the financial planning techniques that you employ more than it will depend on your asset allocation.
Taxes, Inflation, and Wealth Erosion
Bud Kasper: When you look at that and realize the impact that good financial planning can mean, it is incredible how it improves the probability of success for a retiree. One of the things that we also have to consider is taxes because that tax issue can become a game-breaker right there. It can also promote your growth into the future like you wouldn’t believe.
Dean Barber: Well. And we talked about this before, that higher taxes are akin to inflation, or its evil cousin-
Bud Kasper: An eroder.
Dean Barber: Yeah. Higher taxes and inflation are both eroders of wealth. I would say that taxes, over the last couple of decades, have been the number one eroders of wealth for people in retirement because inflation has been relatively benign.
Bud Kasper: And who’s controlling that Dean? Congress.
Dean Barber: Well, Congress is, but you know what? There’s so much that you can do that’s within the confines of the law to set yourself up with the correct tax situation by doing proactive, forward-looking tax planning.
The New Normal?
Dean Barber: We’re talking about investing in a post-COVID era. Bud, what do you think of this being the “new normal” for retirees?
Bud Kasper: I don’t know if there ever is such a thing as a new normal, but new events are taking place. You can go to politics with our new president. We anticipate we might have some changes in the tax laws, which could be huge in terms of what retirees need to understand to optimize their portfolio to get the best net result possible with that. We have a market at all-time highs.
Dean Barber: Interest rates at all-time lows. Well, not quite all-time lows, but near all-time lows.
Bud Kasper: There’s a lot at our plate, and I know what you’re doing, and I know what I’m doing. It’s almost exhausting to try to keep up with all the information out there, but more importantly, to dissect that down into what’s going to serve our clients the best.
Somethings Won’t Change
Dean Barber: Well, there is something, Bud, that will not change, and I can guarantee you that. All right. When you head into retirement, you’re still going to have bills.
Bud Kasper: That’s right.
Dean Barber: You still need money coming into your bank account every month to live the life you want to live. That is a guarantee. That will not change the riddle that everybody needs to answer. How take your hard-earned dollars and have that money work for you efficiently with the least amount of risk possible to deliver to you the income you need throughout all of your retirement without running out of money?
If you want to leave a legacy, then leave that legacy. It’s far more than just asset allocation. It is financial planning techniques that are applied. So many people get so focused just on the investment.
Investments are Just a Piece of a Successful Retirement
Don’t get me wrong, investments are essential, but that is not the most critical piece of a successful retirement. Don’t believe me? Check out that video, Retiring with $1 Million. I highlight four couples, all with a million dollars, the same earnings history, and the same Social Security, all retiring with a 60/40 portfolio. Yet, the difference in total spendable income over the retirement years is over half a million dollars. All by applying financial planning techniques and agnostic on the asset allocation. Asset allocation is the same.
How can you increase your spendable income in retirement by using financial planning techniques? Watch the video to find out.
Bud Kasper: I can almost guarantee you that if you do that, if you watch this video, and it’s a fun video, quite frankly, because of the information. You will be rewarded with more knowledge than you had before you watched that video in terms of how planning can impact your retirement.
Asset LOCATION, Not Allocation
Let’s talk about something more related to, say, real estate. What do they always say is the most essential thing in real estate? Location, location, location. Let me tell you. That applies to financial planning as well! How you prepare before retirement to locate your money will make a significant difference in the net amount of money you’re going to be able to live on when you retire, Dean.
Dean Barber: You’re talking about asset location. You’re talking about tax allocation. Yes, you’re exactly right, but that’s part of the financial planning techniques.
Bud Kasper: Absolutely. That’s my point with it. I mean, if you ask people before they get into retirement and say, “Well, is your Social Security going to be taxed?” They probably would say, “No.” While actually, there’s a different formula associated with that based upon the amount of income you have that will make that Social Security taxable or not taxable. Do you know that? Well, that’s part of the financial planning process—just one tiny element associated with that and where you end up saving money.
Keeping Uncle Sam Out of Your Savings
For those of you who are working right now and still putting money aside, I hope you’re looking at Roth 401(k)s because that’s the most beautiful thing that we’ve seen in the last, what, 20 years. The reason is it eliminates Uncle Sam when it comes to income distribution.
Do it now, and you will be rewarded in the future. If you think that the tax brackets might increase, and I’m betting that they will, look at the amount of debt. They have to get it from somewhere, right? If that’s the case, you need to understand how this could impact your retirement income.
The SECURE Act
Dean Barber: Well, Bud, Congress has done a couple of things to guarantee that they will raise revenues to the Treasury without actually increasing taxes. One is the Secure Act. It stands for secure, S-E-C-U-R-E, setting every congressperson up for retirement enhancement, right?
Bud Kasper: I hadn’t heard that one. That’s great.
Dean Barber: What they’re doing in that is they’re forcing money to come out of IRAs at death. When the money goes to the next generation, they’re forcing all that money out within ten years.
There’s no longer a required minimum, but they know that all the people in their 70s and 80s today who will be passing away in the next several years have tons of money in IRAs or 401(k)s. All of that money will come out, and it’s all going to go down to the kids who are probably in their peak earning years. It’s going to be stacked on top of that income, and that income is going to be taxed at some of the highest rates you’ve ever seen.
Bud Kasper: There’s nothing like having a treasure chest beyond belief in terms of the amount of money that’s been accumulated in retirement plans. You’re at Congress, and you’re spending money, and you’re saying, “All we have to do is tap into that treasure chest just a little bit more, just a titch, and it will take care of all of our needs.”
Capping IRA Accounts?
Dean Barber: Well, and then you’ve heard the ideas being floated, Bud, about limiting the amount of money that a person can have in a Roth IRA. They’ve floated the idea of limiting or capping the amount of money that a person can have in their IRA to $5 million.
Bud Kasper: Is that right?
Dean Barber: Yeah.
Bud Kasper: Well, that’s not a bad number, I would say in hindsight associated with that, but this is what Congress can do. It often means it’s going to cost you more money, and that’s where comprehensive financial planning comes into play. It’s our job to represent to you the best ways of getting your net income absent of taxes to the best of our ability.
Investing Before Planning
Dean Barber: What happens if you don’t employ financial planning techniques before you have an investment discussion? What happens to you? The answer is pretty simple. You will fall prey to financial salespeople because they will focus on the magic of the product that they are showing you.
If you employ the financial planning techniques set out in our Guided Retirement System™, you won’t fall prey to a financial salesperson. It will be clear what your money needs to do and what options are available to get your money to do what you want to do. So to a financial salesperson, you will say, “No, I’m not interested in that product because that doesn’t solve my needs.” If you don’t know what those needs are because you haven’t gone through the financial planning process, you will fall prey to financial salespeople. I promise you.
Bud Kasper: I’ve seen it happen too many times, and it’s become somewhat of a challenging thing to reverse, by the way, when people have made that leap into that type of a product. It’s not about a product, folks. It’s about planning.
Educate and Start Planning
Dean Barber: It’s a process, and there is a true art form to proper financial planning. Get out and watch the videos we discussed today on the next ten years and retiring with $1 million.
Also, check out our calendar to schedule a complimentary consultation with one of our CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professionals. We can visit with you by phone, in person, or virtual meetings.
Dean Barber: I’m Dean Barber, along with Bud Kasper. Everybody stay healthy, stay safe. We’ll see you in a week.
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