Managing Your Portfolio in Times of Crisis

[EPISODE]

[00:00:07] Dean Barber: Welcome to The Guided Retirement Show. I’m your host Dean Barber, founder, and Managing Director at Modern Wealth Management, joined today by Bud Kasper. He’s also a Managing Director at Modern Wealth Management Lee’s Summit office and this is a special podcast of The Guided Retirement Show. We want to take time as we record this, we are in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and what’s happening with the financial markets.

And as opposed to just focusing on what’s happening with the markets right now with the coronavirus, what we want to do is we want to spend some time talking about how do you react or what should you be doing in times of economic crisis. You know, sometimes an economic crisis can sneak up on us but sometimes that economic crisis comes at us at lightning speed. There are certain things that people should be aware of. So, let’s start with a simple question from you.

Now, you’re 37 plus years in this industry. You’ve been around for a long time, seen all kinds of bear markets and all kinds of recessions. Once a recession hits, Bud, is it too late or is it illogical to begin to make changes to a portfolio? Is there ever a point in time, which you should say just don’t do anything, you’ve waited too long?

[00:01:31] Bud Kasper: I don’t think so, Dean. I think everybody’s individualistic because we all have different emotions that come up. The key is to keep them in check. Yeah, you said 37 years plus, well, my first client was Davy Crockett and he and I sat down to discuss his risk level just to see what might be happening. Now, to answer your question sincerely, this is the time for cool heads to prevail.

You need to know what your options are. If you’re making the moves, why are you making the moves? And you might say, “Well, that’s silly.” You know, it’s because markets are going down. We need to be able to preserve capital. Appreciate that. Understand that. But a second move might actually be more detrimental to you than just staying put. Now, I’ve never been one that’s totally buy and hold, because they don’t think that necessarily serves the best interests of the purpose of the money. Now, notice what I said. The purpose of the money, that money has a reason that you spent your entire career, let’s say in collecting it, and now it’s supposed to be serving you.

So, when the market comes in and starts to pull some of that back out of your pocket that you never intended to have it leave, I think it’s important that we have to ask the question. Sustainability of what you really have for the purpose of the money needs to be first and foremost. Let me give you an example. If we were looking at a portfolio that was dominated in bonds and the bonds were providing a good amount of interest income to support the amount of distributions let’s say that you’re taking from your IRA or taxable account, whatever the case may be, would you abandon that strategy just because we’re getting fluctuation in terms of the price of the underlying bonds?

The answer is no. You shouldn’t do that. It’s serving its purpose from that. The market can fluctuate all around, but it shouldn’t take you off course in what that money is supposed to be doing for you in terms of serving your income need.

[00:03:29] Dean Barber: But you’re assuming, Bud, the people have made their investment decisions based on what that money needs to do and you and I both know with over 70 years combined in this industry together, that that’s not typically what happens. There are very few percentage of the population that takes the time to create a plan, like what our guided retirement system does to actually understand the purpose of each individual type of asset that you have, your IRAs, your 401(k)s, your taxable accounts, your Roth and those types of things, and understand the purpose of each one of those different buckets of money and then putting those buckets of money to work in the right way.

If you haven’t done that, then I think what happens is in times of economic stress, market stress, that’s where the emotion can come in. So, I think it’s crucial to step back and say, “Why am I investing this money? What is it supposed to do?” Your example of bonds is a good one, Bud, we can also take that example and talk about real estate.

What I will tell people is if you have a dozen real estate rental properties and each one of those rental properties are all occupied, you’ve got say a five-year lease term on those rental properties and the real estate market takes a hit like it did back in the financial crisis, do you step back and say, “Oh, my gosh, the value of my homes are down?” No. What do you do? I bought these homes. I bought these rental properties in order to generate income.

My tenants are solid. They’re going to continue to pay rent. They need a place to live. I’m not going to worry about those ups and downs. And the plus side of that is they don’t post the value of your real estate online every day or in the newspaper every day. What’s happening with bonds is they’re getting priced every single day and when people understand the bond market is like a good old boy network of trading and saying, “Hey, I got this bond. What do you give me for it?” well, based on what we see happening, I’ll give you X.

[00:05:28] Dean Barber: Well, if you hold on to that bond, bonds are always issued and mature at what we call a par value. So, if you’re satisfied with the yield or the interest on that bond, there’s no need to change it just because it may be trading above or below that par value.

[00:05:44] Bud Kasper: Yeah, I agree. And you’re paralleling with me perfectly in terms there’s a purpose there. And as long as this is being served, then there’s no reason for you to change it. Now, I have to also say that with what’s going on, I am completely perplexed with the amount of volatility that we’re seeing in the bond market because we all believe bonds to be that safe investment that we can put money into hardly have any principal value, if any at all and we’re just going to collect the interest income. Well, not so and not so in this particular environment because of all the mechanics that are going in behind the scene.

Look what the Federal Reserve is doing with the $1 trillion stimulus plan that they’re putting into that. You think that doesn’t matter? We’ve all heard about these negative interest rates that they had over in Europe but what did we see most recently? You saw treasuries going down to almost zero yield. Now, they’ve come back up a little bit since then, but remember in the bond, if the interest rates are coming up, then the dollar value is going to the other direction, which is not comfortable for people that want bonds for the comfort and safety that they are defined as.

[00:06:53] Dean Barber: Bud, let’s back out of the coronavirus crisis of 2020 and let’s back up to the timeframe of 2008. So, one of our favorite bond fund managers who has had a stellar long-term track record in 2008, at one point, this bond fund manager was down, his portfolio was down about 12% or 13%, wound up being down 5% for the entire year of 2008. Now, when you look at the credit crisis that we had, the crisis with the loans and especially mortgages and things like that, there was no safe haven in 2008.

But people that bought those bonds for the right reason, own those bonds for the right reason and wanted the coupon or the yield to drive income to them, that was a big deal. And you look at what that bond fund did the next year, up nearly 20%. So again, it’s understanding the assets that you own, but again, you got to step back and really understand what you do own and what is the purpose of that money.

And this shouldn’t be a conversation that you’re having with your neighbors or your coworkers or your relatives about what they’re doing. This has to be very, very specific to you and the guided retirement system that we utilize, Bud, really identifies what’s an ideal asset allocation. And I think one of the best things that people can do is to understand the range of stocks and bonds that they should have.

And when I say a range, what I mean is, people there used to be that old saying, invest your age in bonds, right? So, if you’re 65 years old, have 65% of bonds, if you’re 70 years old, have 70% of bonds. That’s an unsophisticated rule of thumb way of investing and it should be ignored in my opinion. What you should do is you should have your plan created in such a way that gives you from a historical perspective the probability of being successful and spending the way that you want to spend in retirement at different levels of risk.

[00:08:59] Dean Barber: So, you might start with a level of risk that is 100% cash. Well, does that work? Can you get the income that you need from a historical perspective? Did it work? Okay. What if you had 100% bonds? What if you had 10% equities and 90% bonds and you keep working up those percentages all the way up to 100% stocks? Well, what’s the range?

Maybe it’s 30% equities and 70% fixed income works and you might have the same kind of a score as far as a probability of success at a 70% equity, 30% fixed income, and you know that you have that range of anywhere from 30% to 70% equity that will allow your portfolio to work. Well, then when you start getting into troubled economic times, you can say you know what, it’s okay to back off on the equity exposure. Maybe you don’t want to abandon it completely, but it’s okay to back off on that equity exposure, and your plan is still going to work. But with a lack of clarity of what that range is, Bud, that is where I think people allow emotion to take over in the investment strategy.

Of course, you and I both know that the two most powerful emotions out there are fear and greed. Greed can get the best of you as well. So, remember, we did a radio show back in January where it talked about people’s biggest regrets for investing in 2019. The number one biggest regret that people had was they didn’t get aggressive enough in their portfolios. Well, you know what those people were doing? They were getting more aggressive in January of 2020.

I saw the same thing happen in the dot-com bubble, Bud. I saw the same thing happen in the Great Recession. People look at the last three or four years, the last five years and they go, “Oh my gosh, I’m missing this. I need to get more aggressive with my portfolio,” and our job as financial planners, especially using our guided retirement system is say, “No, wait a minute, hold on here. It’s not about the return. It’s about what you can do with your life.”

[00:11:00] Dean Barber: And it’s going all the way back to what you said at the very beginning of this podcast, Bud, is what’s the purpose of this money? What does the money need to do for you? And to identify that, there is an art and there is a science to that asset allocation in how you put that together. And that’s in the art of putting together the financial plan in what we call the guided retirement system.

[00:11:26] Bud Kasper: Right. Yeah, what you want to really be at this point is like, Fonzie. You want to be cool. Here’s a real interesting point as well. Are we closer to the bottom, Dean, than we are or do we have more downside to go? Well, nobody knows that. You know, at the time we’re doing this podcast, the S&P 500 is down about 25% when you look at it. However, let me rephrase this and go back to 2008 because you brought that up earlier.

The aggregate bond average in 2008 actually made 5.6%. If you look at a managed mutual fund, I’m going to use the example of the PIMCO Income Fund, they, in fact, were off, I’m looking up here the screen, 5.47%. So, what was the difference between the aggregate bond average and PIMCO income? And the answer is obvious, the composition of the bonds that are inside of that.

So, if you don’t know how your portfolio is going to behave in different bond environments, how do you know if you’re in the right one? And therefore, again, and I think the important thing to take away from all this is we’ve developed this guided retirement system. Ladies and gentlemen, I have never seen anything as special as what this is. It’s easy to understand. It follows all the details necessary from a historical perspective as to the pluses and minus associated but more importantly, it puts you on a path that you clearly understand to meet the objectives that are so personal to you.

[00:13:03] Dean Barber: Well, Bud, so let’s go back to that PIMCO Income Fund for an example because your bond aggregate was positive in 2008. You have on your screen what the bond aggregate did in 2009.

[00:13:18] Bud Kasper: Yes, I’ll have that. Yeah. The aggregate the next year was 5.93, close to what it was and PIMCO was up 19.21.

[00:13:28] Dean Barber: All right. So, again, it’s an understanding of what was the composition of the PIMCO Income Fund. Now, you’re talking about a mutual fund. A PIMCO Income Fund is also available in an ETF format, but the composition of what’s inside of it is very, very similar from the ETF to the mutual fund. And so, if you own ETFs or if you own mutual funds, either one, and by the way, if you’re confused about the difference between those, check out on the Guided Retirement Show. We did a special with Bud Kasper and Jason Newcomer on mutual funds versus ETFs back in Season 1 of the Guided Retirement Show.

Quite interesting and quite a lot of detail in there on the difference between the mutual funds and ETFs. The point I wanted to make here, Bud, is that if you don’t know what is inside of that ETF, if you don’t know what is inside of that mutual fund, and you don’t know how those different assets that are being held with inside the ETF for the mutual fund will act during certain economic conditions, that’s where the emotion comes in.

That’s where you’re going, “I don’t understand what’s happening,” and people get this idea, “Oh my gosh, this thing could go to zero.” Well, no, it can’t especially not a fixed income portfolio in most stock portfolios unless you’re dealing with some crazy leverage thing. It’s not going to go to zero. There’s going to be an ending point. Now, go back to what we started talking about, Bud. Is it ever too late to readjust and reexamine the portfolio that you own now in the midst of a financial crisis?

Because I think the gut reaction of most people is to follow the old Wall Street theme of just let it be and time will take care of it. And by the time it gets too bad, I mean, the pain is so bad, then ultimately, people will capitulate and they’ll make a decision, and they’ll make a change at the very wrong time and they’re not doing it for anything logical. They’re doing it all based on emotion.

[00:15:31] Bud Kasper: Absolutely right. And there’s going to be a repeat and going back to what you were talking about the composition of, let’s say, those bond funds, our clients, the clients that I represent, they don’t understand that. I don’t expect them to understand that. That’s why they hire us is to give them a better explanation. And even with all the knowledge and experience that we have, sometimes an interpretation when it’s overlaid on top of economic stress similar to what we have now and then the add-on a social stress, if you will, with this disease, it’s convoluted.

It makes it even more difficult to understand what the reaction of these investments is going to be in this type of environment other than this: over any given period of time, and we can show this to you clearly, you are always going to find that we will come out of this at some particular point. I’ve got clients, I got a microbiologist, I got a gentleman who’s a professor at Vanderbilt in epidemiology, and I’m getting information for what they’re thinking is going on right now and they’ve shared that with me. This is the time to find the experts and in the case of allocation, in case of investing and more importantly in the case of planning, we’re are the experts.

[00:16:49] Dean Barber: And that’s right, Bud, and of course that’s why people hire us. Let’s talk about some other strategies that people should be employing and I think this is through all economic cycles. But it especially helps you prevail and stay like you said Fonzie and stay cool in tough economic times, and that is understanding what piece of your money are you going to spend, in other words, which asset are you going to spend from when. And so, if you’re looking at your portfolio, and let’s say that you’re spending 5% per year out of that portfolio, and you have let’s just say a 50/50 portfolio, 50% fixed income, 50% is equities, you know intuitively that you could spend off of that 50% fixed income for 10 years.

And you could leave those equities alone and then the years where those equities have good returns, you can scrape off that return, add it to your fixed-income portfolio, and you can invest in those equities like you were 10 years younger, not like you’re in retirement. That’s one way to think about it. Another thought process is saying you need to create a bucket of money that’s going to be for the first five years of your retirement.

You’re going to plan to spend that thing all the way down, create a second bucket of money that’s going to be used through the 15th year every time, and have a third bucket of money that’s going to be used 15 years plus. Well, guess what you do. You don’t just spend all that five-year bucket down. In the years where your 5 to 15-year bucket and your 15-year plus bucket make extra money over and above what your bogey is, you scrape it off and you add it back to that five-year bucket so that you know that you’ve always got that bucket of money that’s got say three to five years’ worth of your retirement spending in that bucket so that you don’t have to use emotion in times of economic stress.

[00:18:51] Bud Kasper: Sure, and when stress and the emotions come into play, I mean, let’s look at it this way. If you look at year-to-date on the stock, Apple, it’s down close to 18% right now. If this was six months ago and everybody’s still positive on the market, and if I could say, “Boy, if I could have bought Apple 17% lower than where it is today, would you have done it?” Of course, you would. You would say, “That’s a discount. That’s a bargain.

I could use that.” Well, the current situation that we’re in with the virus, with the economy, but look at this massive amount of stimulus. Now, we know Dean, you and I’ve been there too many times before. This stimulus is going to be – you’re going to have to pay a price for it at some point in time. But the purpose of it is to stabilize and allow us to recreate a foundation to build back up on.

And I will make my 37 years’ experience talk at this time and say by the time we get to the end of this year, by the time we’re a year from what you and I are talking about today, you’re going to see that the markets are back and that people are more confident and content, because we handled a situation professionally, properly, and there will be better times. We just have to be able to persevere.

[00:20:16] Dean Barber: You know, Bud, you may be right. I hope that you’re right but again, we’re in the middle of something as you and I record this special podcast on The Guided Retirement Show that we’ve never seen before. We’ve never seen the shutdown of economic activity on such an abrupt basis where it’s very clear that we’re going to have at least one if not two negative quarters of GDP.

[00:20:40] Bud Kasper: A recession.

[00:20:41] Dean Barber: A recession, but I want to go back to 2008 again because I think we can learn from past experiences. 2008 was a credit crisis and what you described a little bit ago with the oil prices and the oil companies and how it’s affecting bonds, and so on, we could have a credit crisis here, again, not to the magnitude, I think that we saw, but that’s where a lot of this is coming from. Think about the airlines, think about the cruise industries and the amount of money that they’re going to be losing and the amount of employees that they’re going to have to either lay off or temporarily, not pay. How is that going to affect the overall economy?

Back in 2008, Bud, by the summer of 2008, Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Chairman at that time, were both saying, “Hey, the worst is behind us.” And the reality was that the worst hadn’t even started. Yet they began their zero interest rate policy early in 2008. We just did the zero interest rate policy as we’re recording this show about less than a week ago.

And so, to think that the stimulus that the government is putting in place and the things that they’re doing is just going to have this abrupt turnaround and everything’s going to be just fine in the next couple of months or the next six months, I don’t think is a realistic view. You look at the number of different programs, how many quantitative easing programs that we have to get through in 2008? So, we had the zero interest rate policy, quantitative easing one, quantitative easing two, quantitative easing three.

And that continued until there was finally stability but, in the meantime, financial markets continue to sell off, panic continued to ensue, uncertainty continued to ensue. And so, the deal is that if you don’t go back to what Bud said earlier in this podcast and know what the purpose of your money is, know where your income is going to be coming from, and why you actually own what you own, and understand the potential drawdown or the potential loss in those different pieces of your portfolio, if you don’t clearly understand it, then you’re going to make emotional decisions.

[00:22:54] Dean Barber: So, the important thing is to analyze each piece, put it into your plan, hopefully using our guided retirement system and understand how it’s likely to react. And if it’s not comfortable, then you make adjustments to where it is comfortable all the time knowing that what Bud is saying eventually there will be light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not going to be a train headed for us. It’s actually going to be the way out and then onward and upward with the economy and the markets. And that’s the time at which you can say, “Okay, now it’s time to go ahead, and I can start getting a little bit more aggressive again.”

[00:23:27] Bud Kasper: Yeah. I think that’s a true statement, Dean. One of the things going back to 2008, though, is that we had a lot of leverage inside the market and that leverage was working against this when all of a sudden that leverage was coming due. And remember, the banks were in serious issues and that’s why we came in with the TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program with that. But I think as difficult as that period was, and that was very difficult, okay, here we’re faced with a different set of circumstances, but it’s still a problem that needs a solution.

[00:24:02] Dean Barber: And there are different industries getting hurt, Bud. You’ve got the oil industries, you’ve got the cruise industries, you’ve got the airlines, hotels. I mean, you can’t tell me that these companies don’t have leverage that they have to take care of?

[00:24:18] Bud Kasper: Well, and you see the declines setting up inside those specific types of bonds, which in the vernacular are junk bonds. You’re going to have some serious issues. You’re going to have some price dislocation there that’s going to be pretty ugly for people that want to stay exposed to that. But remember that in the simplest of terms, and you look at all the companies that are across America right now, we know just from the quarantine situation that we have in America, that that means there’s going to be less business, which means that that’s going to impact the earnings of corporations.

If the earnings are going down, what’s the stock price going to do? It’s going to go down. If the market’s going down then obviously, we’ve got a situation which we may find ourselves in and that’s a bear market. We are in a bear market right now. We’ve had that 20% drop from the prior high on February 19th. It looks like we’re probably going to go into a recession, which would be two consecutive quarters of GDP.

I’m premature on that but nonetheless, I just can’t see how the numbers are going to keep us out of it. But there will be a point that when the stimulus actually gets into the system, that we’ll start to see things start to settle down a little bit more, and hopefully, there’s a sunshine at the end of the road.

[00:25:37] Dean Barber: Well, I think one of the things that you and I both know, Bud, from our 70 plus years of experience is that typically the market losses will precede the recession. The markets don’t fall after the recession takes place. They precede it and a lot of times, by the time you’re in that recession for real, you can’t even officially call it a recession until after the final results come out one quarter after the second quarter of negative GDP growth because they revise that at the end of each month for the full quarter after the quarter. And so, by the time you can identify the recession, typically, you’re nine months in.

By that point in time, in many cases, the markets have already started to rebound because they’re seeing the economic activity begin to pick up and they can see that, okay, this next quarter looks like we’re going to have positive growth. Here’s what’s happening within corporate America. Here’s what’s happening with consumer spending. It’s getting back to normal. We’re getting more jobs, etcetera, etcetera.

So, it’s not a never-ending cycle and you and I can understand that from a planning professional’s perspective. But again, bringing that back to the individual, the couples sitting in their homes, looking at their financial statements online saying, “Oh my God, look at what’s happening,” you got to take it out of that what is the value of the account and you’ve got to put it back into every single time.

Has the change in the value of my portfolio and the structure and the strategy that I have in place, has it impacted my ability to continue to do what I want to do? And if it means that I’m going to have to make some adjustments, what are the adjustments that I need to make? And if you don’t have that type of planning in place, that, Bud, is where the emotions start to drive decisions and they can ruin days if not weeks and months, even years of a person’s life because they’re living in this anguish, and this uncertainty, and that is in many cases, it’s so painful

[00:27:47] Bud Kasper: Right. But if you’re dealing with a professional, a real planner in everything, you should have money set aside let’s say that will last you 12 months, 24 months, which means what? It’s not going to disrupt your lifestyle. The markets will do what they’re going to do but they will come back just as they’ve done historically over the last hundred years. So, I think we have the kind of this what I go back to Fonzie. Let’s be cool. Okay. Let’s go ahead and make some adjustments in the portfolio if it makes you more comfortable but let’s not lose sight of the objective and the real purpose of our clients’ money.

[00:28:25] Dean Barber: Well, and if you’re not a client of Modern Wealth Management, you’re hearing this podcast, we can work remotely. We’ve got clients all over the country. We can do virtual meetings. If you happen to live in the Midwest and around the Kansas City area, we’d happy to sit down with you face-to-face. Really take a look at what you’ve got going on and analyze what you have and help you determine are you on the right track? Are you doing the right things?

[00:28:50] Bud Kasper: Yeah. Dean, do you think this headphone makes me look younger?

[00:28:53] Dean Barber: Yes, it does.

[00:28:55] Bud Kasper: Good. I’m going to wear it more often.

[00:28:59] Dean Barber: It’s the Xbox logo on the side of it. I never took you as a gamer, Bud.

[00:29:07] Bud Kasper: Now, you know where I stole this from, from my son’s gaming room.

[00:29:11] Dean Barber: Yeah.

[00:29:12] Bud Kasper: All right.

[00:29:13] Dean Barber: It’s awesome. Okay, there you go. All right. Well, Bud, you look younger. I feel a lot younger than you just because I am. Hope this special podcast has helped you to understand. Let us analyze your portfolio, help you with where you are today, and help you understand what’s going on. And let us help you make smart, intelligent, logical decisions as opposed to emotional decisions. And, Bud, yo stay cool. Thanks for joining us.

[00:29:46] Bud Kasper: You bet.

[CLOSING]

[00:29:47] Dean Barber: I hope you enjoyed this special podcast of The Guided Retirement Show with Bud Kasper and myself, Dean Barber. Look, we’re here to help you. We’re here to be your guide through retirement and on the show notes, you’ll find a link to our website. You can request a meeting. We’ll reach out to you. We can do the meetings remotely, meaning virtually, telephone, video conference. We could help you make the right decisions, get clarity in your overall financial life with the use of our guided retirement conversation. And, of course, there is no cost. It’s your obligation to visit with us, get answers to your questions. We’re happy to help. We’re here for you.

[ANNOUNCEMENT]

[00:30:34] Female: If you’re isolated in your home recently, it’s natural to think about your own health. If you’re getting close to retirement, it’s also natural to wonder about what effect Wall Street may be having on your retirement accounts. Go to BarberFinancialGroup.com/Risk and take our questionnaire to find out how much risk your portfolio currently has so that you can make an informed decision if changes need to be made or things are just fine. That’s BarberFinancialGroup.com/Risk. No cost, no obligation. We know these are stressful times and not just in the investment world. Nobody enjoys uncertainty especially when it concerns the well-being of our loved ones and ourselves. And if we can provide just even a little bit of additional knowledge when it comes to your retirement, then we’re happy to do so. That’s BarberFinancialGroup.com/Risk.

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Investment advisory service is offered through Modern Wealth Management, an SEC-registered investment advisor.