I see three big dangers to your financial security and retirement well-being and income.
- Risk of a long and deep market crash. Since COVID, stock market valuations have been flying very high. Are we seeing another tech-stock-driven “bubble”? Bubbles always end badly, with huge losses and devastated dreams. Consider: in the last tech bubble, stocks peaked in March of 2000 before plunging by some 80% in the months to come…and it took over sixteen years to recover those losses. If that happened again, could you wait a decade and a half to break even?
- Continuing inflation: Until recently (and as predicted in my last book) the US hasn’t seen serious inflation in decades, but conditions remain ripe to see long-term inflation continue with a vengeance. The Federal Reserve has pulled out all the stops to drive interest rates down, juice the economy with cash, and implement a long-term easy money policy. These were perfect conditions: huge losses on investment bonds, the loss of purchasing power, and massive losses on “inflation-ignorant” investments. Of course, that’s just what happened and it’s probably going to get much, much worse – even as the Fed pulled back the stick and raised rates to try and put the genie back in the bottle. What if it fails, as seems to be happening? If your nest egg were to keep shrinking at the same time prices for what you need are shooting up, where does that leave your life and retirement? Double-danger warning: such conditions spell doom for the bond market and have already put severe cracks in the credit ratings of the revered U.S. Government Bond. And don’t forget the potential impact of run-away inflation on critical needs like health care!
- Massive tax hikes are inevitable. Even before COVID, the US Federal Deficit was barreling toward unsustainable levels. Now, government debt is projected to actually exceed gross domestic product in short order. This is a huge deal. This is a massive debt load never before seen, double the record set after paying for World War II. On top of that, Social Security and Medicare will go upside down in the near future. This will be a massive bust. This crushing debt load can only be addressed one way – by raising taxes on the minority of voters who’ve accumulated wealth….and by “monetizing the debt” – basically letting inflation run up, printing money to service the stratospheric government debt, and paying the debt off with shrinking dollars. As this juggernaut rolls down the pike, even if the dysfunctional Congress gets its act together, it will probably be too late to make much difference.
How can you protect yourself and your family wealth? The solution requires two critical factors:
- You must get smart about tax. As we explore deeply elsewhere on this blog and our other Wealth Ed resources, finding advisors except in the massively complicated Federal tax code is difficult but absolutely essential to protecting your family wealth and avoiding redistribution of your resources to others.
- Tactical investing offers the potential to avoid deep market losses and still target the returns you’ll need to stay ahead of inflation. We get into the details and how-tos of technical analysis elsewhere in this blog, but for now recognize you must have both to prosper – active investment to protect your assets and retirement income, and attractive returns to beat inflation and rising prices.