Episode 84: Surviving Stagflation: Investment Tips for Turbulent Economies on STW Show

In this episode, our financial guru Bruce Weide delves deep into the economics behind a potentially looming recession, and how you can dance in the rain of stagflation like a pro. 🕺💃

Here's what you'll learn:

1. **Federal Reserve Finesses:** Uncover the Federal Reserve's tactics to simmer down the economy and why a recession might be their unintended side dish.

2. **Investment Strategy Shake-Up:** Whether you're into bricks and mortar, shiny metals, or stock tickers, learn why it's time to reevaluate your investments.

3. **Cash is King, but Inflation is a Thief:** Discover ways to protect your hard-earned money against the silent predator that is inflation.

4. **Stagflation 101:** Stuck between low growth and rising prices? Get the lowdown on stagflation and what it means for your wallet. Visit the website for a free course on Stagflation.

5. **Retirement Roadmapping:** Set your GPS for golden-year nirvana with Bruce's retirement roadmap strategies tailored to ride through any economic rollercoaster.

**Fun Fact of the Episode:**

Did you know the Canadian economy has been signaling "recession" in semaphore for the last four quarters? Bruce breaks down what our neighbors up North might be facing. 🍁

Don’t forget our amazing **Call to Action**: Sprint over to straighttalkwealth.com and nab your very own free "retirement roadmap"! While you're at it, dive into our treasure trove of past podcasts, join the mailing list, and unlock the door to our free courses. 🌟

Drop in, soak up the knowledge, and let’s make sure you're set to thrive, no matter what the economy throws at us!

Stay savvy, stay smiling, and most importantly – stay ready!

Talk to Bruce by visiting https://www.straighttalkwealth.com

Transcript

Bruce Weide [00:00:31]:

Oh, we're here. Okay. Hey, did you know I played all the instruments on that opening? Don't believe me. I only wish. Hey, I'm Bruce Weide, and you are watching Straight Talk Wealth Radio. And that's like so incredibly unique that you're watching Radio, but here we are. It's gotten very confused in the era of podcasting. We are here every week with a new episode, and I'll tell you why, because this is what you need to know.

Bruce Weide [00:00:58]:

This is why I do this. I run a financial planning service. Been doing this since 1997, retirement planning. Lots of great clients. I could and probably sometimes should spend all my time just work with clients. But you know what? Things are going to change. And we do this because things are going to change. I've been in the business since 1997, and it is just not, you just cannot operate on whatever happened in the past is what will always continue to happen.

Bruce Weide [00:01:31]:

And the stock market does this and all, man, things are always moving and changing. And so we try to keep our clients briefed on this, and we try to keep the public briefed on it because strategy has to change. How you're going to plan in these chaotic times is different than mom and dad did. If you missed our last show, it was all about, is there a recession coming today? I'm going to talk a little bit more about that. I have another video I want to bring to you to actually look at whether recession is coming. I keep notes on this, or I can go off the rails. And I want to look at, just briefly, is inflation topping? Because both of these topics come together in this. What's going on with whether we're going to have, well, we have had inflation.

Bruce Weide [00:02:20]:

Inflation means the Fed is going to slow that economy down. Get down, boy, get down. It's going to raise interest rates. And what we're waiting for is, oh, my, you raise interest rates. Business is not as brisk. People can't buy homes the way they used to. Is that going to happen right away? Is that happen little by little? And so we're on this edge of like, really, and ultimately, I'm going to give you a very good education on this today, a little PowerPoint.

Bruce Weide [00:02:54]:

I don't think we're going to get through everything. I want to talk to in one day. We're probably going to have to do a separate episode of the next part. But where I'm going at all of this is this, yes, things are going to change. I want to talk about that. Are we topping out on inflation? Are we going to get a recession? And then together, I want you to understand that really what's going to happen is we're going to be whipsawing. We're going to be whipsawed between deflation and inflation. And I've prepared a special training on this that I did for my clients a while ago.

Bruce Weide [00:03:27]:

I've kind of trimmed it down for the show because the original training is about 45 minutes. But I'm going to cover as much as I can with you to understand what this whipsaw of stagflation is and how it's going to matter on your strategic planning. Because, look, if you're a kid and you're in your years old, 40 these days, I'm 67. We say 40 year olds are babies and they are, they're our kids. They can make mistakes. They can let things happen in the market and they got time to recover. But you and me of the baby boom generation, we are no longer at a point where we can make a false move or we can take a big loss because we're too close to needing that money. So all of these things, the timing of them matter.

Bruce Weide [00:04:10]:

So while we're looking at whether there's going to be a recession, whether we look at if inflation is topped out, is the fed going to change, things are changing. Is the Fed going to change interest rates? Look, so we're going to do this training, but in the training, I don't think I'm going to get to it today. Probably going to be the next episode. I want to look at a very unique area that has done really well because of high interest rates and because of stagflation is probably the best way to navigate through this whipsaw. And yes, if you want to time everything and sit by your laptop and wait for the market to top and then wait for it to fall and then reinvest and all of that, good luck. But I saw an article the other day just recently. I can't remember who was showing it. 90% of stock market investors are not profitable.

Bruce Weide [00:05:01]:

I have to dig that stat up. I hate just saying things out of my mouth and not actually giving you a source on it. But what we're going to do today is I want to look at a video about whether we have already hit the recession. Is it still coming? I want to look at a little article on whether interest rates have topped out. Then I want to give you my condensed version of the training that I did for my clients on how to win with stagflation. By the end of the show today, I will have some giveaways of some things you can do for free that will help further your education and all of this. But let's get into this video right now. Now I seem to wind up with videos when I go to YouTube.

Bruce Weide [00:05:38]:

I get some of these topics. They seem to be from Canada a lot, which is a pretty parallel economy. But all things said that if they're talking in Canada about the economy, then they're also talking about the US. This is why inflation remains a concern for BoC, which I think is bank of Canada. But it is a Bloomberg show, so it's on Bloomberg. I'm only going to play the first part of this that is pertinent. It's eight minutes. We're not going to go through all this, but I want to open the show with just this look from Bloomberg on whether the recession is over, whether it's coming, or whether we are in it.

Bruce Weide [00:06:15]:

So let's take a look.

News clip speaker [00:06:17]:

Rosenberg is one of the best known economists on Bay street. He runs Rosenberg Research, and he's here once again with the bond market veteran Ed Devlin of Devlin Capital and formerly of Pimpco. Good to see both of you again. Thanks as always.

Bruce Weide [00:06:28]:

You too.

News clip speaker [00:06:29]:

Okay, where do we start, David, where would you like to start things this morning?

News Clip Speaker 2 [00:06:32]:

Well, that's a pretty broad question.

Bruce Weide [00:06:34]:

Are you going to give me the full half hour?

News clip speaker [00:06:36]:

Well, I think we just heard a whole host of themes there, just based on the bank's decision yesterday not to move.

News Clip Speaker 2 [00:06:41]:

Well, look, we're not going to have a serious recession and no big run up in unemployment. Well, hallelujah. Look, what he said was that the path towards a soft landing is narrowed, which when you look at it in the mirror image, he's really saying that recession risks have risen. But here's the reality of the situation. I think the recession has already begun and we had already a fractionally negative print in real GDP in the second quarter. There's no momentum into the third quarter.

Bruce Weide [00:07:15]:

I want to clarify some words here that he's using. Gross domestic product is GDP. I think he said it was a modest growth or something. I can't remember. But first of all, GDP means that it's gross domestic product. It's generally considered the overall measure productivity. He's now going to talk about, I think he said GDI, gross domestic income. So what he's actually talking about on this is a couple of measures of the economy.

Bruce Weide [00:07:42]:

One is how much we produce. Now, let's just say you produce five apples. Those apples are $0.50 apiece. But later you produce five apples, but because of inflation they're a dollar apiece. So if you just simply look at gross domestic production, it went from two dollars and fifty cents to five dollars and it looks like, wow, production is up. But now what he's going to look at is income and income is actually readjusted for inflation and what are incomes doing? And he's looking at as second indicator. So I like to clarify these things once in a while. So, you know, for those that might not know economic terms, they could track with this a little bit better of.

News Clip Speaker 2 [00:08:28]:

The economy and that's been contracting for four straight quarters. So beauty is in the eye of the boulder. But you could argue that there are metrics already suggesting the economy is in recession. And here's the bottom line. We have two and a half to 3% population growth in this country because of the immigration boom. What's the Bank Canada told us? What did they tell us yesterday? They have real GDP growth of 1% this year, 1% next year, two and a half percent in 2025. They're telling you we're going to have three years in a row in this country of negative real GDP per capita. And the only time that's happened in.

Bruce Weide [00:09:01]:

History, GDP per capita. So that's how much production per person. So if you're letting a bunch of people immigrate into the country and let's say you're increasing your population by 5% but your gross domestic production is increasing by 2%, then per capita it's going down.

News Clip Speaker 2 [00:09:22]:

That's what he's talking about was 1991 92 and that was the John Crow recession. And who has Tiff Macklin? Just as Jay Powell has taken on the label of Paul Volcker, Macklin has taken on the moniker of John Crow three years in a row of negative real gaming capita. So maybe you don't want to call it a recession like Gerald Ford in the mid 70s called it a banana. But a recession is staring us in the face of it's not already here devil.

News clip speaker [00:09:54]:

And I guess every time we ask our guests about why central bankers are fearful to declare an end to the rate hike cycle if recessionary risks are front and center. After all these aggressive moves we've seen, they say, well, inflation, it gets inside people's heads, gets inside businesses heads.

Bruce Weide [00:10:12]:

That's something they can't quite do.

News clip speaker [00:10:14]:

And even the bank yesterday said they expect inflation to be higher next year than they previously thought. So how do you feel about that? Yeah, so I think this really is, we're staring in the face kind of one of the worst case scenarios, which is stagflation. So you have this situation where we're not really growing, as David was talking about, but you got some sticky inflation kicking around. It's not going to be massive inflation, but if you got the inflation kind of consistently and sticky above target for a bit, this is what keeps rates a little bit higher than they should be because I'm with David, should be cutting, and they will be cutting at some point in the not too distant future. But Tiff and Powell do not want to go down in history as the folks who let the inflation genie out of the bottle. And they're going to be overly restrictive. And I'm with David in that they already are overly restrictive and it's coming.

Bruce Weide [00:11:08]:

That said it quite well. Good. Quite well. So I want to give you this training a little bit on this area. Stagflation. You heard the guy talk about stagflation. Stagflation is insidious and we had it in the 1980s. I'm going to cover this a little bit in training.

Bruce Weide [00:11:27]:

So sit back with me and watch this and let's go through a little bit. I'm going to try to cut through some slides and skip some stuff and all that. We're going to get out of here hopefully within the 30 minutes mark and we'll pick it up on the next episode if I run short, because what I want to cover today is at least you to understand what stagflation wise, it's treacherous. And then in our next show, I'm going to talk about how we deal with it, what little maneuvers we've got figured out for it. But let's take a look real quick at the stagflation PowerPoint here. That's right over here. And we're going to start this puppy up and I'm going to narrate it because I actually developed this. This is my PowerPoint on how to win with stagflation by Bruce Weide.

Bruce Weide [00:12:15]:

This is Straight Talk Wealth Radio. All right, so today's problem for the Fed is stagflation. It is, in fact, the Fed's worst nightmare because it's not just a singular thing that you're trying to get a grip on. It is a whipsaw back and forth. So it's constantly changing and it takes months. It takes time for what he's doing to have an effect, to even know whether he went too far with the effect or he didn't go enough. So it is the Fed's worst nightmare. And there is more to come.

Bruce Weide [00:12:48]:

So how did this happen? Well, you're probably familiar with the story. How it happened is that the Fed flooded the economy with dollars for a long time. Just pumped every time. The Fed convinced everybody that the minute there's trouble in the economy, the minute that things are faltering, we can print a bunch of money, get it into corporation hands, get into bank hands, and then credit gets cheap. Everybody can get cheap credit, and we just keep running it. So he flooded the economy with dollars. And the stock market, quite frankly, loved it. The stock market had a long run of cheap money from the Fed.

Bruce Weide [00:13:27]:

Long run here. So it lasted for a very long time, for sure. In fact, what do we got here? We got 2009 to 2022, man, just rip roaring since the great Recession over here. Rip roaring because at the start here, because cheap money, cheap money. Finally, that caught up with us. Finally, in 2022, we started to see the inflation of all this money coming into the economy. I did this one in 2022, the slideshow, by the way. But there you go.

Bruce Weide [00:14:08]:

We are eight up to 9.1% one year economy. That's massive. If that continued, that would be just catastrophic. It is getting more under control, which is part of what we want to talk about today. But I'll give you perspective. That's the five year graph of inflation. This is how much it finally the genie got out of the bottle and started to raise havoc in the economy with all this printed money. There's the ten year inflation rate.

Bruce Weide [00:14:37]:

There's the 39 year inflation rate. We were at historic inflation in 2022. Now, moving forward, what's the risk to your money? Well, one is you need to understand the basics of inflation deflation, understand the risk to your money. So let's talk about that really quick. Under inflation, what happens is that hard assets or commodities increase in value and price. Well, cash buys less and less of it. So when you have inflation going, you want to hold hard assets whose prices will grow when inflation grows. You don't want to hold cash because your cash is trash, because it's worth less and less until you buy something with it that later increases in price.

Bruce Weide [00:15:19]:

That's the basic there. Under deflation, asset prices are going to be free falling, real estate values tumble, and with so many people unemployed and goods and services will have to be sold for lower prices to attract any buyers at all. Wages will also fall, so as so many jobless people scramble for the little work there is. Furthermore, what happens to inflation is that banks will be dry and broke and credit will be extremely hard to come by, and many people will have lost their life savings to bank failures. Bank failures happen more? Well, they can happen either way. But we saw a lot of them. We saw in the deflation, which was 2008, 2008, stock prices crash, real estate prices crash. That was real deflation.

Bruce Weide [00:16:07]:

Banks were failing because they were holding hard assets as collateral that were falling in price. And in that scenario, cash is king. So if you understand inflation and deflation, so then why are we even talking about deflation? If inflation is rampant right now, why would we even care? Who cares about deflation? Well, here's why. Because the Fed sees a currency that's so heated up, it's on fire. The value of your dollar is literally burning up under severe inflation, as it was in 2022. So what tools does the Fed have to attack inflation with? Well, what he'll do is he's going to keep raising interest rates until finally the economy cools down. That's why he raises interest rates. Get that money out of circulation, make money harder to come by, because the easier it is to come by cheap money, the more that it's going to raise prices.

Bruce Weide [00:17:10]:

So you get the cheap money out of hands, you get less borrowing, less credit going on, make it harder for people to get it, and the economy will cool down. And you keep raising interest rates until the economy does cool down. So step by step, it's going to look like this first step is he raises interest rates to dry up the easy money. Second step, you're going to slow inflation. It is now starting to eB, and there's a lot of questions if we're done, or whether Joe Biden said just this most silliest thing the other day killed me, which was he said, well, now that inflation is slowing down, these corporations should lower their prices. That's deflation. That's deflation. So we're not having deflation.

Bruce Weide [00:18:02]:

We're having slowed inflation. The rate went from 8% to 5%. Maybe we're at three and a half now, which is still historically higher than it's been for 20 some od years, but prices are still rising. So in rising prices that all the companies that make products are still having to pay for their goods. He wants them to lower in prices because inflation is slowing. That just shows he doesn't know the difference between inflation and deflation. It would have to take deflation to lower prices. Slowing inflation is not the same.

Bruce Weide [00:18:33]:

So, sorry, I had to rant there. Step three. Now that you've slowed inflation and you've slowed the economy, then now you have a recession, businesses shrink and unemployment looms. These are the steps that start to happen. If he didn't get it exactly right for a soft landing. Now, once the cooling comes, now you've got less money in circulation, you've got a slower economy, you've got unemployment, and you have price deinflation, which means inflation is slowing, or in fact, you get deflation if it's bad enough. And that's the concern. So where would you want to invest into this? Well, once the cooling comes, let's talk about real estate.

Bruce Weide [00:19:24]:

That investment real estate you're holding. If you've got less capitalization available, it's going to lower property. Know we covered and I will cover in some future episodes this lag. Last week we talked about Jeremy Grantham. He just talked about there's just a lag. We're still going to get a hit on real estate. It is still going to come down in price because there's not enough money floating into it. So that may or may not be the way to go.

Bruce Weide [00:19:51]:

If there's unemployment now, if you got foreclosures, you're going to have increased rent. So maybe rental income is the way to go, rental properties. But if you have a lot of unemployment in next recession, that could also put downward pressure on the value of rents. So there will be downward pressure on the real estate market once the cooling comes. How about precious metals? Everybody's run to precious metals during inflation. So now you're holding a lot of precious metals to protect you from inflation. But a slower economy also means slower commodity demand. We will do more shows on gold because gold has two essential aspects to it.

Bruce Weide [00:20:35]:

One is the emotional value. People think money will burn up and be no good and that they're going to take their gold bullion to 711 and shave a sliver off and buy bread with it because the denomination will be worth nothing. That is what I call it as an emotional asset. I'm not going to argue whether that's true or not. The other basic value of any metal is its value as a commodity. Is it being used in production? Is it being used to produce products? If you have a slower economy, you have slower demand for commodities. Gold grows on fear of inflation. It's a good hedge for inflation until the recession hits, and then gold will usually deflate.

Bruce Weide [00:21:19]:

So this is kind of, I call this as an up and down. While we're having inflation and people are concerned about it, gold will grow with it. But if we hit that inflationary skid and things start to contract back, it'll be time to get out of your gold or lose its value back down. What about stocks? Well, stocks are going to be fits and starts, and that's what I want to talk a little bit more about here. Give me fits and starts until we are out the other side. Now, I took a look at an earlier period of deflation, which was in the 1970s and 1980s, and I wanted to find out what was happening in the stock market there. And another reason I put this slide in is in any of my financial presentations, I've always aspired to have a Led Zeppelin photo in it somehow or other. And I thought it was just cool that I could finally have an excuse to put a Led Zeppelin photo in here.

Bruce Weide [00:22:12]:

But moving on, this is the stock market during stagflation 1970s, up and down. And while it went nowhere for a while and finally took off once it got through the period, the point is you're going to have these ups and downs that we just went through. The market just learned. Wow. Like the Fed's easing up on interest rate hikes, easing up. So the month of November was great for the stock market, but now do we have a recession coming? If we don't, do we have more inflation? All of these things are kind of likely to cause a lot of whipsawing and confusion in the market. So just going on history, if we look at stocks going in fits and starts, unless you can time the market, unless you're in control of that, I don't advise it. For people that are getting close to retirement to put themselves at risk and go, well, it's looking good.

Bruce Weide [00:23:15]:

Now I'm going to write it to the top. You never know where the top is. And frankly, if you made some good money in November, this might be the time to capture some of those gains. So for now, I would say it's a time to sort of start to pull back out because we haven't hit the recession, we haven't hit the downside of the cycle yet. We've had some relief that inflation is slowing, but we haven't had the downside of housing falling and the economy slowing, which is going to hurt stocks. What else do I want to tell you? Oh, this is some articles. I'm going to try to speed this up here and skip some slides. Cash is the only winner in a market gripped by stagflation.

Bruce Weide [00:24:00]:

Fear notch, I disagree with this, but the idea is to stay, I guess the idea is, what they're saying is stay liquid. That's really what this article is. So I want to talk about how you can do that? How do you keep your cash safe from being eaten by inflation while you wait for markets to come back after the recession? That's the trick. You're trying to stay on the sidelines. Keep your cash because you don't want to lose investing into a recession, but you got to keep your cash safe, and you got to keep it safe from inflation. So here's the model, and I'll talk next week more about application of this. But in looking at the model, we tell our clients it's time to change how you think about risk. This is the theme.

Bruce Weide [00:24:52]:

This is where we operate differently at Straight Talk Wealth than the average advisor. We have changed the risk paradigm. We think differently about risk and what risk should mean today. And as Albert Einstein once said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. So here's traditional risk. Traditional risk is I might lose my money. If I'm going to invest and I want to make gains, I got to know I might lose my money. But the upside is I could make some money.

Bruce Weide [00:25:26]:

And that is typically how we think about risk. Market goes up, the market goes down. If I'm not willing to suffer a decrease in my assets, then I'll never make any money. We disagree with that model. Our model works along these lines. First of all, we eliminate any losses. We make sure that wherever we're placing funds, particularly in times where we've got whipsaws going on. Oh, the market finally started to take off.

Bruce Weide [00:25:51]:

I finally got you in the market. Oh, the recession yet? Okay, we'll wait for the recession to clear. I don't know. It's still falling. It's still falling. It's not time to get back in yet. Market's gone about halfway. Market finally has a search.

Bruce Weide [00:26:03]:

These things happen faster than you can call them, unless you're a professional trader. For mom and pop that have worked at the company, they got their 401k. They don't have time to look at the stock market every day. It's treacherous. So what we try to do is we say, first of all, we're not going to lose any clients money. We're going to eliminate losses. So the worst you can happen in a down market, if the market is down, we're going to be in preservation mode. I might make nothing, but that would only really be if the markets fall or make nothing.

Bruce Weide [00:26:33]:

So if the market goes down or the market makes nothing, then maybe I'll at least hold at zero. I won't have losses again. A topic of further shows I could do a whole show on this concept of you are better off with modest growth and never having a loss historically than you would be by taking the losses every time to then try to climb out of those losses. But we're at least at, that's the worst we do is on a down year, you didn't make gains, but you didn't have any losses. Now, above that, we can go to something very certain. We can say, I will make something no matter what. And we can work with guaranteed rates of interest, even if they're slightly less than inflation, but right now, they're doing better than inflation. We are seeing, and this is a moment in time.

Bruce Weide [00:27:20]:

And boy, I wish I had time to go into this. We will go into the next show. But I want to tell you that with these high interest rates, this certainty bracket has gone into the sixes. And we're seeing commonly on a one year basis. I have one account that's up to eight year, or, excuse me, one year, guaranteed 8% return guarantees. I want that. And you get it. So that is our mid range.

Bruce Weide [00:27:45]:

That's the mid range of where we might do is we operate with certainty. We could get up to 8%. This is changing by the time you see this video. Don't wait for interest rates to fall. If they fall, then if interest rates fall, then all the companies we use to get our guarantees from, they contract on their guarantees as well. This is like the best time we've had in 20 years for this type of a strategy. But if you see the Fed softening on rates, don't count on this. All right.

Bruce Weide [00:28:17]:

The last level then is you might make a little or you might make a lot. So we can also get growth means I might make something substantial that's not capped strategies that are uncapped. We use this. This works best during non volatile growth years. I know 16 to 17, when Trump first came in, the market was just kind of inching its way up month by month by month. Not a lot of volatility. We were getting 17 and 18% in accounts that would lock in at the end of the year. That gain is locked and can't be taken away, and then they're going to reset to eliminate any losses next year and come back to this.

Bruce Weide [00:28:58]:

This type of strategy resets every year. So during that period, you would think during the stagflationary period or more recently, this is just more recent. But what can happen to the market? And I'm showing you how we employ this strategy to capture what the market is during this period, I think this was like coming out of. We have the great recession somewhere in here. I'm looking at the bottom of this. Oh, there we go. This is 1997 to 2008. So the fall off is the great recession.

Bruce Weide [00:29:28]:

So if you were in the market in 1997 and went through the tech bubble, there's the tech bubble going off on the left and then falling down. And then we climbed back out because the Fed goofed. The economy, low interest rates, and then we had the credit and housing bubble. That's ten years of no growth. And if you just were buying and holding and you weren't on top of it, that's what you would have experienced. But the fact is that during that period, during that first period up in the tech bubble, this is just the s and P 500. We had 66% growth over 3.2 years. The problem is we just had a down year, and from roughly 2002 and a half to 2008, we had growth of 70%.

Bruce Weide [00:30:11]:

So there is growth to be had. The trick is you want to lock out the downside. So if you made three quarters or maybe even half of this growth, but you didn't suffer the downside, you would have been well ahead. And that is a little bit of where we're going. That's 136% if you add those up over ten years. Although if you were just sitting in the market with the ups and downs, you didn't make Doodley squat, but the market had growth during those years. The problem is you couldn't capture it. All right, enough said on that one.

Bruce Weide [00:30:42]:

I'm going to pull out and go to another topic here. What I want to say is the strategies we're using. Again, let's review this. By the way, if you're just tuning in, I'm so used to doing that in a live show, you wouldn't tune in on this. You'd like start at the beginning. If you're just tuning in, you're watching Straight Talk Wealth Radio. I'm your host, Bruce Weide, and we're trying to do this weekly. Wherever you're watching this, we will expand.

Bruce Weide [00:31:05]:

We are on YouTube. We're on Facebook. Look up. Just make sure when you go to YouTube, you go to Facebook. Look up Straight Talk Wealth Radio. I don't think there's another Straight Talk Wealth, but the Search engines won't quite find you until you put the word Radio in and it'll take you right to us. And we are on Facebook and YouTube right now. We'll get on all the other things we're building out now.

Bruce Weide [00:31:27]:

That we decide to go back in the air. So the concern right now is, is inflation licked? And this is sort of why I want to talk about why, if you don't act now, you're losing some of the best moments to employ. Again, the risk strategy. Not, I got to lose money to make money. The strategy is I'm not going to lose any money. I might make a little or I might make a lot. And your risk is I'm going to make a little or I'm going to make a lot this year. We'll see.

Bruce Weide [00:32:00]:

But it's never lost. And we work all of our client cases that way. So this is a little article here out of, I think this was Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's up here. Debate on Wall street is inflation lit. I want to go more into this next week because next week I'm going to explode how we work these accounts to make that strategy work. But there is some concern that we're starting to control inflation. We have not had the recession yet.

Bruce Weide [00:32:30]:

Hopefully this soft landing works out. But if you heard on that prior video at the start, they think the Fed's going to continue to be very restrictive, probably to the point where he may have gone a little too far and then interest rates will fall. But right now they're sticking a little bit, but they're headed that way. There is another article I think I pulled down that echoes this. There it is. Which is investors see interest rate cuts coming soon, recession or not. Recent data has fueled bets that cuts could come under a variety of circumstances. Wall Street's gearing up for rate cuts 20 months after the Fed Reserve began a historic campaign against inflation.

Bruce Weide [00:33:15]:

Investors now believe there's a much greater chance that the central bank will cut rates in just four months than raise them in the foreseeable futures. Interest rate futures indicated last week of roughly 60%. The Fed will lower rates by a quarter percentage point by its May 2024 policy meeting. Now, all I want to tell you is this. If you're working with us currently and we've gone through how these products work, I can't implore you enough. I've already had notices from two insurers in this case who had really strong rates that they were going to back down a little bit. And they literally will give me a two day notice. And then if people aren't in by that two days, they're getting the lower rate for the next ten years.

Bruce Weide [00:33:55]:

So these rates tend to be long term. They lock in. If you lock it in the higher one, you've got that no matter, this isn't like you lock. And when we work this and you get in at the right time, that rate will be good for at least ten years. But if you get a new contract that's after the rate change, then you're getting a lower rate, which will also be locked in for ten years. All right, I want to just talk about our resources and chalk this up to another show. Let's go back here to our website again, Straight Talk Wealth Radio. I want to talk really quick about our resources here, where you can learn more about this, discover financial solutions.

Bruce Weide [00:34:32]:

We're working on this triage. This triage is basically, you might be here to learn, you might want to participate if we're having some events, or you might be ready to go ahead and execute so you can kind of pick where you fall there. I probably haven't spoken about this enough, and I should continue to reiterate, the retirement roadmap is where we, for no charge, no obligation, figure out what is appropriate for you. What do we want to recommend? Think I can't stand is when people come in and they go, hey, Bruce, what's hot right now? What's really good? And I'm like, I don't know. The hard thing about you. Who are you? What is your circumstance? How old are you? What resources do you already have? Are you trying to retire? Do you have a date? I can't make a recommendation. What's hot is hot. I mean, what's going to go to a 30 or 40 year old is not going to go to a 60 or 70 year old.

Bruce Weide [00:35:28]:

So this is where we map this out and we really lay out a map of where are you now versus where do you want to be. So when you go to our website at Straight Talk Wealth, click on retirement roadmap. The video up on top is informative on how we do it. It's a little bit outdated, but the basic rules of how we're employing and when we developed the retirement roadmap 15 years ago are covered in it. And then you can, oh, let's see here. We're missing a response. We will get that put back together. Our form fell out there on their thing.

Bruce Weide [00:36:06]:

So you can always write me, by the way, Tony, if you could put this slide up, write me for a free retirement roadmap. It's bruce@straighttalkwealth.com. I personally answer all of that email. Bruce@straighttalkwealth.com if you come to the website, you don't see a form here under the retirement roadmap write me and I will get one put together for you. Otherwise, if you go back to the main page here. Oh, all of our prior podcasts are here. I've got a couple of recent ones that we haven't logged in. As I told you, we went off the air for a while.

Bruce Weide [00:36:42]:

So someone stops at 2019. But there's got to be like, I think there's 80 some here. And we do have a page up. Get on our mailing list. First of all, let's see, is that at the bottom here. Subscribe, get on our mailing list, and then you'll make sure to get every show. Let's see. Well, that didn't go anywhere.

Bruce Weide [00:37:05]:

We'll make sure that goes somewhere. Hey, I'm winging it. We're just getting this stuff together. These are some prior blog posts, but we will make sure that you can get to us again. Here's our phone number. This is our California address. We are in Largo, Florida, and in Ventura. And one last thing I want to show you, foolproof, I'm sure this one's going to work, is go over here to learn and click on personal financial planning for successor retirement.

Bruce Weide [00:37:34]:

We have some courses here that could be very valuable, too. These are short courses, retirement planning, how to maximize Social Security, women and wealth, tax free retirement, estate planning, wills and trust. All educational material. All free courses you can do on our website under the learn page, however you get there. And we have a fast start. Library. This is just a report that I wrote recently, very much to do with the things we're talking about called principal spend down a slippery slope. And you can go through that report there.

Bruce Weide [00:38:11]:

Is this the face of the new economy? Fairly recent. I wrote this within the last couple of years after Covid talked about how the economy is going to change and the risks that are in it. So I want to invite you to do that. And, hey, I know we're a little slippy here. Not everything's on the website that's supposed to be here, but we're just regenerating the show. And the important thing is I want to bring you some news every week and bring you updates because, you know what? Do you know why we do Straight Talk Wealth Radio? Because things are going to change. They're going to change in the economy. They're going to change in the environment.

Bruce Weide [00:38:46]:

And you, the baby boomer, are going from an accumulation stage in your life to a distribution stage. The math is totally different. Just collecting your money. And we're up 5%. We're up seven, we're down ten. That math is so easy. But now you've got a matter of distribution, lifetime distributions and knowing you're on the mark, knowing you can spend the maximum amount of money with certainty, with confidence and live your best life and know that you won't run out, that's different math and all of these things come together. Things are going to change because the economy is changing.

Bruce Weide [00:39:22]:

Things are going to be changing because of your age. And so we are going to keep bringing Straight Talk Wealth Radio to you hopefully every week as long as I can get to it. I get busy in the office sometimes. It's hard to bang out an episode because we want to keep you up to date on all of this. And until next week I will see you and we will talk next week more about what we do about stagflation and why right now is the best time to take action on it. See you soon.