Retirement Answers

Jacob: 00:01

The best golf players are not the ones who necessarily can hit the best shot every time. What they can do is avoid those large mistakes throughout every round and give them consistency over time. And so when it comes to investing, think of it that way. The small, consistent things over time, that's what's gonna actually give you the results that you're looking for. Welcome to Retirement Answers, a podcast built to answer your most pressing retirement questions.

Jacob: 00:26

If you're someone who's either thinking about retirement or already in retirement, well, you're in the right place. Hey there. My name is Jacob Duke, and each week, I'll be walking through different tips and strategies to help you succeed in retirement. So let's go ahead and get started with today's show. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Retirement Answers.

Jacob: 00:48

I am glad that you're here and, it is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So wanted to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. Hope you have a great time with family and friends or however you celebrate, hopefully eat a lot of food and have a good nap there on Thanksgiving day, but just wanted to wish you a happy Thanksgiving really quickly. And, also wanted to highlight our listener review this week. It comes from Z3000 and, he or she says that this is an amazing podcast.

Jacob: 01:14

It's really a must listen. They give the show five stars and they say this podcast is great. Great episodes every time Jacob has answered so many questions of mine, some podcasts are challenging to keep up with, you might need to listen more than once, no ads on this one and so many concepts covered and pitfalls pointed out. So thank you so much for that review and that rating. If you're someone who finds the show valuable and maybe you're a frequent listener, maybe you're a new listener, well, welcome to the show.

Jacob: 01:41

If you find this episode valuable or the show valuable in general, I'd love it if you can give a rating and review as well that helps other people find the show. And then also you will probably be featured here in one of these episodes. So thank you Z3000 for that review. Now, in my time as a retirement planner, I've seen my fair share of mistakes when it comes to investing. And to be honest with you, I've made these same mistakes too, whether it be trying to time the market or pick the right stock or guess when to go to cash or when to get all in.

Jacob: 02:10

And the reality is it's just human nature. We think that we can do better than what the market's gonna give us. And so we wanna try to do that, but typically it's just not gonna work out in our favor. And what's interesting about investing is that doing the right thing is important, yes, but it's equally as important to not do the wrong thing. The biggest key to investing is avoiding those big mistakes.

Jacob: 02:31

And I like to kind of liken this to a professional golfer, right? We can all go out there and make a birdie maybe once on a round, but professional golfers, they go out there and they make a few birdies per round, or if not more, they make a bunch of birdies per round. But the key is, is they're not making triple bogeys on every hole like I am, right? So they're avoiding the big mistakes. Even if they're making a bunch of pars, they're still doing well.

Jacob: 02:52

And so I can go out there, I can make a par or two or maybe make a birdie every now and then. But if I make a bunch of double bogeys or triple bogeys, it offsets all the good things I've done because their mistakes are so big. So I like to think of it that way. The best golf players are not the ones who necessarily can hit the best shot every time or score the lowest round every single time. What they can do is avoid those large mistakes throughout every round and give them consistency over time.

Jacob: 03:16

And so when it comes to investing, think of it that way. It's not so much about hitting the home run-in terms of the stock you're trying to pick or the perfect time to get in the market or out of the market. In fact, maybe it's just building the small consistent things over time. That's what's gonna actually give you the results that you're looking for. So the biggest key to investing is avoiding the large mistakes.

Jacob: 03:35

So today we're gonna be walking through the five or six investing mistakes that I think you should look out for and avoid in retirement. And then I'm gonna share how you can avoid those mistakes. So with that said, the first mistake I often see with people that are investing in retirement is they're trying to time the market. And if you listen to anything I've ever put out, you've heard me talk about this before, but just kind of to give you some background really quickly on what timing market is. It's basically whenever you're trying to say, hey, I'm gonna buy into a particular stock or a fund or just the market in general at this time, because I think the market is gonna go up from this point, or you could be trying to sell a position after it's gone up a lot because you think it's gonna come down at some point.

Jacob: 04:15

So you're trying to buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest point, which in theory makes sense, right? That's what we would all want to do. But the hard part is we get, we really don't know when that's gonna be or how that's gonna happen or how it's gonna work. And the biggest problem with trying to time the market is that you have to be right twice. You have to buy at the right time on the front end and you have to sell at the right time on the back end.

Jacob: 04:35

So your odds are going down or diminishing quite quickly because you have to guess correctly twice. So just as a little context here, the S and P 500 is the largest 500 stocks in The US that makes up that index. And since 1960 until 2023 this year, the average annual return of the S and P 500 has been 10.1%. And maybe what's even more interesting is that over that time period, 77% of the years, the S and P 500 actually ended with a positive gain. So only 23% of the time did the actual market end with a negative year.

Jacob: 05:12

Now those negative years may have been large, meaning it actually pulled the average back down, but at the end of every single year, you are likely to be positive over 75% of the time. Now let's assume that we could go back in time and invest a thousand dollars at some point in the past. In fact, let's say we can go back to 1960 and we can invest a thousand dollars in the S and P 500. So what do you think that would be worth today after a 10.1% annualized return over that time period? Well, today that $1,000 that you invested in 1960, that would be worth $433,000 right now in 2023.

Jacob: 05:49

So over the time period, yes, you're only getting 10 every single year, but that starts to compound. And in fact, what you'll find in terms of dollar returns in one year, those are gonna be happening in the later stages closer to right now today. They're not gonna happen in the front end whenever you only have a thousand dollars invested in 1960, they're gonna happen in the back end when you've got 200,000, 300,000, $400,000 that you've accumulated because 10% or whatever the return is that particular year is gonna make a larger dollar amount gain because you have a larger dollar amount invested. So compounding is not linear. It takes place over time.

Jacob: 06:24

And typically you're gonna find that those larger returns in terms of dollars are gonna happen in the later years of your investment period. So what happens if we miss the best day or the best five days or the best ten days throughout that period? So we're gonna look at just kind of an example here, we're gonna change the years just a little bit, but let's say that we had $10,000 as the original investment, and we're gonna say that those invested in the S and P 500 and the beginning year was 1980. And we go all the way from 1980 until the end of 2022. So $10,000 beginning in 1980, if we invested every single day for that whole forty two year period, at the end of twenty twenty two, you would have $1,082,000 and some change.

Jacob: 07:10

So that's if you're invested every single day over that full forty two year period. Now, happens if you missed the best five days over that forty two year period? Well, you would go from over $1,000,000 accumulated to $671,000 So that's a difference of over $400,000 that you've given up simply because you missed the five best days. Now, let's take this even further. What happens if you miss the best ten days throughout that period?

Jacob: 07:39

Well, you go from 671,000 after the, you miss the best five down to 483,000. Now, if you miss the best thirty days, it goes down to 173,000. If you miss the best fifty days, it goes all the way down to 76,000. So you can see that if you miss the best days over any investment period, your returns are gonna suffer greatly, right? Because if we invested $10,000 in the S and P 05/1980 until the end of twenty twenty two, we don't have over a million dollars accumulated.

Jacob: 08:06

But if we miss the best fifty days, we'd only have $76,000 So what this is hopefully describing to you is the importance of staying invested and not trying to time the market by getting in or getting out at what you think are the opportune times. Because we all have the ideas or we all have hunches, we all have reasons to believe that the market will do better or will do worse. But if we miss out on the best days and we guess wrong, that's whenever we start to eat into the returns that could be possible for our accounts. And what's even maybe more interesting about this is that the best days really don't happen when we think they will. They happen at the bottom.

Jacob: 08:43

If you go back and think about like COVID twenty twenty or the financial crisis of two thousand and eight, the best days happened after the worst days. I remember in COVID back in 2020, you know, there for about a month, it was like minus 10% day minus 10% day minus 10% day one day after another. And it was really hard to kind of sit through that. But on the back end of it, that's whenever you saw that recovery kind of shoot straight up into the right. And if you had gotten out anywhere along the way, you missed out on that recovery, which means you're missing out on those best days of that investment time period.

Jacob: 09:18

So that's whenever, if you're not invested, you're not gonna have the potential returns or the potential account balance that you could have had if you had just stayed invested along the way. So that's why timing the market is such a risk. We naturally wanna make investment decisions with our emotions. I'll wait until things settle down to get back in, or I'm gonna get out of the market because things are just heading South. These are our emotions and biases talking to us, and that is a really bad way to invest.

Jacob: 09:42

So we all know what to do, but I found that it's very few of us who actually do what we should be doing. So that's mistake number one is trying to time the market or get in or out based on what we think is or isn't happening around us. The second mistake that I commonly see in terms of people talking about their investments is that they're not really understanding averages correctly. So like for example, the S and P 500 back to that, it's averaged around 10% a year since 1926. But what's really interesting is that it's never actually returned 10%.

Jacob: 10:14

In fact, from 1926 until 2018, only six times did the market fall within eight or 12%. So that 4% difference right there, only six times over that long period of time since 1926, did the market return fall between 812%. So what you can see is that the market is not consistent. It's not gonna give you a 10% every single year. The market's not linear.

Jacob: 10:37

It doesn't work that way. In fact, the best year over that time period from 1926 until 2018, the market was up 54% and the worst year it was down 43%. So whenever we're thinking about this, understanding averages correctly and saying that your returns are lumpy, like they're going to happen kind of out of order or out of whack. It's never going to go the way you think it's going to go. You're going to have an up 30% year and a down 15% year, and you're never really going to get a 10% year.

Jacob: 11:05

Like that's just not how it has worked. And in fact, like I mentioned earlier, there's never been exactly a 10% return even though the average has been 10%. So the first issue we kind of have to deal with whenever we're thinking about averages and understanding them correctly is we've got to reshape our mindset around investment returns in general. Averages are not linear. Your returns are gonna be lumpy.

Jacob: 11:24

They're all gonna happen at once. And they're gonna have a big drawdown. You're gonna all gonna happen at once again, you're gonna have a big drawdown. There's gonna be periods of maybe flat line where nothing's really happening, but what you're gonna get over time by saying invested back to point number one is you're gonna get that average, what you're really looking for. So the key here is, is once you know that you will have years of really high and really low returns, just understanding that will help you stay put during those more volatile times.

Jacob: 11:50

And the second issue is really ready to retirees and it's sequence of return risk. And as you get to retirement, you're gonna figure out this a real issue that we have to plan for and kinda protect ourselves from. Because as I've already mentioned, returns are lumpy. They're gonna happen all at once good, or they're gonna have all at once bad. So retirees need a thoughtful income and investment plan to combat that sequence of return risks that we so often refer to.

Jacob: 12:14

So just for an example here, you could be up over a thousand percent over the thirty years of your retirement, but the first three years of your retirement period, they could be down 40%. And so you've got to have a plan that meets your income needs during those really bad years on the front end. And in fact, those three years minus 40% overall could send your retirement plan down the drain and could send you back to work, right? If you don't plan for it correctly or have the plan in place and kind of understand, hey, this is possible. Then that's whenever the sequence of return risk will catch up with you.

Jacob: 12:47

So that's the second issue, kind of misunderstanding averages. Just know that sequence of return risk for you as a retiree is a real issue and you have to have an income and an investment plan to combat it. All right, the third investing mistake I commonly see is that people enjoy chasing returns, whether that be trying to buy the best stock that you've heard about lately or buy a CD because it's giving you a better interest rate than it ever has. Whatever the case may be, we like to get returns, but the problem is we always do it a little bit too late. So just for an example, large stocks like Tesla or Amazon or Google, they got big because they had really great performance in the early years and it continued over time.

Jacob: 13:25

Now, once they're big, they typically have stopped outperforming the market historically, like Amazon, Apple, Google, they typically do not outperform the market once they get to that point. Now that's just an average, there's always outliers, but in general, once they're a large company, they're probably not gonna continue beating the market itself. Now there are hot funds like mutual funds or ETFs that come out every now and then they become the fad and kind of the story that you see in the headlines. And I've actually got a real life story for you about this. It's about Arc Innovation ETF.

Jacob: 13:56

I don't know if you heard about this back in 2020 during COVID with Kathy Wood. She's the manager of that particular fund and kind of has an array of arc funds that she manages. But the ticker for it is A R K K. And after COVID, this was a really tech heavy investment portfolio or investment fund. So it's an actively managed fund that's trying to pick the best stocks and put those stocks in that fund so they can get the best return.

Jacob: 14:23

Now, what happened here is it went up threefold in the year 2020. And so the story I've got for you is a particular client of mine came to me and said, Hey, Jacob, I wanna buy the ARK Innovation ETF. And so this is what we're talking about, right? And so they wanted to buy it after he'd run up and multiplied by two or three times. And I'm like, man, I don't know if that would be the best decision because I feel like we'd be chasing returns and I don't know how far that is gonna run.

Jacob: 14:47

And so what happened is I was like, look, I really don't have a conviction to purchase this for you. I don't know if I can do that for you because I don't believe in it. And I don't tell you this story to brag or say, hey, I was right. I tell you this story to kind of prove the point that this is real life for many people. Well, what ended up happening is we parted ways as friends and we're like, hey, just maybe you're not a good fit for each other because of how I invest versus how he wanted to invest and which is totally fine.

Jacob: 15:11

But he wanted to buy this particular fund at the highest point out there. And in fact, it was early on January 2021 when the market was at its almost highest point for this particular ETF. And I never heard from him again, but I really hope he didn't go end up purchasing the ETF because it went from around $150 a share in 2021 during that early part of the year, and now it's worth about $40 So it got cut back down to its original investment price before COVID happened. And this is where people make their biggest mistakes because they're writing stocks or funds back down after they've had a really good run up. So if you're buying a company after it's gone up, you're likely too late.

Jacob: 15:50

And some of the reasons that we actually run into this issue is because we hear our friends or our family or somebody talking about this really cool stock that they bought and it's done really, really well. And then we go look it up and we're like, man, it has done well. And then we go buy it because it has done well. Right. But then we end up with this scenario that I just mentioned of, they actually got to realize the gains that have happened, but now you're buying it a year, six months later after it's already had the run up.

Jacob: 16:12

And so you're gonna ride that wave back down. So they still have gains on the table because they've started at a lower point, but now you're dealing only with losses. So that's the third mistake. Avoid chasing returns, whether you're buying a stock or trying to get a particular yield on a CD or a money market or some sort of fixed income asset. Those types of things are temporary.

Jacob: 16:31

So zoom out, use your investment approach that you've established and believe in instead of trying to chase or pursue something that looks like it's doing really well and you don't wanna miss out anymore. So that's number three, avoid chasing returns. The fourth mistake I wanted to mention here is that we often are too narrowly focused on recent performance. We only care about really what's happening this year, whether it be good or bad. We don't really think about what happened three years ago necessarily.

Jacob: 16:58

We really only care about what's happening right now today. And when things are going poorly, we obviously focus on it even more. But for an example, over the last ninety five years, the market is down 20%, which is what we would call a bear market. One year after that bear market began, the market was actually up 18.6%. And then three years after that 20% decline, the cumulative return is over 35%.

Jacob: 17:23

And then five years after that 20% decline, the market is back up 72% cumulative returns. And it's really interesting because when the market's down 20%, that's when we least want to invest. But this is maybe the best time to invest because you're buying cheaper investments at a better price. So what's happening here is this dichotomy of your emotions versus logic, right? We all know that we should buy low and sell high, right?

Jacob: 17:49

If we're trying to time the market. But whenever the market's actually down 20% or actually down 40%, that's the last thing we ever wanna do is go buy into something that's gone down so much, right? Because we're like, man, it can only keep getting worse from here. But this is actually the best time for you to invest and buy more into the market. Because remember the point I mentioned earlier about how the best returns are actually gonna be right after all the bad things happen.

Jacob: 18:13

So you have really bad returns, but then the best years or best months are right after those bad years. And so just kind of to prove this point even further of not being too narrowly focused on the recent performance. If we zoom out and look at market returns in The US since 1926, 56% of the time the market is positive on a daily basis. So every single day, over half the time you're going to have a chance of having a positive return. Now on a monthly basis, since 1926, 63% of the time you've had a positive return.

Jacob: 18:46

And to keep going farther on a yearly basis, you would be positive 75% of the time on a five year basis, 88% of the time you'd be positive, ten year basis, 95, and then a twenty year basis in each rolling twenty years since 1926, you would be positive 100% of the time. So right there, that alone, that statistic, just looking at historical averages and historical numbers, we can see that if we just zoom out a little bit, our percentage chance of having a positive return over our investment period goes up every single year. And in fact, based on history, we can see that after twenty years, you're going be a positive 100% of the time. And that's a rolling twenty year period since 1926. So every twenty year period since then, we've been positive in The US stock market 100% of the time.

Jacob: 19:34

So hopefully this just proves to you that maybe we need to zoom out a little bit, stop focusing on right now, today, this month, this year, even last year, and say that we know that over time markets will recover, markets will perform well, and we will get the averages we're looking for. We just have to stay invested and allow enough time to go by. So that's the fourth mistake. We're often too narrowly focused on recent performance. Now, fifth mistake that I often see when people are investing, especially for retirees, is they get too conservative whenever they get to retirement.

Jacob: 20:03

Now, there's two things that I want to point out here that actually causes this to be a risk. The first one is longevity risk. What happens if you're healthy and you continue to live longer than you ever expected? Let's say you reach age 100 or 95, right? You've got to have money to live and provide for yourself or even your spouse or your family to that point, right?

Jacob: 20:23

So we can't be necessarily too conservative because we've got to take a little bit of risk to have our money last long enough. And the second risk that comes into play here is gonna be inflation risk. Now we don't know what inflation rates will or won't be in the future. All we can look back is at historical numbers and on average, we're gonna have around a three, three and a half, 4% inflation rate. But obviously there's gonna be periods of really high inflation and periods of really low inflation.

Jacob: 20:48

It's back to the sequence of return risk and the same thing may apply to inflation. And right now in 2023, over the last couple of years, we've had higher inflation numbers than we've had over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years. Now, will that continue? Who knows? It may or may not, but there is a risk that we have to pay attention to and account for.

Jacob: 21:06

So how do we overcome these risks? Well, just kind of back up a little bit. Whenever we get to retirement, we think that we're at the end. Like we think that we've got all of our money. We've saved it.

Jacob: 21:15

We've accumulated it. We've done everything we can to build up this nest egg and we've got to protect it. Right. So we want to be conservative. We've got to have cash and bonds and CDs and treasuries and make sure that we're getting interest, but we're not having the volatility because we all assume that volatility is risk.

Jacob: 21:31

But what if I told you that whenever we factor in longevity risk and inflation risk, what happens whenever we don't have any money at the end because we were too conservative on the front end. So that's the risk that we've got to overcome. We've got to say, look, I've got to have each dollar in my portfolio assigned and has a purpose. So the way I like to do this, if you listen to me for any period of time, you know that I like to build out a three bucket kind of income or investment approach to make sure that we're covering the short, mid and long term needs throughout your retirement plan. So what does that look like?

Jacob: 22:00

Well, quickly, I like to have two to three years of living expenses in cash. That way it's readily available and we can access it at any point. So that's our liquidity. Now we wanna have three to five years of living expenses in bonds, treasuries, or CDs, those more fixed income type assets. Yes, there might be some volatility with them, but we're still gonna be needing a higher interest rate than maybe we would be getting on cash.

Jacob: 22:23

And the third bucket would be our long term bucket, which is our stock bucket. So that's money that we would need five years and beyond. We wanna make sure that we've got that money invested so that it can grow at a larger or higher rate than our fixed income and our cash investments. And that's the particular bucket that I'm talking about here. We wanna make sure that we got money invested in equities or the stock market so that we can overcome the longevity and inflation risk that plagues a lot of retirees later on in their life.

Jacob: 22:48

So how do we do that? Well, I don't necessarily anchor to a sixtyforty portfolio. Maybe that will or will not be the best portfolio for you, but I don't like to start there. I like to say, what are our income needs? How much money are we gonna have to be taking out of our portfolio?

Jacob: 23:01

And then from that point, can we back into this bucket strategy where we have a short, mid and long term bucket where each dollar in those buckets has a purpose, and we know what that purpose is. So whenever our third bucket, the stock bucket is actually going down in value because the market's down 25%, We know that we don't have to use or touch that money for at least five years because we got these other two buckets, they're gonna be able to provide income for us. So that's the three bucket strategy and how I like to overcome these different longevity or inflation risks that retirees have to think about. So that's the fifth mistake. I see many retirees getting too conservative too quickly in retirement and not thinking about their entire rest of their life or their entire income plan whenever they're going to need money in the future.

Jacob: 23:41

So those are the five, I guess, mistakes that I see from an investment standpoint with retirees. But I've got a bonus one here for you. And I've talked about this before, and it really kind of ties into asset location, but it's tax inefficient investing. That's the sixth one I'll throw at you today. What do I mean by that?

Jacob: 23:57

Well, it just means that we're holding the wrong type of holdings, whether it be stocks, bonds, or cash in the wrong account types. So we wanna align the particular holding or asset class based on how that income or capital gain will be taxed with the appropriate account type to make sure they match together. So an example of this being done incorrectly being tax inefficient, this would be that someone has all stocks in their traditional IRA. They've got all bonds in their Roth IRA and they got all CDs in their brokerage accounts. Now, why is that bad?

Jacob: 24:26

Well, number one is because stocks are gonna be able to produce a long term capital gain based on the dividends they're producing. And then anytime you sell a stock that has gone up in value after holding it for at least three sixty five days, you now get the benefit of a long term capital gain rate. So that's obviously cheaper than a normal income rate, but it doesn't matter because anytime you've got stocks in a traditional IRA, it doesn't matter what happens inside of the account. Anytime you take money out of a traditional IRA, it's gonna be taxed as normal income. So another way of saying this is if we had our stocks invested in a brokerage account, let's say, we could realize the gains at a 15% long term capital gain rate as opposed to a 22 or 24% normal income rates.

Jacob: 25:07

That's a difference of seven or 9% simply because we invested the stocks in the wrong account. Now, why would we not wanna have bonds in a Roth IRA? Well, a Roth IRA is a tax free account. That meaning that the assets grow tax free inside of it. That means we would wanna have the growthiest if that's a word, we wanna have the growthiest types of assets in that account so that it can realize and use that tax benefit to our advantage, right?

Jacob: 25:32

So bonds are typically not gonna grow at a higher rate than stocks. Therefore we would wanna own the stocks in that Roth IRA. And back to a brokerage account, we don't wanna have income producing assets if at all possible, we don't wanna have those in that brokerage account because every time interest or dividends come off of a bond, a CD or a treasury, they're gonna be taxed as normal income. There's no way for those to get long term capital gain rates because of the asset class that it is. So that's where, again, we wanna hold the stock.

Jacob: 25:59

So back to our example of someone doing this incorrectly, I'd wanna have all my bonds or fixed income type assets in that traditional IRA or any tax deferred account like a four zero one ks for that matter. And we wanna have all of our stocks when possible in the Roth IRAs and the brokerage accounts. Now there's no way to do this perfectly. There's no way to actually match this up all exactly right. But whenever we can, we wanna make sure we're thoughtful about this and make sure that we do it the right way.

Jacob: 26:24

Instead of saying, hey, I'm gonna be fiftyfifty in all my accounts because that's my portfolio allocation. Well, that's the lazy way of doing it, right? Maybe we end up needing to be a 100% stock in one account and a 100% bond in another account. But at the end of the day, your total overall allocation across all of your account types is gonna be fiftyfifty, as opposed to just fiftyfifty in every single one. So in general, that's just bad tax planning and you're gonna end up paying more tax every single year than you have to.

Jacob: 26:49

And in fact, you're probably going to pay more tax in the future as well. So be conscious of the tax drag potentially on your portfolio whenever you're investing and pay attention to asset location whenever you're building out your investment plan. So those are the five or the six different investment mistakes I commonly see with retirees. Now, here's some really quick steps or tips that you can take to help avoid these mistakes. So the first one is just take a deep breath, go for a walk, sleep on it for seventy two hours, like the seventy two hour rule, just let things lay, don't make any decisions immediately because typically the bad decisions we make from an investment standpoint are often whenever we're in the heat of the moment, whenever our emotions are running high.

Jacob: 27:31

And so the first step is take a deep breath, go for a walk, go do something fun that you enjoy, go be with someone you love and stop thinking about this stuff. This stuff will drive you crazy if you're constantly looking at it and worried about it. So that's step number one is just take a breath and go for a walk. Now the second step remember is to zoom out. Stop focusing only on right now today, or only this year and say, over the last ten years, how's my portfolio done?

Jacob: 27:56

Now over the next ten years, what do I expect my portfolio to do? Stop thinking about just this six month period or just this twelve month period and say, I need to zoom out and remember my principles that I'm investing by, and that will help me avoid some of these bad decisions. This third step would be to revisit your plan. You know, what plan do you have in place? And if you don't have a plan in place, now is the time to build one.

Jacob: 28:17

Now's the time to actually put that in motion and be thoughtful about how you're investing. But if you have that plan in place, revisit it. What does it say? Does it say, hey, we're not doing anything until the market's down 50% and even then what is there to do? So sometimes the best action is inaction when it comes to making wise investment decisions.

Jacob: 28:36

And the fourth step would be to call your advisor. They're there for a reason. They're there to help you make the right decisions throughout the rest of your life to make sure you've got money to live and enjoy your life and help those around you. And so that's what they're for. That's what I'm for to my clients.

Jacob: 28:49

And if I can help ease your concerns or ease some of the anxiety that comes with investing, that's ultimately my goal. So call the people that you have in place. And if you don't have anybody in place, maybe this is an opportunity to think about, hey, should I hire somebody? Should I have somebody that's a third party that's an objective opinion that will not be as emotional about my money as I am? And so I don't know how to quantify or value that and put a dollar amount to it, but I think it's worth a lot.

Jacob: 29:15

And if you ask someone who has a really good financial advisor, most of the time, they're probably gonna say yes, they're completely worth having. And I love not having to worry about my money all the time. So if that's something you wanna evaluate or check out, feel free to reach out to me. I've got a link down below. You can schedule a quick call and just learn more about how I help my clients and what I do to serve them.

Jacob: 29:33

But thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Retirement Answers. I hope this episode was helpful for you. If it was once again, that rating and review that helps more people find the show. Then also send me an email, ask questions. I would love to interact with you and hear from you.

Jacob: 29:46

So thanks so much. Once again, my name is Jacob Duke, and we will see you right back here next week. Hey, it's Jacob again, and I wanted to extend a quick offer to you. If you have a question and you would like to have it answered here on the show, please email me at jacob@retirementanswers.net. And I'd love to answer that question for you right here on the show.

Jacob: 30:06

Also, I wanted to remind you that nothing discussed in today's episode is meant to be financial, legal, or tax advice. Retirement Answers is for educational purposes only. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode. I look forward to talking with you again next week.