(00:04): So we don't know what's in the news today. For two reasons, we record the episode a few weeks in advance. So we don't know what's coming out in the news and we're not seeing or hearing the headlines every single day. We do know that financial news in 2022 has been causing a lot of people. A lot of worry today. We want to assist you to break the power of the headlines, and now it won't mean putting your head in the sand or your fingers in your ears. Instead, we wanna help you discover a power. That's more powerful than the headlines. Hey, I'm Brandon and welcome to wealth wisdom, financial podcast, episode 1 0 8, breaking the power of the
(00:51): Headlines. And Hey, I'm Amanda. And I'm super excited about today's episode. Before we jump into financial news, I want to set the stage a little bit, you know, how people ask each other where they were and what they were doing during significant moments in history like September 11th. I know exactly where I was. And I first heard about, you know, what was going on that day. Yep. Me too.
(01:14): But then we have times financial times when lots of people talk about life before and after like the great recession, right? We have like a moment black Monday. A lot of us probably weren't even aware what was going on black Monday, but we know the great recession. It, it impacted all of us, but it folded out over months and months of headlines. So a lot of people will talk about before and after the great recession, you know, what, what like kind of life and business before life and business, after we have this really unique thing with the COVID 19 pandemic, where we have a mixture of both, we have Friday, March 13th, 2020 when the us shut down. And we all probably know exactly what we were doing that day. Brandon and I are gonna tell you later what we were doing that day. So keep listening. if you're super curious. Um, but then we also have these months and months of wave after wave after wave. And we probably will ask each other years from now both, where were you? Friday? March 13th, 2020. And we'll talk about what life and business were like pre pandemic and post pandemic and how it changed, you know, everything for us.
(02:22): Yeah. What I find most interesting is that for the majority of people outside the financial industry, the financial headlines are either something we don't see, or we're actually told to ignore, like don't even read 'em and ignore them until things blow over yet. They impact our lives dramatically.
(02:44): I mean, think about it. Can you imagine retiring in January of 2007, would you be paying attention to the headlines throughout 2007, 2008, 2009, because you knew they were impacting your retirement. I mean, maybe some of you that is your Now imagine retiring in January 20, 22, right. Do you think those most recent retirees are watching the headlines right now? Like they are retiring right now. I bet you, some of them are glued to the TV.
(03:14): Yeah. And it doesn't matter if they're at return normal retirement age, or maybe they're a part of the fire amendment and they retired earlier and they're, they're probably also glued to the headlines. Plus it's not just about retirement. What if your kids are gonna start college in the fall and all of the money you've set aside for them in college, isn't a 5 29 plan going up and done with the markets this year. Or what if you have a down payment for your first home and an ETF
(03:39): Now conventional advice is to ignore the headlines because the stock market always goes up. We've heard that before, but what if you can't wait for it to go up again? What if you're losing sleep and stressed by the roller coaster of the market? What if you're concerned that as a society, we've let things get out of control. Like a lot of people I hear say, say that, that they think we've let things get out of control.
(04:10): Well, the good thing you're listening today, thanks for being here. We're here to help make sure that you know, your options, that you might bring some sanity to your financial journey, no matter what headlines are coming your way.
(04:23): I'm hoping we bring that to you. Now, are you sick and tired of hearing the same old conventional financial advice? I mean, we feel you, we are fed up with the same old truisms that fall flat. When you get into the unique opportunities and challenges of your specific situation. Now, this show is all about bringing you historic wisdom around building wealth, with practical insights on how to apply it to your journey. When conventional financial thinking, doesn't get you to where you wanna go. You need wealth wisdom. So let's master wealth building together.
(04:57): So here's a game and it might not be the funnest game you've ever played. see if you can guess the year, you don't have to say the day, but just the year of each of these real front page, newspaper headlines. You ready for this? I'm ready.
(05:13): Just say what you think it is in your head. Don't say it out loud. Don't ruin it for the audience. Here we go. Wall street lays an egg stock market suffers largest loss in history as Dow industrial average drops 508 points while day cap's worst week ever for stocks, stocks lose 10 billion in day. Billions lost as stocks crash day of reckoning on wall street. More than 7 trillion has been wiped out from the stock market this year. Oh, I'm getting anxiety. Just reading those headlines. I mean, all honestly, it doesn't matter when came from. I mean, I feel like they could have all came from last week or from a hundred years ago.
(06:03): Yeah. The headlines haven't really changed in the last hundred years though. Cause again, they're from all over the place. Right? So for the super curious out there, there were seven headlines. Two of them were from 1929. Two were from 19 87, 2 were from 2008 and one rose from 20 20, 20, 22 Not, Oh yeah. Sorry. 20, 22. Sorry. One was from 2022 and all of them were found from a very easy image search online. You could probably go do it yourself. If you really wanna find out where they came from.
(06:35): Yeah. Again, they feel like they could have been from 1929 or from 2022. Now, if you really wanna spark some fire in a conversation, all you gotta do is ask why, why do we keep repeating the same headlines with all the technological progress that we have? Why do we still experience huge crashes?
(07:01): I feel like we're playing the role of our four year old now, starting to ask why and encouraging people to ask why, but let's talk about like why some people point to politics. They claim whenever a certain party is in power. The likelihood of bad financial news goes up. Yeah. Another people point to financial institutions like the federal reserve it's often claimed if the fed increases interest rates too quickly, we're sure to see it crash.
(07:28): And some people point to overall economic forces like supply and demand or supply chain shortages, or overall fears of investors as often the claim is it's just irrational behavior to blame still others claim. We're just puppets. And the 1% wealthiest Americans are the puppet masters. The thinking is that there's something going on behind the scenes with the billionaires or trillionaires at this point. And the rest of us can only guess what they are doing and thinking
(08:00): Now there's also the very common claim that capitalism is broken or that we're not capitalist enough any longer. Now we don't claim to be economists. We do listen to some of those kind of podcasts, but we are definitely don't have any PhDs in economic theory. So let's just suppose that it's a little bit of all of the above. Probably all of them.
(08:23): Yeah. And I think that's safe to assume. It's probably a mixture of all the things we mentioned, including we're not capitalist enough and we're too capitalized but we recently heard these two guys on a podcast. If you wanna check it out, it's called the pitch fork economics podcast with Nick Hanauer, who is a philosophy major turned business man and Goldie David Goldstein. Who's a blogger journalist activist kind of accidentally in this, uh, sphere. And they put it this way. So I, the quote, one of them, they, they each are talking here, quote power is the dark matter of economics. It makes up close to 85% of what matters, but it's really hard to see or characterize or quantify. And that's why Orthodox economists ignore it. It gets in the way of their theories. I love that power is the dark matter of economics makes up 85%, but we can't see it. We can't explain it. We there's all kinds of things going on.
(09:22): Yeah. What we like about this quote is that it sums up all the powers at play politicians, economists financial institutions, emotion systems, and theories and so forth. I mean, there's powers all over the place that we could put in that. So forth category. Yeah. And so we have basically summarized the answer to the question. Why do the headlines keep repeating themselves with one word power?
(09:49): Here's probably the wisest question you can ask next. What am I going to do to make sure I'm not impacted by the next negative headlines? In other words, how can I claim more power over my own destiny? So I'm not at the whims of other forms of power or how can I break the power of the headlines, write those things down for sure.
(10:17): So I'm gonna go in a little side rail. This is not in our script. See if this, uh, is helpful to think about this way. So dark matter it makes up. I, I don't know, like if I was an astronaut, everything around me is dark matter if I'm out in space. So I take precautions, I get a, a space suit, right. I have my oxygen tank, right? Like I know I'm gonna be surrounded by dark matter. So I take precautionary measures to make sure that that dark matter is not going to kill me. Right. What we're talking about is how do you make sure that all the power that's out there, the 85% of what's really going on in the economic world, what might be some of how you think about building your own space suit? Is that a helpful analogy? We could totally delete that out of the show.
(11:05): I don't think dark matter is it's some kind of other thing, isn't it? I don't Let's look this up. What is dark matter? Here we go. A non luminous material that is postulated to exist in space. And that could take any of several forms, including weekly interacting particles or high energy randomly moving particles created soon after the big bank. It's a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.
(11:35): Hmm. Maybe. Well then there you go. Yeah. It's one of those unknown things that are outside of her control and probably a big reason why astronauts wear really good space suits. Yeah. Not just because there's no air, but because they don't know what kind of other stuff they're getting at, um, influenced by encountering.
(11:54): And here's the thing I I've learned in all of this. We're not economists and we're definitely not Physicists Physicists either. but you know, Hey, this is good to learn from. Yeah. So take whatever analogy, whatever wheelhouse you're in and we'll stick with the money side. So here's what we think about for three ways that we try to break the power of the headlines in our own lives and what we try to introduce to the clients that we work with as the ways that they might safeguard their financial future from all the powers that be, or at least from most of them. Does that sound fair? Good way. Okay. That was great. Yeah.
(12:30): Okay. so the first one is to increase your options with plenty of liquidity. Now we wanted to go back to tell you where we were on Friday, March 13th, 2020. Now we were building up our liquidity. We were finally ready to do some major moves and we on March 12th or March 13th, we actually closed on our house. We were buying a house. We moved from Illinois to Cincinnati, Ohio. And I remember driving from the Illinois to here. I'm wondering if we were gonna actually be able to cross state lines. We had kept plenty of cash when we made the purchase in case something went wrong. And of course things were going wrong, all of the place for people. And I remember having a cold and sneezing during the signing when we're signing all that paperwork.
(13:31): Yeah. And, and they were all afraid. I had COVID and yeah, They said, keep your pen. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't anyway, but I remember where we were and we'll never forget it. Yeah. And we were super glad that we had extra liquidity. We didn't buy more house than we could afford. We didn't tie up all of our liquid available money within the walls of our house. Now, as you can imagine, I,
(13:55): I would say we apparently bought on the dip. We didn't even know. We thought it was the, I don't know. I, I don't know. Oh, I, I like to remind people. There's always a good deal in any market and we found a great deal for ourselves. Um, but at, so let's, let's take a different scenario. I mean, can you imagine retiring and having a hundred percent of your retirement funds and stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and how that would compare with having a portion in what is, uh, our, one of our favorite terms, a volatility buffer. You have a portion that's liquid accessible. You can use it whenever you want, without having to worry about selling low. You know, when the stock market goes down so that you can go buy groceries or whatever, that's, um, I think a super important thing to think about no matter where you're at in life, if things go wrong, how can you create a volatility buffer? And as our friend mark likes to say, he says it this way, the optionality of liquidity is the horizon of opportunity. Liquidity gives you more options, and that's when you can take advantage of opportunities, cuz just like, there's a good deal in any real estate market. There's also an opportunity in every crisis.
(15:07): So we do want you to be cautious here. Too many people buy at a dip rather than a crash thinking. They are not getting a good deal. When the dip might just be a sign of a larger crash to come. That's what we were kind of worried about on March 13th is saying, uh, what's gonna happen. And
(15:27): That's why we like to also keep liquidity for opportunities in our wheelhouse and things. We've learned about areas of expertise rather than like hopping from one thing that promises a high rate of return to another, that pro promises a higher one or whatever. And that helps us know if it's a dip or a crash helps us to see what's really a good opportunity. And what's um, just snake oil.
(15:49): We also like to ask the question, the stock market has a dip of at least 10% roughly once per year, would you rather invest 1000 each time and turn that 1000 into 1,100 yearly or save up to save up a hundred thousand of liquidity and wait for a 30% drop to turn it into 1,300, 130,000. Oh
(16:15): Yeah, yeah. 130,000. Yeah, definitely don't wanna do the other way. That's a bad, bad way to go. Now you might not do both and there can be learnings from the smaller to help with the larger, the important point here is it's impossible to time the market perfectly. So be very cautious and always be learning and growing personally, don't just give it to a guy to do or girl. Yeah. Which is a great segue into the second way to break the power of the headlines in your life. You're ready for this one is something we do that we love helping others do as well. Do what the powerful do. Not what they tell you to do.
(16:54): Oh wait, can you say that again? That is huge. do what the powerful do. Not what they tell you to do. Yeah. You're not gonna learn what the powerful really do with their own wealth, by what they say. I mean, seriously, do any politics watching? They might tell you a few odds and ends and some, some might be of public record, right? So, but we believe a lot of what they say are lies because they don't tell you all the truth or at least maybe not total out lies just half truths. Only part of the truth to, you know, get you to do what they want you to do.
(17:34): Now don't take this the wrong way. I just wanna ask you a question. This is something that's been rolling around in my head recently and I'd love to know what you think about this listener. I wanna hear from you. Email me, give me your reaction to this question. Have you ever thought about when you look out at the world, you see all these commercials, these products, these apps, these firms, why are there so much of them trying to convince you to put your money in the stock market? Is it because that's what's best for you? Could it be what helps the powerful keep their power? Are the banks in good favor? When the stock market's up or down? What helps the stock market be up? Are the CEOs getting bonuses when the company stock is up or down, what happens to the politician's approval rating when people are buying stocks versus when they're all trying to sell them, think about it and then ask, why am I being told right. And left to put my money in the stock market and then to not look at it. What's the real agenda here. I'd love to know how you'd answer that question.
(18:33): Yeah. Those are fun. Things that we think about, you know, on date night, you know, you know, we're nerds, all this boils down to a very key way to break the power of the headlines. And that is be strategic rather than just fix the systems. Be strategic rather than just fix the systems. The, the, the word there is symptoms, Brandon SIM that's okay. What did I say? Did I say symptoms? Systems? I don't think any of us can change the systems, Be strategic rather than just fix the symptoms. Yeah. That's what,
(19:09): I'm very big difference there. When you think about symptoms, it's things like inflation, debt, fear. These are all like reaction. You see the symptom, you try to fix it. You're just reacting to what's going on. The, what we're inviting you to with this third way to break the power of the headlines is to not just be reactive.
(19:28): Could it be that the headlines have such power because Americans aren't very strategic when it comes to their finances. I mean, how many people do you know that have sat down and written out a 70 year strategic blueprint to accumulate funds for retirement or preserve some of those funds and then distribute their wealth in retirement and beyond their death. If they done those three things, it's a very hard to think, 70 years into the future. I mean, there's a lot that can change, but couldn't having that long term strategic blueprint give a lot of peace of mind in the midst of change.
(20:08): Plus this strategic blueprint. If you've made it correctly, it should foresee that an economic crisis could happen at any time, either globally or even individually like a flood of your basement or whatever. Right. And then it would foresee that something like that was happening and it would make sure that the strategy, this blueprint holds up regardless. Now, for those of you who are fans of bank, the bank on yourself concept, you might be hearing it. It is very much a strategic blueprint. And one of the things that I've learned over the last two years is that the life insurance companies that we work with to do bank on yourself, they were doing pandemic stress tests for their general funds for years before the COVID 19 pandemic hit. I mean, that's some great piece of mind that I couldn't accomplish for myself. I know, you know, where if I had my money in a savings account, that's where I stored my liquid money. Or even in a 10 can or whatever, wherever it's not gonna stand up to a pandemic stress test. So I, I just was wowed by that when I heard about it within the past two years.
(21:12): Yeah. And if that's something you wanna learn more about, please reach out up to us, just go to grandma's wealth, wisdom.com and schedule a call or, you know, send us an email, something along those lines. But you can go again to grandma's wealth, wisdom.com and schedule there for now though. Let's recap. There's one thing we know with a high degree of certainty, the headlines like we read earlier will happen again. We don't know if it will be in two months, two years or two decades. And rather than blame whichever power of this world you find is easy to blame,
(21:49): Which we all have something or someone right. Even Brandon. And I try to blame somebody else. all the time. Yeah. Usually me blaming him. Yeah. Yeah. I'll blame Amanda, but we invite you to claim more power over your future. So that way, regardless of what happens and those headlines tomorrow or today, or the in 20 years that you were in a solid place.
(22:13): Yeah. And this part of why we're we created this episode today is we wanted to create something that we could have our son listen to when he's ready to learn about how money works and how to think about it. And this is what we want him to hear and what we're sharing to you. So son, if you're listening, this is for you. Don't wait for anyone else to do for you, what you can do for yourself. But also don't try to do it alone. You can increase your options with liquidity. You can learn what the powerful are doing rather than just what they tell you to do. And you can create a strategic blueprint for your future. That is pandemic tested and more. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you, but for sure, find an ally in a community that you can do it with. We found that in bank, on yourself, that's part of what we love about the bank on yourself professionals and the group that's there. And that's part of why we try to be allies for others is so that they can find what we found to help us break the power of the headlines.
(23:18): And as you're learning new information or coming up with those ideas, it's difficult to decide what to carry through with. And when, so we've developed a filter to use when deciding how to move forward towards your unique dreams and goals, financial, and otherwise it's a gift for you waiting@stillmethod.com. So go to still method.com and download it. It's amazing.
(23:43): Now today was core belief. Number one, break the power of the headlines by taking control of your future. Next episode, episode 1 0 9, be sure you hit subscribe, tune in cuz we're gonna be talking about core belief. Number two that we wanna share with our son. We're creating a series of episodes here that are gonna be our, what, we're our financial legacy that we're passing down to him and you get to benefit from it. As we make this record, these recordings, and we're gonna be talking about something that's near and dear to our hearts voting with your dollars. We're gonna talk next time about making a difference, you know, changing the world, making a positive difference with how you spend safe, invest and even who you owe money to.
(24:25): So until next time, keep building your wealth simply and sustainably. So you can break through to a smart, stable, financial future. And we hope you live long and profit. The topics presented in this podcast are for general information only. And now for the purpose of providing legal counseling, our investment advice on such matters. Please consult the professional who knows your specific situation.
(24:50): This is the podcastfactory.com.
