April 15, 2025 • 12 mins
The market’s up… the market’s down… back up… then back down… and tariff policy is constantly changing. Is stability possible during nonstop turbulence? Jon Hicks dives into the essentials of setting up a secure retirement plan amidst economic uncertainties and ever-changing policies. He explains how to balance risk and safety with clear strategies that could ensure steady income while safeguarding principal. Jon also touches on how different market conditions impact your retirement funds and discusses how to maintain equilibrium in a fluctuating economy. Schedule your complimentary appointment today: RetirementSolutionShow.com Follow us on social media: YouTube | Facebook | LinkedInSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Retirement Solution Podcast with financial advisor John Hicks,
founder of Jayhagen Capital.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The Trump tariffs have been released.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Can we boom happened? Is the biggest, most violent boom
in the history of today? Oh boy, here we go?
What is it I've been saying for a week? There
we went? Yeah, it's that implies that it's not going
to go do something just as crazy tomorrow or the
next day, or next week or next month.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
You know.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
One of the things that I've been saying from the
very beginning of this year, actually going all the way
into right before the election last year, is ye, hey,
just everyone take a just take a beat, just because
we know what happened with Trump one point oh, okay,
and and no one could control that. No one could
control it. Here we are Trump two point. Oh. I
(00:53):
am not saying that there aren't some positive things that
can absolutely come out of this, but I'm saying, yeah,
the markets don't like it very much. And the whole
point of the show is understanding our finances in a
way that one day we can quit working and do
the things we really want to do. Of course, I
know real goals. So what we're going to have is
(01:14):
a lot of a lot more of this, a lot
more of a little bit of circus tint P T.
Barnum and crazy people. And I'm fresh out of crazy pills,
So I don't you know, it's here we go. I mean,
that's all I can say. We can't control any of that,
but we do need to know how to protect ourselves
in some of these situations. That's what really we need
to be talking about today.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So let's talk about what we can control. Obviously, that
is your job here to help us figure that out.
So obviously people have thoughts, but whose thoughts do you
lean into when it comes to what the market will do?
We have said before time and time again, nobody has
a crystal ball. City's Kate Moore was on CNBC and
(01:57):
she was talking about how it's no time to add
risks to your portfolio. Here's what she said.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
If you have a portfolio that is fully invested, we're
going to sit tight and think about being a medium
and long term investor. But if you have cash that
you were looking to deploy, the uncertainty factor, whether it's
in bonds or inequities, was too great for us to
have a really convicted call like money is made while
you're being patient. We want to be thoughtful about when
we re enter the market or we think about adding
to risk. But I would also note the uncertainty factor
(02:24):
is just s aarreading some.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Of the things she was saying there, don it seems legit,
But also again thinking about the folks that you work
with that are in their late fifties, early sixties, all
this stuff about be patient and the money will come,
the long game, all these things as a work for
somebody who's close to or just entered into retirement, well.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
We hope that we would have had a slightly better
game plan going into that. Right. So she said a
lot of things, and I agree with a lot of them.
There's a lot of cliches when it comes down to it.
The reason that people do very poorly at investing over
the long run is that they get hung up in
the short run or the immediate now okay, And so
when you're looking at headlines, and almost every headline we
(03:00):
see is probably something pseudo negative, or even if it
is a positive headline, there's some gray area that makes
us uncomfortable and doesn't help us retire. Right, So, you know,
when you really think about what we can all do.
I don't know that patience is always the greatest thing
when it comes to investing. I think the best thing
we can do is establish a guideline and a framework
(03:22):
and a plan that we can adhere to, because I
promise you one thing. You know, people like my uncle
I love. I mean, he is what a wonderful human being. Yeah,
he is so generous, so much of his time and
things like that, but he cannot handle the fluctuations of
more than three or four percent. He just almost always
(03:42):
makes the wrong decision, almost always. So we had these conversations,
and so what we did is we removed almost all
of that wiggle room out of his portfolio. We really did. Now,
is he not going to be able to get to retirement? No,
of course he absolutely can. He's just not going to
have some of those home run years. Right, He's not
gonna be able to sit around the water cooler one
day and said, man, I had this one, you know
(04:02):
stock and it was up fifty two percent last year.
Why because he's not gonna hold it long enough. When
as soon as it goes down four percent, he's gonna
sell it. Then he's never gonna have that story so
instead of telling him to be patient, we just took
that opportunity right out of his portfolio. And here's the
craziest thing. Because interest rates have been higher, there are
very attractive things out there there. He still has double
(04:24):
digit returns from the last couple of years in his portfolio.
He just is not going to have any of those
absolute home runs. And what he's learned is he's completely
content with that. So when I hear someone say cliches like, oh,
we just need to be patient, we just need to
ride it out. Eh, here's my point. The money that
you want to have risk with, use risk tolerance with
(04:45):
that portion and understand, yeah, you could have a fifteen
percent down week, it could happen, but hopefully that's money
that you're not gonna need for the next ten or
fifteen years. Right now, there's other money that all of
us should have. Every one of us should have another
bucket of money, and that is you cannot afford to
lose this money bucket period. That's what it is, and
(05:06):
that is meant to do one thing, to be preserved
and to generate income for your future. Back in the day,
this is what a pension was, It's what a pension was.
And here's the craziest thing when you look back about
how wonderful and I mean this, how wonderful some pensions were.
You didn't even pay into that pension as a worker
back in the day. The company put that money in
(05:30):
for you. You didn't even put it in. Wouldn't even your
skin in the game. No, technically, your skin was doing
the work that allowed them to put that in for you,
but you didn't have to put that in. It was
only after Ted Benna, the creator of the four to
oh one K, came up with this miraculous concoction where
they could tell the employer, Hey, we're going to save
you a fortune. You're not gonna have to pave these
(05:51):
people for going forward. We're gonna give them the total
freedom to screw it all up on their own, and
you don't have to put any more money away for
them unless you want to. That's what he did, and
they sold that to the American people. Is freedom, freedom
to plan your future. And what did we do?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Here we are, you know, and some of us have
done exceedingly great jobs of saving our money in those
four one ks, and others of us we kind of
look around going hmm, I feel like I should have
more money in here. How Come I don't have more
money in here because we didn't put as much in right,
either we spent it, or we took loans against it,
or all of the other things that happened. But the
whole point where I was going with that is pensions
were great, but that was money that as long as
(06:29):
that company was still in business, you knew that you
were going to get paid. That was your can never
lose it money. And you knew even if it was
five hundred dollars a month or fifteen hundred dollars a
month or fifty five hundred dollars a month, that was
going to come in like clockwork. So you didn't have
to worry about squandering your entire future because you had
that incomeans. Now, what we all have to do is
establish how big should that bucket be in our portfolio?
(06:52):
How much money? Look at, let's assume we've saved one
and a half million dollars. If you've saved one and
a half million dollars and you're in your early sixties
and you want to retire in a few years. Now,
we don't know what the market's going to do and
we don't have to. But if we realize you really
need of that one and a half million bucks, you
really need about nine hundred thousand of that in a
(07:12):
place that you can just earn an income from. And
you can earn pretty good incomes because interest rates are
pretty high right now, you can typically create income streams
off somewhere between five to even up to eight percent
income stream and not have any risk of principle, there's
all kinds of strategies to do it. It's not a product,
it's just it's a design, okay, to create an income stream.
(07:32):
So if you do that that nine hundred thousand dollars,
you may have tens of thousands of dollars a year.
In this example, let's just say we give up fifty
thousand dollars a year of income from that nine hundred grand.
Now that also left six hundred thousand dollars in our
portfolio that you can decide how risky do you want
to be with that other six hundred thousand. But at
no point, at no point in your retirement situation, should
(07:56):
you risk that nine hundred thousand. Why because you need it?
Because if you had that fifty thousand dollars coming from
that safe bucket and then you had social security. Right,
that is an okay existence. You can live to fight
another day no matter what the markets do. Now most
people they don't have pensions anymore and they don't design
their portfolio this way. But ladies and gentlemen, this is
(08:16):
exactly how we design every portfolio Jadan capital because there
is some money that we can potentially take risk with,
which means that we could potentially lose it too, just
like this year has not been a fun game for
most people. But if we never had to worry about
it because we had our safe bucket that we can
never lose and we know that it can turn on
income when we need it. Guys, that's how we can
(08:38):
sleep at night. That's how come we don't have those
cold clammy hands and freaking out and our spouse is
always uncomfortable and you almost can't even share a dinner
together without someone just being unhappier. They get indigestion. Why,
that's what stress does. That cortisol builds up and makes
us just just not be great functioning people.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, but it's a completely avoidable, okay, But it just
means that we have to understand how have we designed
this portfolio for not just as we're growing the money
and working, but we really have to establish it to
where we can't fail even if we do have an
administration that wants to, you know, throw all caution of
the wind and negotiate with the whole world all at once,
(09:18):
or the previous administration which basically did a whole bunch
of things that no one really understood and we'll find
out if it was all going to be terrible in
the end or good in the future. We couldn't control
anything there either. Point is, no matter who's in charge,
we will not have control of the economy. We can, however,
have control over our personal economy. That's the portion that matters.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And that's the bigger conversation. Because what's been going on
in the markets because of the Trump tariffs and all
of these things in the past few days and weeks.
How many administrations are you going to see in a
twenty or thirty or forty year retirement.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
That's well a minute, yeah, yeah, So I mean you
can just do the simple math. In twenty years divided
by four, you have a minimum of five different potential administration. Yeah,
at a minimum, at a minimum So when you think
about it in that way, what does that mean? It
means that things are always going to be in flux.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Everything changes.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah, it's going to be okay in the end. But
I disagree with just being patient and putting your head down.
I think that you have to have zero patients and
making sure that you align your strategy today for what
we know is going to happen in the future. What
do we know is going to happen in the future.
The market's going to go up and mark's going to
go down, and it could do the same thing in
(10:29):
the same day. It could be one trend one day
and another of the next and it just goes away.
If that's too much, change your strategy, guys. There's all
kinds of stuff that's out there. Heck, money markets are
still paying over four percent at the moment. I'd much
rather earn four than lose forty on money you can't
afford to lose, right, yep, Because the whole point is
you can't afford to lose it or you could never
(10:51):
potentially retire. That's just not whise.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Do you have your buckets set up? Do you know
what you need to have and you can't lose it
versus what you can put in the riskier space, and
then how much risk can you really tolerate in that space.
Now is not the time to sit on your hands.
Now is not the time to play victim. Now is
the time to take action. It is your money, take
(11:15):
control of it. At jay Haagen Capital, they can help
you do just that. We've got links posted in the
show notes to head to our website, which is Retirement
Solutions Show dot com to start the conversation with John
and his team about figuring out your option.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Thanks for listening to The Retirement Solution Podcast with John Hicks.
Begin the conversation about your savings plan with John and
the team at Jayhagen Capital by visiting Retirement Solution Radio
dot com. Be sure to listen to John's radio show,
The Retirement Solution Saturdays at eight am and Sundays at
nine am on NewsRadio eight forty whas.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Jahagen Capital Incorporated is not licensed in all fifty states.
To find out if Jayhagan Capital Incorporated is licensed in
your state, please call five zero two six nine fifty
six thirty five. Ahagan Capital Incorporated is not affiliated with,
nor endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other
government agency, and does not provide legal or tax advice.
By contact Tingous, you may be provided with information about
insurance and annuity products offered through j Higgin Capital y
(12:11):
LLCNPN number one eight eight two seven zero nine four
This is the Retirement Solution Podcast with financial advisor John Hicks,
founder of Jayhagen Capital.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The Trump tariffs have been released.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Can we boom happened? Is the biggest, most violent boom
in the history of today? Oh boy, here we go?
What is it I've been saying for a week? There
we went? Yeah, it's that implies that it's not going
to go do something just as crazy tomorrow or the
next day, or next week or next month.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
You know.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
One of the things that I've been saying from the
very beginning of this year, actually going all the way
into right before the election last year, is ye, hey,
just everyone take a just take a beat, just because
we know what happened with Trump one point oh, okay,
and and no one could control that. No one could
control it. Here we are Trump two point. Oh. I
(00:53):
am not saying that there aren't some positive things that
can absolutely come out of this, but I'm saying, yeah,
the markets don't like it very much. And the whole
point of the show is understanding our finances in a
way that one day we can quit working and do
the things we really want to do. Of course, I
know real goals. So what we're going to have is
(01:14):
a lot of a lot more of this, a lot
more of a little bit of circus tint P T.
Barnum and crazy people. And I'm fresh out of crazy pills,
So I don't you know, it's here we go. I mean,
that's all I can say. We can't control any of that,
but we do need to know how to protect ourselves
in some of these situations. That's what really we need
to be talking about today.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So let's talk about what we can control. Obviously, that
is your job here to help us figure that out.
So obviously people have thoughts, but whose thoughts do you
lean into when it comes to what the market will do?
We have said before time and time again, nobody has
a crystal ball. City's Kate Moore was on CNBC and
(01:57):
she was talking about how it's no time to add
risks to your portfolio. Here's what she said.
Speaker 5 (02:02):
If you have a portfolio that is fully invested, we're
going to sit tight and think about being a medium
and long term investor. But if you have cash that
you were looking to deploy, the uncertainty factor, whether it's
in bonds or inequities, was too great for us to
have a really convicted call like money is made while
you're being patient. We want to be thoughtful about when
we re enter the market or we think about adding
to risk. But I would also note the uncertainty factor
(02:24):
is just s aarreading some.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Of the things she was saying there, don it seems legit,
But also again thinking about the folks that you work
with that are in their late fifties, early sixties, all
this stuff about be patient and the money will come,
the long game, all these things as a work for
somebody who's close to or just entered into retirement, well.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
We hope that we would have had a slightly better
game plan going into that. Right. So she said a
lot of things, and I agree with a lot of them.
There's a lot of cliches when it comes down to it.
The reason that people do very poorly at investing over
the long run is that they get hung up in
the short run or the immediate now okay, And so
when you're looking at headlines, and almost every headline we
(03:00):
see is probably something pseudo negative, or even if it
is a positive headline, there's some gray area that makes
us uncomfortable and doesn't help us retire. Right, So, you know,
when you really think about what we can all do.
I don't know that patience is always the greatest thing
when it comes to investing. I think the best thing
we can do is establish a guideline and a framework
(03:22):
and a plan that we can adhere to, because I
promise you one thing. You know, people like my uncle
I love. I mean, he is what a wonderful human being. Yeah,
he is so generous, so much of his time and
things like that, but he cannot handle the fluctuations of
more than three or four percent. He just almost always
(03:42):
makes the wrong decision, almost always. So we had these conversations,
and so what we did is we removed almost all
of that wiggle room out of his portfolio. We really did. Now,
is he not going to be able to get to retirement? No,
of course he absolutely can. He's just not going to
have some of those home run years. Right, He's not
gonna be able to sit around the water cooler one
day and said, man, I had this one, you know
(04:02):
stock and it was up fifty two percent last year.
Why because he's not gonna hold it long enough. When
as soon as it goes down four percent, he's gonna
sell it. Then he's never gonna have that story so
instead of telling him to be patient, we just took
that opportunity right out of his portfolio. And here's the
craziest thing. Because interest rates have been higher, there are
very attractive things out there there. He still has double
(04:24):
digit returns from the last couple of years in his portfolio.
He just is not going to have any of those
absolute home runs. And what he's learned is he's completely
content with that. So when I hear someone say cliches like, oh,
we just need to be patient, we just need to
ride it out. Eh, here's my point. The money that
you want to have risk with, use risk tolerance with
(04:45):
that portion and understand, yeah, you could have a fifteen
percent down week, it could happen, but hopefully that's money
that you're not gonna need for the next ten or
fifteen years. Right now, there's other money that all of
us should have. Every one of us should have another
bucket of money, and that is you cannot afford to
lose this money bucket period. That's what it is, and
(05:06):
that is meant to do one thing, to be preserved
and to generate income for your future. Back in the day,
this is what a pension was, It's what a pension was.
And here's the craziest thing when you look back about
how wonderful and I mean this, how wonderful some pensions were.
You didn't even pay into that pension as a worker
back in the day. The company put that money in
(05:30):
for you. You didn't even put it in. Wouldn't even your
skin in the game. No, technically, your skin was doing
the work that allowed them to put that in for you,
but you didn't have to put that in. It was
only after Ted Benna, the creator of the four to
oh one K, came up with this miraculous concoction where
they could tell the employer, Hey, we're going to save
you a fortune. You're not gonna have to pave these
(05:51):
people for going forward. We're gonna give them the total
freedom to screw it all up on their own, and
you don't have to put any more money away for
them unless you want to. That's what he did, and
they sold that to the American people. Is freedom, freedom
to plan your future. And what did we do?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Well?
Speaker 3 (06:06):
Here we are, you know, and some of us have
done exceedingly great jobs of saving our money in those
four one ks, and others of us we kind of
look around going hmm, I feel like I should have
more money in here. How Come I don't have more
money in here because we didn't put as much in right,
either we spent it, or we took loans against it,
or all of the other things that happened. But the
whole point where I was going with that is pensions
were great, but that was money that as long as
(06:29):
that company was still in business, you knew that you
were going to get paid. That was your can never
lose it money. And you knew even if it was
five hundred dollars a month or fifteen hundred dollars a
month or fifty five hundred dollars a month, that was
going to come in like clockwork. So you didn't have
to worry about squandering your entire future because you had
that incomeans. Now, what we all have to do is
establish how big should that bucket be in our portfolio?
(06:52):
How much money? Look at, let's assume we've saved one
and a half million dollars. If you've saved one and
a half million dollars and you're in your early sixties
and you want to retire in a few years. Now,
we don't know what the market's going to do and
we don't have to. But if we realize you really
need of that one and a half million bucks, you
really need about nine hundred thousand of that in a
(07:12):
place that you can just earn an income from. And
you can earn pretty good incomes because interest rates are
pretty high right now, you can typically create income streams
off somewhere between five to even up to eight percent
income stream and not have any risk of principle, there's
all kinds of strategies to do it. It's not a product,
it's just it's a design, okay, to create an income stream.
(07:32):
So if you do that that nine hundred thousand dollars,
you may have tens of thousands of dollars a year.
In this example, let's just say we give up fifty
thousand dollars a year of income from that nine hundred grand.
Now that also left six hundred thousand dollars in our
portfolio that you can decide how risky do you want
to be with that other six hundred thousand. But at
no point, at no point in your retirement situation, should
(07:56):
you risk that nine hundred thousand. Why because you need it?
Because if you had that fifty thousand dollars coming from
that safe bucket and then you had social security. Right,
that is an okay existence. You can live to fight
another day no matter what the markets do. Now most
people they don't have pensions anymore and they don't design
their portfolio this way. But ladies and gentlemen, this is
(08:16):
exactly how we design every portfolio Jadan capital because there
is some money that we can potentially take risk with,
which means that we could potentially lose it too, just
like this year has not been a fun game for
most people. But if we never had to worry about
it because we had our safe bucket that we can
never lose and we know that it can turn on
income when we need it. Guys, that's how we can
(08:38):
sleep at night. That's how come we don't have those
cold clammy hands and freaking out and our spouse is
always uncomfortable and you almost can't even share a dinner
together without someone just being unhappier. They get indigestion. Why,
that's what stress does. That cortisol builds up and makes
us just just not be great functioning people.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, but it's a completely avoidable, okay, But it just
means that we have to understand how have we designed
this portfolio for not just as we're growing the money
and working, but we really have to establish it to
where we can't fail even if we do have an
administration that wants to, you know, throw all caution of
the wind and negotiate with the whole world all at once,
(09:18):
or the previous administration which basically did a whole bunch
of things that no one really understood and we'll find
out if it was all going to be terrible in
the end or good in the future. We couldn't control
anything there either. Point is, no matter who's in charge,
we will not have control of the economy. We can, however,
have control over our personal economy. That's the portion that matters.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And that's the bigger conversation. Because what's been going on
in the markets because of the Trump tariffs and all
of these things in the past few days and weeks.
How many administrations are you going to see in a
twenty or thirty or forty year retirement.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
That's well a minute, yeah, yeah, So I mean you
can just do the simple math. In twenty years divided
by four, you have a minimum of five different potential administration. Yeah,
at a minimum, at a minimum So when you think
about it in that way, what does that mean? It
means that things are always going to be in flux.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Everything changes.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah, it's going to be okay in the end. But
I disagree with just being patient and putting your head down.
I think that you have to have zero patients and
making sure that you align your strategy today for what
we know is going to happen in the future. What
do we know is going to happen in the future.
The market's going to go up and mark's going to
go down, and it could do the same thing in
(10:29):
the same day. It could be one trend one day
and another of the next and it just goes away.
If that's too much, change your strategy, guys. There's all
kinds of stuff that's out there. Heck, money markets are
still paying over four percent at the moment. I'd much
rather earn four than lose forty on money you can't
afford to lose, right, yep, Because the whole point is
you can't afford to lose it or you could never
(10:51):
potentially retire. That's just not whise.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Do you have your buckets set up? Do you know
what you need to have and you can't lose it
versus what you can put in the riskier space, and
then how much risk can you really tolerate in that space.
Now is not the time to sit on your hands.
Now is not the time to play victim. Now is
the time to take action. It is your money, take
(11:15):
control of it. At jay Haagen Capital, they can help
you do just that. We've got links posted in the
show notes to head to our website, which is Retirement
Solutions Show dot com to start the conversation with John
and his team about figuring out your option.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Thanks for listening to The Retirement Solution Podcast with John Hicks.
Begin the conversation about your savings plan with John and
the team at Jayhagen Capital by visiting Retirement Solution Radio
dot com. Be sure to listen to John's radio show,
The Retirement Solution Saturdays at eight am and Sundays at
nine am on NewsRadio eight forty whas.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Jahagen Capital Incorporated is not licensed in all fifty states.
To find out if Jayhagan Capital Incorporated is licensed in
your state, please call five zero two six nine fifty
six thirty five. Ahagan Capital Incorporated is not affiliated with,
nor endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other
government agency, and does not provide legal or tax advice.
By contact Tingous, you may be provided with information about
insurance and annuity products offered through j Higgin Capital y
(12:11):
LLCNPN number one eight eight two seven zero nine four
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