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March 18, 2025 13 mins
Ever wondered how market risk affects your retirement plans? In times of economic uncertainty with Trump’s plans for tariffs, Jon Hicks explains that understanding income sources, maintaining emergency reserves, and evaluating risk tolerance are essential to retirement planning. He explores strategies to find security amidst market turbulence, with insights into creating a balanced portfolio. 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

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Retirement Solution podcast with financial advisor John Hicks,
founder of Jayhagen Capital.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
How you feel about market risk, in fact, has little
to do with your personality. It's much more about what's
going on with the market at the time and at
the time of us recording this podcast today, John, the
market has been how you say, a little wonky.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Little wonky's an understatement. It's it's in full dumpster fire mode.
It's depending wonk tas, depending on the tweet, depending on
the tweett. I know, you just never know what's gonna happen.
No one knows who's gonna be tariff next, whatever, whatever,
you know. But you know, markets are they do what
they do. We know they go up and down. But
just be nice if they were world Yeah, all of

(00:49):
the the the worldly dues and the upside downs of
a roller coaster all in the same twenty three feet
right right, It feels it's nicer if you can space
it out. Yeah, But when you do it all about
a twenty fet span, all that you're going to do
after that is barf. I mean, let's just let's just
be straight up.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
I mean, yeah, Phil not is at least anyway I'm
at the branch. This is financial advisor John Hicks, founder
of jay Hagen Capital, who is here to share with
you some insight on how to better prepare for your
financial future thinking about your retirement chears. What you need
to be considering, particularly in times like these when we've
seen such market turbulence, the economy is uncertain, we're seeing

(01:28):
inflation rates go up. John, And there was this article
on Kip Linger talking about how when it comes to
our appetite for risk, it's not determined by our personality,
but in fact it's a reflection of what's going on
in the market at the time. So for example, if
you're on a winning streak in Las Vegas, you're going
to think and speak much more positively about the game.

(01:50):
And that's kind of how we function on our perspective
with the market. So what are the dangers in that
thought process? And also let's just break down what's been happening.
And for those who are close to retirement or have
just retired, where they can control, which you can control,
is what I always like to say, So where do
they do that?

Speaker 3 (02:10):
You know? It was interesting, So before we got on
the show today, we were talking about you know albums
that came out, you know, during the eighties, and we're
talking about appetite for risk, tolerance of appetite restruction, which
is what it feels like is going on with the
markets right now, right you know. But anyone that's listened
to this podcast in the past, or anyone has heard
me for the past ten years, always understand markets go

(02:30):
up and down. The one thing I've been citing since
November of last year, even before the presidential election, was
that we have been on a pretty good run. Twenty
and twenty three, twenty twenty four were very good years,
and if you were looking at things, no one necessarily
saw that things were going to fall apart. I don't
think that anything was was glaring in broadcasting signals of

(02:51):
the market's going to go down. But I did say, hey,
if you look at some of the really smart guys
like Robert Schiller, who won the Nobel Prize back in
the day, specifically for the research I'm about to site,
Schiller's research said that the market was around forty two
percent more expensive than it should be. Now, does that
mean the market's going to crash? Of course not, But

(03:12):
what it did mean at those numbers it meant that
the market may only average about one point six percent
over the next decade only because it was just really expensive.
And what has happened since roughly November. Of course, November
Trump wins, the people that wanted him to win shot
the market up. Market was way up in November, but
then December stunk. January's okay, but then February stunk. And

(03:33):
here we are in March, and the IDEs of March
are all around us. It's kind of stinking. So when
you kind of look at these things, did we know
that things were going to go down? No, But I
have some numbers in front of me right now, which
is very interesting if you now look at what the
Atlanta Fed is saying. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Board is
now saying that we may see a two and a
half percent contraction in GDP. Guys, this is not just

(03:56):
a market downturn. Potentially, this may be an actual recession.
And even the President, who is very very very close
to the vest, when it comes to him saying bad news,
he even said, you can't rule out of recession. So
those are things we have to really be careful of,
especially if you're doing what we're talking about in the show,
which is getting closer to retirement or you're already retired.
So I want to talk about some of the precautions

(04:18):
that we should be making, and then some of the
things that we should be doing. Because we can't control
a recession. There's not a single thing that any one
of us can do to stop a recession or stop
a market downturn. We can, however, control our own personal finances,
and that's what we have to do. So the three
major things we all have to consider. Number one, if
we're already retired or if we're about to retire. Number

(04:40):
one and first and foremost, you have to understand where
your income's going to come from. So do you have
enough emergency reserves? I typically want my clients the first
two years of their original retirement. I want them to
have about two years worth of income stacked up so
they don't have to pull from potentially assets that have
been hurt a little bit. Right, So you have to

(05:01):
make sure you have a good cushion.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Now.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
I typically want emergency funds to be around six months.
And that's not just me. I mean you can go
to bankrate dot com, you go to Fidelity, you and
go to Schwab, Vanguard. They all say a similar thing
about six months worth of just straight up cash reserves
for your emergency fund. But you want short term instruments
that are still earning something. Right. Luckily, interest rates are
still high, so we can still get four to four

(05:23):
and a half, maybe even five ish percent on safe
liquid assets that we can keep that one to two
years worth of income in right, because if you have that,
you're not gonna be hopefully be forced to pull from
those assets to create and provide you that income that
you're gonna need in retirement. Okay, So those are the
two big things you have to do. Number three, you
have to understand your risk tolerance. Like we just talked

(05:44):
about a minute ago. Everyone loves it when the market's
going up, but man, everyone hates it if it's if
it does for a period of time what we're seeing
it do right now, which is be very uncomfortable. Every
time someone says tariff, every time someone says a different
country that may not be happy with you states right now,
every time we talk about mass deportations and things like that,
regardless of your political context, those are things that the

(06:07):
markets absolutely hate because it can't figure out well how
much money your company is going to make if if
all these people that have been buying our products were
shipping out of the country, or how much how much
money can these companies make if all of a sudden,
you know, interest rates keep going up or don't go down,
and blah blah blah blah blah. It doesn't understand what's
going to happen next, and it doesn't like that. Uncertainty
is bad, But we can be very cognizant and conscious

(06:31):
of how we plan our portfolio as we get closer
to retirement. I know that half of the gurus out
there say you should have a sixty forty portfolio, sixty
percent in the market or equity type things and forty
percent safer. I don't subscribe to that for everyone. I
think you have to have the right amount of your
money in a bucket so that you can't lose what

(06:52):
you can't afford to lose. For instance, if you're seventy
years old, in my opinion, you probably need close to
seventy percent of your money. Why because you don't have
enough time potentially to wait for the market to come
back to give it back to you. And this isn't
a new thing right. So, Heather, if we think about it,
going back to the dot com busty, you know, the
dot com bust took three years to pop two thousand,

(07:15):
two thousand and one, two thousand and two. It took
three years to lose nearly fifty percent of your life
savings if you were in the market. And here's the problem.
It took all the way to two thousand and seven,
so seven years from the time it started to pop
to get back close to where you were, and then
what happened to two thousand and eight it popped again.
So I know I'm laughing. It's not funny at all

(07:36):
because if you were trying to retire during that period
of time, great chance you weren't able to retire or
not able to retire the way you wanted to if
you had too much of your money at risk long term.
I am a huge proponent of equities. I'm a huge
proponent of the United States doing good things. Things are
weird right now. That doesn't mean that they won't equalize

(07:56):
and get good, But I do not want anyone risking
too much at the wrong time. So you have to
get those risk parameters in place. If you have an
appetite for risk tolerance. Just make sure it's not an
appetite for destruction, because that could very easily derail all
of us. And I'm not talking about a skating slash solo.

(08:17):
I'm talking about something much worse, which is what Axel
Rose looks like. Now.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, I saw I saw guns Roses a few years back.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
Yet, yeah, it's not a good look on it. If
you saw, you know, emaciated because he's on terrible drugs
and no one wants that. But he looked a lot
better than whatever he's doing.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Now, you were talking about folks that are in their
sixties or seventies. What about somebody who's fifty nine, sixty
sixty one and was looking to retire either now or
sometime in the next couple of years, and they're seeing
this happen. How do they need to approach a just shift?
What questions do you think to be asking of themselves,
if their dio wires or if they have an advisor,
what do they ask their advisor?

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well, if you think about it, a few years ago,
interest rates were zero. Yeah, so if the mar market
wasn't performing, you made nothing from being in bonds. You
potentially even lost money in some bonds, you didn't make
any money from the bank. Things have changed a little bit, right,
so now you don't have to have all the risk
in the world of being in the stock market to
get a four or five, six, seven, eight percent return.
There are some things right now, and they're not perfect,

(09:16):
you know, in any individual product has its pros and cons.
But there are some things now that can keep you
pretty safe, or they're buffered. You can use buffered ETFs,
which basically mean there's a safety net inside of these
exchange traded funds, which are a lot like mutual funds,
so you can protect your downside, but you still may
have heather eight nine, ten percent to the upside. Those

(09:38):
aren't bad. You can do the same thing with banks.
You can do the same thing with insurance companies. So
when someone says, John, I understand, but I want to
be in the market because it's the only way to
make money. Uh, I would kind of agree with that
if interest rates were still zero. But now they're kind
of good. So you can do some things to lock
in some parts of your principle where you can't lose
very much. In some cases you can't lose, but you

(10:00):
still be able to get seven, eight, nine, ten percent
of your money. Guys, those are pretty good only because
we haven't seen those since nineteen ninety eight. Some of
these products didn't even exist about them, But you have
to go all way back to nineteen ninety eight since
we saw rates this high that may sustain. Now we
still have to factor in inflation. You still get a
factor in your spending needs. Those are big deals. You
need to probably talk or at least get a second

(10:22):
opinion on income production from your portfolio from a fiduciary.
But outside of that, I mean, just understand, there are
a lot of things out there. I'm not a gold bug,
I'm not I am not a crypto guy. But if
you had had certain types of exposures to gold over
the past three years, those are double digit returns and
they work a little differently than the market. Crypto I'm

(10:42):
not a fan of. But there are some types of
hedged or safer alternative assets out there that do quite well. Now,
if you're a multimillionaire, you have access to hedge funds. Now,
that's why many of these things exist. Hedge funds, by
their very nature were created by tens of millionaires and
billionaires to hedge downside risk on their life savings because hey, listen,

(11:04):
they've already won, they've already made their tens of millions
or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. They just
don't want to lose everything they got, so a lot
of their types of strategies are hedged to the downside. No,
it's not right for everyone, and some of us don't
even have options to look at those things. But those
are all things that we can consider in the current
environment that don't just force us to go into the
market and potentially get lamb blasted and potentially not be

(11:27):
able to retire when we want. So. Protection is important,
but you have to understand all the various things that
you can invest in that may be more suited to
your needs.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
If you are wondering about what these options are for you, specifically,
John's going to meet with you in person. His team
at JA Hayden Capital is here to do that. So
find us at Retirement solutionshow dot com. That's where to
go to begin this conversation. The idea of checking those
three boxes, where does your income come from? Do you

(11:56):
have an emergency fund? Do you have two years worth
of income? That's in a safe place. Do you have
proper risk set up with in your portfolio to tolerate
the variance the variability of the market that we have
seen in the last days and that you know you're
going to see if you'll listen, You're probably going to
be retired for twenty thirty forty years. Hopefully, let's make

(12:17):
sure that your money is going to last you in
that space as well. This is what John and his
team working on every day in the office and can
work on with and for you as well. Again, it's
Retirement solutionshow dot com or just click on the links
we got posted.

Speaker 4 (12:28):
In the show.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
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 (12:51):
Jahagen Capital Incorporated is not licensed in all fifty states,
I find out if Jayhagan Capital Incorporated is licensed in
your state.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
Please call five zero two six.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
Nine fifty six thirty five again. App who 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 contacting US, you may be provided
with information about insurance and annuity products offered through j
Higgin Capital LLCNPN number one eight eight two seven zero
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