What's up! It's episode 95 of Payne Points of Wealth and FED chairman J. Powell has ruined everything! Just two weeks ago before recording this podcast, J Powell came out and basically said that the FED was going to continue to be hawkish with their monetary policy, and markets sold off precipitously. Is this the end? Is the punch bowl going away? Is the economy ruined? Well, we're going to talk about that on our podcast today, we're going to give you our viewpoint. And we're going to talk about critical questions you need to ask yourself if you're putting together your financial independence plan.

• How a great portfolio is like a great rental property? [2:22]

That eight-minute speech that J Powell gave certainly sent our clients into a tailspin. I was talking to a client last week and he asked if this was time to sell out of his portfolio. Of course not! The value of your house probably went down 10-15% in the last few months, are you selling that? Of course, the answer's no. 

Owning a great portfolio is a lot like owning a rental property. With the dividends and interest, it pays you're going to collect rent until the market goes back up. Under our e-money portal, you can even pull in the value of your real estate from Zillow, so it's updated in real-time. 

One client I spoke with has a lot of rental properties. He said that they were at all-time record highs and now they're down like 15% in some cases. I said well, why don't you panic out and sell? He said, why would I do that? I'm still collecting my rent and guess what I'm going to do next year? Raise it. 

That's kind of how it works with the stock market. Stocks pay dividends. We just had global dividends hit an all-time record high at $545 billion. Think about that. We have increased dividends to the highest level ever and they're going to go up again next year! 

We thought today we could talk about certain questions that you really want to ask yourself to make sure that you're on track to what we call that proverbial financial independence. We covered some critical questions that everyone needs to answer to make sure that they're on their path. Will you really spend less in retirement? SPOILER ALERT...Probably not! Where will your income come from and how will you get it? Do you know what you own and more importantly WHY you own it? How are your finances organized? Can you generate enough returns that it keeps abreast of inflation? If you haven’t asked yourself these questions in a while (or ever) then this is an episode you will want to listen to! Go check it out ASAP!

• Small investors matter for Tesla. About 46% of shares available for trading are held by non-institutional investors. The comparable number for Google is only 15%. Small investors basically drive that stock.

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