What's up! It's episode 49 of Payne Points of Wealth and the world is in flux. We've got the Delta variant of the Coronavirus raging, which is causing more lockdowns and disruptions in the economy. The Taliban has taken over Afghanistan, adding geopolitical risk to the global economy. In addition to that, we've got infighting on Capitol Hill. What else is new? They're looking to spend trillions of dollars. Are our taxes going to go through the roof? Is inflation just going to run wild? We're going to address that today. On the tipping point, we're going to talk about financial disasters with your financial plan. What mistakes you don't want to make, that you need to avoid at all costs. Things we've seen over and over again that you need to avoid. We're going to break it down.

• What our podcast & the market have in common [1:15]

The market always climbs a wall of worry. There's always gotta be a headwind because if everything is priced to perfection and there's no risk, then there's no opportunity. COVID of course is a risk right now, but we've already seen that movie, the market doesn't drop on the same news twice. 

Meanwhile, you've got this infrastructure bill, which has gone from 3.5 trillion dollars down to a half-trillion dollars of new spending spread over 10 years. That's not even going to move the meter a little bit on the market, but we do have inflation. Inflation is something we should all be concerned about.

We’re blowing the whistle on the biggest scandal in the history of the financial market since the 1900s, the mutual fund industry. We all know from every study that's been done that no money manager can outperform their underlying index. So what do they do? They take money managers and sell mutual funds and they churn the account every year, charging you more, giving you a lower return, and having you pay more taxes. If that's not a scandal, I don't know what is.

The other big issue we see right now, being in a big booming bull market is a lot of times the risk in your portfolio becomes outsized and you don't even know it. Because the market has gone up by 100% since last March when you were 50 or 60% in the market, but now you're 80, 90% in the market because there’s been so much growth. You've got to keep that risk in check. At some point, we will get a huge market sell-off or a crash and if you're not allocated correctly ahead of time, you're out of luck. Check on it right now, while things are going well, that's the time you have to make those decisions.

In the 70s, the inflation of that decade was largely a result of the explosion in energy prices. That, to a major extent, reflected oil-producing countries refusing to be paid in the ever appreciating US dollar. Could it happen again? A lot of bad things happened in the seventies like bell-bottoms and leisure suits and Bob's got pictures to prove it, but there was definitely inflation. In fact, there was hyperinflation, but a lot of it had to do with lack of productivity growth. So it wasn't just the oil companies not producing enough oil. There were a lot of other things going on that led to hyperinflation, high-interest rates, and basically the biggest bull market in bonds.

You may be hearing a lot of arguments that we're going into the 70s again with hyperinflation. We are going to see inflation but productivity, which is a big component of what's happening right now, is going through the roof. This is not like the 70s, that's a positive that says this economy is a lot different and a lot better than it was in the 1970s. 

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