Shotwell Rutter Baer

Join Dave and Nick as they discuss an article at DFA Dimensional Fund Advisors about some ETFs, some exchange-traded funds that were created and didn’t fare very well.

When a fund company creates a new exchange-traded fund or mutual fund, they’re responding to what they expect the market is going to do.  They’re trying to be creative and find things that they think are going to attract attention. So they tend to be thematic, having to do with things people are excited about right now.

There were some funny ones and our friends at DFA put together this list. However, there are also some lessons here. These aren’t necessarily investments. It’s more of a marketing machine to get people interested.

Tune in to hear our take on this, and gain some insight into investing EFTs for your retirement planning. And learn what a tendie is!

Gather around and follow the Kitchen Table Finance podcast to learn about money and simple ways you can invest right now.

You can find more practical advice at srbadvisors.com and contact the team for personal planning by emailing [email protected].

Join Dave and Nick as they discuss the important question of when should you make changes to your retirement portfolio.  Or should you?  Do you need to? How do you think about your retirement portfolio?  

On this podcast,  we’ve talked a lot about our investment philosophy of being long-term investors, not market timing, but are there times or reasons that you should be changing your portfolio?  

This is timely for us too. Just this week with the help of Mario and Eric at East Bay, our portfolio consultants, we made an allocation change. That’s rare for us.  

We’ve changed the individual funds that we use to implement our allocation. We’ve made a few changes over the  last year or so, but it’s  been a while since we said, “Okay,  we want to change the allocations a little  bit.”  

Why are we changing a fund?  What’s the purpose behind that? Think about portfolio analysis on two levels.  

What we’re talking about today is the first level, the asset allocation, not the implementation of which fund to choose.  

What we changed this week is how much we have in short-term bonds relative to intermediate-term bonds.

We’ve kept more money in short-term bonds over the last few years because interest rates were really low and only had one direction they could go until last year.

When interest rates are low and they can only go up, rising interest rates are bad for bond prices and push them down. And the longer the bonds are in term, how far into the future they’ve matured, the more they’re affected by that.  

Now that interest rates are higher we’re back to a more normal interest rate environment where interest rates could go down from here. Everybody’s expecting them to, which pushes bond prices up, and intermediate-term bonds respond to that more than short-term bonds. Also, intermediate-term bonds are now paying a reasonable amount of interest to hold them.  So we took half of our extra weight in short-term bonds and moved that back to intermediate bonds.

On the surface,  it sounds like we’re timing the market and we’re trying to make a decision based on what’s happening now. However, what we’re looking at here is a long-term structural change in the market.  Interest rates were low for a very long time. Now they’re back to a more normal state.  

Timing the market would be, “Okay, we think the Fed is going to lower rates substantially by next January, so we’re going to  push a whole bunch of extra money into intermediate-term or longer-term bonds to take advantage of  that,  and then we’re going to shift back.” That’s market timing.

The stock market corollary would be, “We think that small company stocks are going to be the next hot spot in the market, so we’re going to  put the extra weight there temporarily to take advantage of that.” That’s market timing.  

Instead, what we are doing is looking at a big structural change in the market,  not trying to guess what the  Fed is going to do today, tomorrow,  next month,  next quarter,  or next year. It can move either way now and the structure of the market has fundamentally changed the risk-reward relationship.  

It’s always about what’s going to happen long-term because that’s why we’re investing.

Tune in to the full episode to hear Dave and Nick’s thoughts on this strategy.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

We’ve talked about this topic before, but it keeps rearing its head. It’s Bitcoin and it’s back in the news.  The SEC has now decided that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are going to be saved. There are a handful of them that took them up on that offer.

Watch on YouTube HERE.

Previously, to buy Bitcoin, you had to go to an exchange and open an account that handled cryptocurrencies. Now, what’s changed in January is any investment account where you can hold stocks. bonds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds, you can now buy an exchange-traded fund that will track the price of Bitcoin.  As of this recording, you can buy 11 different exchange-traded funds.

We don’t even like to call them currencies, which we get into in this episode.

Allowing investors to bypass the electronic wallets does provide more access. But remember, just because the SEC approved this, does not necessarily make it a wise thing to invest in.

Morningstar’s article, Is Even a Little Bitcoin Too Much for Your Portfolio? looked into this with a lot of research and modeling for us.

Historically, Bitcoin ran up like climbing a mountain in terms of its price and then it dropped and showed huge volatility in either direction.

Anytime we’re adding something to a retirement portfolio, we’re doing it to diversify the portfolio.

Listen to the full episode to hear Dave and Nick’s take on this.

So here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say one of our clients calls us on Friday and says, “Hey, I know how you feel about this. I know it doesn’t fit with your investment philosophy, but I really want to own some Bitcoin. I want to be part of this.”

We’ve got clients who buy lottery tickets, a client who loves collectible cars, some who like to go to the casino, and others who spend money on things that have some value, but they’re probably not going to change their retirement. It comes down to more of a budgeting question than an investment question. Can you afford to go to the casino once a quarter and spend $1,000 hoping you make a half million?

If that doesn’t hurt you and it’s valuable to you, go do it. If buying Bitcoin in your retirement account isn’t going to change the trajectory of your retirement, it is super meaningful to you to participate in that for whatever reason. To me, then at that point, it’s no different than somebody who says, “Hey, my cousin’s involved with this company, and it sounds great. And I’d like 100 shares of that company just so I can say I’m part of what he’s working on.” There’s nothing wrong with that.

Hopefully, we’ve answered some questions about Bitcoin and how it relates to your retirement portfolio. If you have questions, please shoot us an email at [email protected].

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

This episode is part of our series of retirement planning headlines and what they may or may not mean for your upcoming retirement. Our little roundup of things we’ve read over the last couple of weeks that are out there in the media.

Watch it on YouTube HERE

Today we are reviewing some of the headlines from December and January highlighting some of the better things we’ve seen out there for consumer financial planning. If you listen here, you don’t have to read all of these articles, we do it for you and provide the highlights!

Here are the articles:

6 Questions New Donors Should Ask Themselves About Charitable Giving

How Much Do We Give to Charities Now That We’re Retired?

What’s Your Why?

Your 401(k) Is Up. Don’t Let It Go to Your Head

What’s Changing for Retirement in 2024?

How Much House Can I Afford?

How Retirement Spending Works in the Real World

Retirement Planning Is More Than Financial Planning

Gov. Whitmer Launches “MI Vehicle Rebate” Plan to Lower Vehicle Prices, Boost Sales in Michigan

Here are the links Nick mentions for tax incentives for an electric car purchase:

Don’t get fooled again: 3 ways investors are tricked, and 6 ways to protect yourself

Well, there you have it. The good articles we found in December and early January. If you have an article you want us to take a look at, feel free to shoot it over to us at info @srbadvisors .com.

Gather around and follow the Kitchen Table Finance podcast to learn about money and simple ways you can invest right now. You can find more practical advice at srbadvisors.com and contact the team for personal planning by emailing info@srbadvisors .com.

Join Dave and Nick as they review 2023’s fourth-quarter economy and give a current market update.

We do this once a quarter to go through and see what happened last quarter and talk about what that potentially means for the future.

Watch on YouTube HERE

The fourth quarter was pretty darn good. The Wall Street Journal called it The Everything Rally in late December.

It’s a good time to be a financial advisor. People think we look really smart in the fourth quarter, even though we did absolutely nothing.

This is especially amazing when you consider where we came from and what people thought was going to happen last year. The forecasts for 2023 were so gloomy. It was really hard to be positive about anything last January, and that’s just not how it played out. This just underlines that you can’t predict with any reliability.

We are measuring a good market return instead of the recession that was expected. It looks like the Fed may have pulled off the soft landing scenario, which is where they were able to raise interest rates drastically and bring inflation down drastically, and yet still we have strong economic numbers in terms of unemployment and consumer spending.

We use this phrase a lot when the markets are down, but it also is important to remember when the economy and the markets are good.

The closer you get to retirement, the more you want to be a little bit more conservative, which means you’re holding more bonds. And now it will pay you, which is extremely beneficial when you put together portfolios. Either way, holding bonds is a positive component of portfolios.

What’s the problem there? A rally based on a narrow handful of companies all pretty much playing in the same industry is potentially fragile. So, to feel good about it, we want to see a broad rally where all of the stocks are up a little bit instead of a few stocks up in a huge way.

So when you think about something scary like that, it’s good to think about balanced investments.

If the soft landing scenario plays out, we don’t have a serious recession, we have a slowdown. Another potential outcome of this is we see those seven stocks run in place for a little while, while the rest of the market perks up. And so we can get to the point where this is a healthy rally. This doesn’t necessarily mean a bad outcome, it’s just something to be concerned about as a potential problem.

2. We’ve seen a lot of geopolitical risk over the last 12 months. The Ukraine conflict continues. We saw increased intensity in the Middle East. There is always potential that these issues are going to widen and become bigger conflicts. As they get bigger, the more distorted they become for the economy.

There is also good old American politics in the mix. As we’re listening to debates about government shutdowns and wondering how we are going to keep paying our bills. You can’t escape the fact that we’ve got a fairly attention-grabbing election coming up this fall.

We’ll be talking about American politics and presidential elections and the effects those can have on the economy.

Spoiler alert: It’s pretty unpredictable and not nearly as cut and dry or as fantastic as people assume it’s going to be. Every four years we have the same political discussion about presidential elections. We’re going to pull out all the old stuff, dust it off, and change the dates.

3. It’s still possible that inflation can increase. We’ve seen this nice steady downtick, but the economy is a fickle beast and we could see a return to inflation. If we see continued unrest in the Middle East, it will impact oil prices. Oil prices can impact inflation in the United States.

So that’s where we sit right now and it feels a lot different than last year. We wouldn’t say we are brimming with optimism, but at least we’re not coming out of a deep hole where it just seems like it’s going to get deeper. We do this quarterly because if we didn’t, it would seem like we were asleep at the switch, but you don’t want to think about your investments in three-month chunks. You want to think about them in 10-year chunks if you can.

If you haven’t checked out our prediction podcast, be sure to check that one out as well.  We have 12 months to be right. – The future will be surprising.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

About Shotwell Rutter Baer

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Join Dave and Nick as they close out Season 2 of Kitchen Table Finance. They discuss setting realistic market expectations, especially in retirement.

Well, there’s a lot of research out there that shows that particularly in bull markets, a general investor has an inflated expectation of what the markets should do for them and how much money they should be making.

And there’s that old cliche we’ve all heard – “the formula for happiness is happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

When it comes to how we think about our investments in our portfolios, there does seem to be some truth to that. Disappointment is the biggest hindrance to happiness when it comes to how your money does. Yeah, when things are good people think they should be better. And when things are bad, they expect those bad times are going to continue. Either way is a losing proposition. Especially when you’re thinking about how to set expectations and what are you going to base some of your projections on for retirement.

Market corrections are as regular as your birthday or Christmas, yet every time we have one, it feels like the end of the world and things will never be the same again. The opposite of that is when things are going good people believe that it’s going to continue. And they’re going to get better.

Tune in for some very important information on how to think about things, how to set up your expectations, and the importance of how you think about investments and retirement planning.

You can find more practical advice on our website and contact the team for personal plans. by emailing info@rbadvisors .com.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Congratulations! You made it to retirement. You’ve worked hard, planned hard, saved, and are now enjoying your time. And then, the market dives. What do you do?

Watch on YouTube HERE

Common advice is to invest for the long term and stay put in the short term. The markets are volatile in the long term and the averages typically work out. Well, how does that work when you’re in that transition mode?

When you’re in your 20s and 30s it’s easy to follow this rule because you have a lot of time. However, that starts to change as you transition into retirement. Our perception changes.  Indeed, you don’t have more time today than you had yesterday, but how we think about it is probably more important.

There’s a flip that seems to switch once you turn on retirement and stop putting more money in. Now you’re taking it out. All of a sudden, this mythical pot of money you’ve been building and growing for the last 30 years has to turn into enough for you to survive on for the next 30 years of retirement. It’s a big psychological shift for sure.

Join Dave and Nick as they walk you through this transition and shift in thinking.

There’s no way around that. There have been between 80 and 90 corrections since World War II. Over the last 80+ years, there has been on average one major stock market correction every year. We define a correction as a drop of 10% or more from the high.

We’re talking a range of between a positive 38% and a minus 39% since 1980, yet the historical average since 1980 is 9%. So, if you stay invested in the S&P 500, your average since 1980 has been nine percent. But in any given year, it’s likely to see a movement in that range of at least a 10% downside.

That’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around as an investor. If you are told your average returns are going to be 9%, you assume that you’re gonna be somewhere in the ballpark every year. In reality, you’re never going to get a 9% rate of return. Psychologically, that’s hard.  Furthermore, as you’re getting closer to retirement, some of the things that made you feel better about it when you were 30 no longer apply.

If you’re working with a financial planner, they’re not going to set you up in a situation where if those things happen, all of a sudden, your plan’s no good. However, the first time it happens as a new retiree it is still difficult.

Tons of research from psychology shows the more that we’re exposed to a concept, the less scary it becomes. So definitely trust and test your plan. Make sure that your asset allocation is appropriate for your new circumstances. That changes over time. What’s right for a 65-year-old heading into retirement is not the same portfolio that was right when they were 30.

Those can have their place too, just recognize that there’s no silver bullet out there. Some salespeople know exactly what your emotions will be and they will turn it into something that benefits them. It’s something that you have to be careful of.  Just know that they have a cost and try to quantify that cost before you’re paying something you didn’t want to pay.

How do you strengthen your mental acuity in a situation like this? You can follow some techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, but the first step is acceptance. The markets are going to be volatile and there are going to be times when you’re going to feel emotionally distressed because of your portfolio. If you’re going to be invested, that’s part of the price you pay.

Step two is to educate yourself. Have a plan and remind yourself that market corrections are part of the plan. You have to know, in general, how much risk you’re taking and remind yourself that corrections are part of that plan too.

Step three is to habituate yourself by thinking about when times are good and reminding yourself that it is common. Don’t forget that this will happen again.

Gather around and follow the Kitchen Table Finance podcast to learn about money and simple ways you can invest right now.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

A lot of people might think it is the Christmas season, but as investors for the past twenty or so years, it also means that there are some different opinions on the market during this time of year.

Watch on YouTube HERE

We’re talking about market patterns and our pre-programmed human need to look for patterns.

An example of this is the stars in the night sky. When anybody looks at them they search for common shapes. Whether it’s the Big Dipper, Orion, or you make up your own, that’s as old as human civilization and history.

Articles in The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and some others are reporting that we are going to get a Santa Claus rally this year.

The Santa Claus rally is a historical little bump that has been observed in the markets at the end of the year. One thought has been that consumers are out spending their money which is good for companies, which is also good for the stock market. But this historical bumper on Christmas isn’t our focus for today.

You can typically find a pattern if you look hard enough. Analysts will switch the dates on you, where one year it is before Christmas and another year it is after Christmas. Before you know it, it gets to the point where it’s almost meaningless.

There have been perceived patterns in the market such as The January Effect, which is a little more pronounced rally effect in the stock market. If you look at the statistics from 1929 to 1999 for large company stock, the average return in January was a positive 1.7% average over that period.

For small company stocks it was 2.9, so historically that’s a pretty sizable jump.

From 1999 to the present, it’s reversed in that the average for large companies is now actually a slight negative three-tenths of a percent. For small companies, it’s still positive but it’s tiny, like a tenth of a percent.

So, we’ve seen this historical outperformance in January that then over the last twenty-five years or so has dissipated.

There is something about the markets or the economy that used to happen in January that doesn’t happen now.  Another thing to keep in mind with these seasonal patterns is that you get a few years of something happening in a particular month one way or the other and a random event skews the numbers.  October and September have historically been the worst months of the year for the market. There are a few bad outliers that happened in October or September that skew those numbers Nine Eleven being one of them.

Keeping all of this in mind, you can conclude that it is just randomness and coincidence that’s creating these skews one way or the other. If you’ve got a pattern that is real and observable, the chances are it’s going to go away over time because people are going to try to take advantage of it and the mere act of taking advantage of it mutes it.

These patterns may or may not exist. They may just be the effect of randomness and certain events occurring at certain times.  And they’re probably going to go away on their own.

At the end of the day, this boils down to the long-term averages that matter. To be in the market and be resilient you invest and don’t worry about the seasonality because you’re not worried about twelve months you’re worried about the next two decades.

To our listeners: If you have any questions on this topic or any other topics feel free to email us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.

This is episode two in our series of retirement planning headlines and what they may or may not mean for your upcoming retirement. Our little round roundup of things we’ve read over the last couple of weeks that are out there in the media.

Watch on YouTube HERE

Our lead story is an interview with Mr. Charlie Munger, who sadly passed away just a few days ago on November 28. He was 99. Charlie Munger is best known as Warren Buffett’s right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway. He was considered a brilliant investor in his own right and just a real down-to-earth, cool guy.

There are many books of his wit and witticism out there. He gave a very interesting interview before he passed away published in the Wall Street Journal, which has made our list here.

An interesting fact about Charlie Munger is that he has a dorm named after him which has no windows. He designed it so that people or students would go out and mingle with each other because they liked sunlight. One of his responses from the interview a few weeks ago when asked about picking stock prices, he said, “Why should I try to pick my own stocks if I’m an individual investor? I don’t design my own electric motors or my own egg beaters.”

It is also interesting that Munger and Warran Buffett, two of the wealthiest men in the world, both lived in the same houses for decades. They drove modest cars and neither had private jets.

There was also a quote in this article where Munger says one of the reasons he was economically successful in life is because he read so much his whole life starting when he was about six. He also talks a lot about how it’s not necessarily about being the smartest, it’s about the person who continues to learn and continues to get better and improve. He and Buffett were both that way in terms of echoing the old cliche “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”

Interesting statistic: The average retirement age was 62 this year 2023, which is up from the age of 57 in 1991.

So, in about 22 years, the retirement age has increased by about five years. We are curious if that tracks with like how much life expectancy has increased in that time.

If you wait too long you might regret the extra years you gave to work. However, if you leave too early, you could feel lost in your new life, which is a real thing as far as people retiring early and not quite sure what to do or where to go from there.

We do see that quite often. There’s a lot more to decide about retiring than just whether are you financially able to. The people who retire successfully are the ones who are retiring to something, not from something.

If you’re leaving the workforce and not ready to replace that, you might be floundering a little bit. We have a worksheet we use as a part of our process regarding our ideal day, week, and year. You fill it out as if you didn’t have to worry about anything this would be your ideal way to spend a day, a week, and a year.  Then you compare that to your current and it helps a lot of people think through the changes they need to make right now to help them get to that ideal scenario in retirement.

On the investment side of things, it’s a little more technical but it applies to a lot of individual investors out there.

A lot of individual investors see exchange-traded funds as being tax-efficient with passive investing. We would add the fact that most major discount brokerages, Schwab, E-Trade, and Fidelity, will now let you trade most exchange-traded funds with no trading costs. So they can be an effective tool. They’re building blocks like any other tool you might use to build a portfolio.

We have all these online brokerage firms now, where in the past you had to call a broker to make a trade. So they would, for lack of a

We’re starting to see those track records come through and it turns out it’s hard to consistently beat the market. In our portfolio models, we use a lot of exchange-traded funds and we use traditional mutual funds depending on the best fit. They are all just tools. But this article makes a good intro point for people who are interested in learning more about exchange-traded funds and why they’re seen as the best.

Michigan, our lovely home state, ranks as one of the best places to retire in the U.S., This is based on a U.S. news study where they polled seniors in retirement, looking at different aspects of quality of life. Lo and behold, we’ve got Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Kalamazoo, all ranking in the top 100 in the country.

Our initial reaction was surprise to see Detroit on there. Most people don’t think of Detroit as a good place to retire but it can depend on the criteria.  The cost of living has a big impact on a survey like this and if nothing else the cost of living in Michigan tends to be pretty good.

Look at the questions that they asked these people and how people responded and ask yourself, “Are those the things that are important to you?”

You may get very different results if you find that the things that bump Dan Arbor to the top of the list aren’t as important to you as some of the things that might be drawbacks from your plan. Like winter.

Where do you want to be? Why would you want to be there? What’s important to you?

Our favorite thing here was they quoted one of our favorite writers on the topic, Elizabeth Dunn, whose book, Happy Money. informs a lot of our day-to-day conversations with people. The basic idea is once you get beyond a certain living income, the value of money. in terms of happiness, flat lines.

This article is a good intro to that idea and puts in perspective the fact that the more money you make, the more money you think you need to make for happiness. However, the actual results don’t compare.  The general point is every time you make more money you just raise the bar. The hedonistic treadmill is the fancy word for it.

This is about a guy who, as he turned 60, realized that his friends didn’t want to keep hearing the same stories over and over. So he needed to go out and find some new stuff to talk about. We thought his thought process was cool. This is not a bucket list in the normal sense. The man made some rules and one was no stereotypical stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. But also nothing so dangerous that he might not be able to do the other 59 things on his list. Bullfighting was out. Nothing went on the list that was just a matter of spending money.

If it was just a matter of saying, “I’m going to go buy this experience,” it didn’t count. Then he eliminated anything too simple or easy to do and things that were too complex.

He went on a police ride-along,  attended a mega-church because he had never, and bid on art at an auction and then had to sweat it out that he was going to win the auction. His goal was to not come home with a piece of art but he had to bid on something.

These are just a few examples of his 60, but each one made him think about the world a little bit differently and each one turned out a little different than he had envisioned. We spend a lot of time talking about retirement goals, and things you want to do, and we get a lot of stereotypical answers. So we thought this was a cool way to think about different ways to liven your life up.

I guess the question is, “Is there a good time to spend money?” It’s all relative, right?

It’s always a bad time to spend money you don’t have. Being financially responsible right now is more important than ever.  Which is extremely difficult considering the pressure of the holidays and the advertisers out in full force. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all the deals.

There’s always going to be plenty to worry about, and you can always count on Washington making a crisis out of everything that they possibly can. We don’t want to dismiss people’s concerns over the election in markets, but if you step back and look at the facts behind the market impact of a president, whether it’s a Democratic or a Republican president, there’s not a big difference one way or the other.

However, this article states that a poll cites that 68% of Republican voters and 57 % of Democratic voters expect that the election outcome will impact the stock market and the economy. And so that perception and that reality are not the same.

Just like every election year, you’re going to see an uptick in volatility, the market going up and down. But once we have a conclusion,

Gather around and follow the Kitchen Table Finance podcast to learn about money and simple ways you can invest right now.

When it comes to retirement planning, what are your key numbers? How often should you review them?

Watch on YouTube HERE

In today’s world, there’s a lot of different numbers out there. There are a lot of different things that you can stress about.  So we are going to talk today about what numbers are actually important to think about when it comes to retirement.

It might surprise you. It is probably not what you think. We are also going to discuss how often you should look at your numbers.

Do you need to be reviewing these things daily? No. We talk about best practices for not driving yourself crazy.

We have mentioned a few times on our show that you shouldn’t be obsessing over your portfolio. You don’t need to check it constantly. We’ve talked about the statistics about how people tend to actually do worse the more often they check on things because they make emotional decisions.

No matter how many times you look at the market, there’s nothing you can control or change. So, by focusing on the things and the behaviors that you should be doing, you can actually drive meaningful change, especially over a longer period of time.

The number one driver of building wealth is your savings rate.

The number one number that everybody should know as you’re gearing up to retire is how much are you saving. What’s that percentage of income that is going into long-term savings?

The market will take care of itself and if you are just consistently doing the right thing and putting money away, you’ll reach your goal.

We have a general range that we usually want people to be in. It’s general because it’s different for different goals. If you want to retire at 50 you’re going to have a higher savings rate than somebody that wants to retire at 67.

Join us, Nick and Dave, as we take a closer look at the two main questions when it comes to retirement planning:

If you would like more information on retirement planning and would like to talk further, please contact us at 517-321-4832 or email [email protected].

We look forward to hearing from you.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.