Fake News!

Mr. stupid's opus course. John pontificates on here on a regular basis. Glad you decided to join us today from Rose thoughts and the drum course is the author of a brand-new book called the financial buffet and I promise it is a veritable cornucopia of financial advice, and fun stuff. I should've put a veritable cornucopia on the cover not used smorgasbord. Instead, smorgasbord of retirement planning lessons, but cornucopia will go over better.

Either way, it's a variety of financial advice that you can use and love and John Stillman of course is the guy who puts altogether and I thought maybe now on today's edition of Mr. Stillman's opus. We could talk about fake news and hear a lot about that lately. How have we gone this long and not done a fake news discuss how don't know where I've made a couple little remarks that you just kind of ignored but there's a lot of fake news stories been talked about in the political realm. I think basically the definition of fake news is anything that you don't like exactly you just call it fake news is not to argue with her.

Anything just call it fake news and that's it walk away. What about fake news in the financial space tell us if these headlines are fake news or not Social Security going broke. Fake news or no right so the misunderstanding that most people have about Social Security is that there is this pile of money sitting somewhere that is the Social Security fund for the next however many years it works. It's all funded by people paying into the system and then that money gets paid out to people who are retired. I guess maybe this started with Al Gore and his lockbox concept back in the day where he always talked about putting Social Security lockbox and so maybe that created the perception people's minds that there is a pile of money sitting out there that were stealing from that fund to pay for other stuff. I'll refrain from doing my Al Gore impression. Feel free feel free to exit a lot exactly remember that the thing you have to understand is that it's basically a Ponzi scheme right, you're always paying people out with money that new investors are putting right that's basically out works all the time but when you look at it from that standpoint and yet sounds terrifying when you call a Ponzi scheme. But when you think of it that way, you realize that it's not going to go broke because there's no money and there is always as new people paying in and then paying that money right back out to people who are taking their Social Security benefit. So the way you would quote unquote go broke. Obviously, as if there's more people taking out that there are putting it. It's not like up a reservoir that we've drained. It's just you have more takers than you have put her in her's.

Should you want to use the technical sense is a new and I have a yeah that's cool, and when you look at demographics. There's going to be a period of time were actually really close to it where there are more people taking out or at least more dollars coming out and being put in because the baby boomers were a big generation right. That's how they were called the baby boom There Was A Lot Of I Am One Yeah Why Do Pent up Aggression after the War. Everybody Came Home and Then We Have Babies, but the Generation after the Baby Boomers Was Not As Big Generation Right so Generation X Essentially Right, but Not As Big As the Baby What the Millennial Generation Though Is Bigger Then Generation X. So Yes, We Have This Point Where the Most Baby Boomers Are Taking Money Out Of the System and the Generation Xers Are Absolutely Carrying the Water for Everybody. Yeah, We Might Have More Dollars Coming out Going That's Completely Possible to Be Trillions and Trillions of Dollars Difference, but It Could Be for A Few Years, We See That Being the Case, but Once Generation Xers Retire and Now the Millennial's Are in Their Prime Earning Years, the Children of the Generation Xers. Well, Now Suddenly Members of Even Themselves Back out Because There Are More Millennial's, Then There Are Generation Xers Okay so It's Not Really Going Broke.

It's Just That We Have a. Coming up Where It's Going to Be a Little Bit Challenging from a Demographic Perspective, but the Demographics Being What They Are. That's Eventually Going to Correct Itself.

So Yes, We Might Have a. Where We Have To Weather the Storm for Little While but That Won't Be the Quote Unquote Normal As Far As Social Security Is Concerned, but Is Not Going Away like Politicians Are Terrible at A Lot Of Things There However Really Good at Staying Elected and Are Not Going to Do Anything That Messes with That Voting Block That Is. People Currently Receiving Social Security Okay Although Always Treasure the Most Disciplined Voting Group You'll Ever See His Senior Citizens, and They're Not Going to Do Anything. It Really Messes with the Economic Livelihood of Those People Things Really Interesting to Find out That I Am the Product of A Lot Of Pent-Up Aggression, and Thought I Just Was Feeling Really What I Could You Say We Can Talk about That Another Sheriff but How about, Here's Another Headline for You Tell Me If It's Fake News or Not the Crash of the Dollar Is Imminent by Gold Now Fake News Yeah I Mean Here so the Irony with the by Gold Marketing Is, Essentially, People Are Saying What Your Dollars Are about to Be Worthless When You Have This Devaluing of Our Currency. Therefore, You Need Gold so That You Can Trade and Barter and Sell When Your Dollars Worthless. Okay, so What You're Telling Me Mr. Mann Advertising on Cable Television at One of the Morning Yeah Exactly Is That Dollars Are about to Be Worthless. Therefore, You're Going to Do Me a Favor by Taking These about to Be Worthless Dollars off My Hands and Replacing Them with Gold for Me. Your You Are Willing to Accept My Dollars in Exchange for Gold Process. The Logic of That French Thing Would Look at It Doesn't Make A Lot Of Sense.

Now It Doesn't so Anytime You Come across Something like That Use Would Have To Question the Motives of the. The Sales Tactics Going on to Say That You Should Never Have Any Gold at All in Your Portfolio. I Think It's Absurd for People to Have 25% of Their Portfolio Investment Goal.

I've Seen That and I've Told People That's Absurd, but You Know If Some People Are Going to Go That Route the Sock If It's 5% of Your Net Worth You Having Gold Fine, but Let's Not Approach It from the Standpoint of the Dollar Is about to Be Worthless. Therefore I Need a Safe in My House Filled with Gold Coins and Bullion on to Feed My Family for the Next Generation and Exchange the Other Person Is Going to Take a Bunch Worthless Dollars Right Dollars, or about Worthless. The Reason to Have Precious Metals of Any Kind in Your Portfolio Would Be Because They're Not Correlated to Other Things in the Market so It's Great to Have Different Assets That Grow or Lose Value in Different Ways at Different Times and If You Look at the Long-Term Track Record of Gold As an Investment That Are Good from a Growth Perspective. But If You Say Well I like Something That Moves Inversely, or Just a Way That's Not Correlated at All for My Stocks or My Bonds Are Whatever Just Fine. From That Standpoint Makes Sense If You're Approaching with That Standpoint, You're Not Going to Go Overboard by Having Too Much Gold in Your Life Is Another Headline for You John Tell Me If This Is Fake News Market Crash Coming Soon Fake News Were Not Well with We Don't Know until It's in Retrospect Right. I've Never Come across Anybody Who Can Really Show Me Any Tangible Proof That They Consistently Predict Market Crashes Ahead of Time. There A Lot Of People Who Look Back. They Research Old Market Crashes and They Say All While It Was Because This Was Happening and We Can Identify These Metrics and This Was Overpriced and That's Why the Market Crashed While in Retrospect Maybe That's True, but Usually Those Same Indicators Are Not Indicative of the Next Market Crash, There's a Guy Named Harry Dent Who Is a Great Example of This. Harry Dent, You'll See Them on CNBC or FOXBusiness Channels like That from Time to Time and He Is Always Predicting the Next Market Crash.

He's Been Predicting the Next Market Crash since I Think 2009, Right after We've Started to Recover from the Last One He Was Predicting the Next When It Was Going to Be Worse Than the One We Just Had Well That May Be True Eventually.

But What I Know about People like That Is, Once the Next Crash. Finally It Happens I Can Say See I Told You so, What You Can't Say I Told You so, after You Said the Same Thing for Seven or Eight Years and Then Finally Came True. That's Not How I Told You so Works. My Point Is This, Are We on the Verge of a Market Correction Completely within the Realm of Possibility. I Think You Need to Be Preparing in Your Portfolio. As If That Could Happen Tomorrow Afternoon Right It's Completely Possible That We Could Have a Downturn in the Market Very Soon and It Could Be Back to Be a Good Size Correction but It Could Be Another Two or Three Years before We See a Correction like That's the Point. I'm Always Trying to Make in Terms of Planning for Correction Is Not Trying to Time It Perfectly and Say Okay Well Tobin's Q Ratio Indicates That Were about to Have a Downturn in the Market. That's a Fine Metric to Look at but Again, A Lot Of People Been Using Tobin's Q Ratio for Two Years to Tell Us the Crashes Imminent so We Just Don't Know. The Point Is If You're Retiring Tomorrow Afternoon. We Need Money to Create Your Income. That's Not at the Whim of the Market and If You're Not Retiring for 20 Years. Who Cares If We Have a Crash Tomorrow. You Have Recovery Time That'll Actually Be a Buying Opportunity for You If We Have a Crash, You Start Putting More Money in and You Write It up so That's the Two Extremes You Not Retiring for a Long Time or You're Retiring Very Soon. If You're Retiring Seven Years from Now. Well, It's a Little Murky Right Because We Don't Know If You Want to Be Too Conservative or Progressive or What Should We Do What, That's Where a Good Retirement Income Plan Comes into Play Because You're Going to Have Some Dollars That Need to Be Conservative Because Lessee You Are Retiring Seven Years but We Have a Crash in Two Years. Those Dollars May Not Recover by Your Seven When You Need Them for Income so You Want Some Money Set Aside for Your Income. Seven Years from but There's Going to Be Money in Your Portfolio.

I Don't Care If You're 72 Years Old. If You're Not Planning to Die Next Week. There Is Almost Certainly Some of Your Investment Money That You Don't Need for a Decade or More, and That Money Doesn't Just Have To Be Parked in Cash Because You're Afraid of a Market Crash You Can Afford Some Volatility with Some Percentage of Your Wealth in Almost All Cases, That Doesn't Mean You Enjoy the Volatility Necessarily, but in Almost Every Case, You Have Money That You'll Need for A While so Market Crash Next Week Doesn't. That's All I'm Saying about Market Crash Is That It Is It Coming.

Maybe, Maybe Not. We Don't Know, but You Do Need to Be Prepared for. If It Does, or If It Doesn't, and When It Does, Whenever That Is.

You Can Always Look Back and Say I Told You so, so, and You Know I That's the Best Explanation of Fake News and I've Heard from Anybody.

John Asked so Much. Always a Pleasure Even Listening to Mr. Stillman's Opus Where Everything Is Always Harmonious in the Orchestra Always Hits the Right Notes