INSIGHTS Blog

The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, (named after its predecessor, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019) is designed to improve the current and future state of retirement savings and retiree income in the United States. The following highlights just some of the provisions in the law that could affect you and your retirement savings.

DISCLAIMER - I don't know the future - neither do any of the others. But sometimes it’s at least a little clearer than the present moment. Take the outlook for recession. Nearly everyone says we’re going to get one. The Conference Board recently reported that 98% of CEO’s expect a recession. 98%!!!! Yikes! . . . So, is it a done deal? We’re going to have a recession? Maybe.

I have a rule that I never make decisions in the middle of the night—especially if I’ve woken up in the dark. Everything always looks worse then. The stock market can be thought of as a place of long days and short nights. If bull markets are the days of the stock market, then bear markets are the nights—and they don’t tend to last very long.

In 1926 Earnest Hemmingway published what most people consider his best novel, the Sun Also Rises. Like most Hemmingway novels, it’s about real people and events from his life, but fictionalized, and, like most Hemmingway novels, it spends a lot of time being dark and depressed. 2022 has been rather like a depressing Hemmingway novel.

Most everyone knows that inflation is when prices of things are rising. This is a wonderful thing when you go to sell your house and you get a lot more than you paid for it some years ago. Not so good when you go to the grocery store or buy a car or for that matter, buy a house.

When the financial world barks, it sends cascades of bad news. So far this year it’s been impossible to escape from this onslaught as we see soaring consumer prices, rising interest rates, bogged down supply lines, war in Europe and saber rattling in Asia between China and Taiwan. Getting hammered by bad news day after day, week after week for 8 months causes people to sell. Fear of losing is a big thing.

When I was 16, my mother helped me get an afterschool job loading trucks at a factory in Philadelphia. I learned a lot about how the world works during the two years I worked there. As a part-time dock loader, I was low man on the totem pole. I'm certain I was also the lowest paid. But it was enough to take my girlfriend on dates and have a little extra money of my own. The owner of the factory was a relatively young man of roughly 40. He was rarely around the plant.

I think of myself as a boy of summer. When I was young, summer was a time to spend outside with my friends. We played a form of baseball with only two kids using a plastic bat and ball. We played tag and touch football, and really any game we could think of or make up. It was truly great fun. So much so that more than five decades later, you can still find me outside playing games in the summer. Most of the time that we played, someone won and someone else lost.

Here we are, almost halfway through yet another historic year.  Unlike the turbulent times of 2020 and 2021 though, the markets this year have not been as kind.  Inflation, war, and recession are just a few of the things weighing on the minds of investors as we look to the rest of 2022 and beyond. 

There is always a list. The items on the list change quite regularly. The purpose of the list does not. It's list of things to worry about. We all have a list. Some of the items on the list are particular to our own personal situation whether it's our age, our personal finances, our job, etc. That's an important list, but the list I'm referring to isn't that one. The list I'm talking about is the list we all share.

Some events are truly world changing. I don’t know if we can ever be sure that an event will be world changing until quite some time after it happened, and we can see the effect. My hyperbolic title can be argued with because I’m not going to discuss the inventions of fire or the wheel.

The old adage is to buy low and sell high. This is, of course, what everyone wants to do. If you sell anything for more than you paid for it, then you make money. Simple. But simple is not always easy. In the case of investments, it can sometimes be brutally difficult.

Time for one of my very favorite quotes – “Prediction is very difficult, especially when it pertains to the future.” The great dilemma of investing is that we make an investment in the present with the hope of making a profit in the future. But we can’t predict the future.

Markets hate uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds volatility. And, as we have experienced with the S&P 500 down over 10% year-to-date, the volatility has accelerated as the Ukraine-Russia conflict unfolds. Well, Russia has now invaded Ukraine. That much is certain. The new uncertainty is to what end.

Driving from Eastern Iowa to Denver is a very long, flat excursion that starts out at about 700 feet above sea level and ends up at 5,000 feet. The rise is so gradual as to be unnoticeable. If the U.S. economy conforms to my outlook, its rise should be pretty much like that long, flat drive that somehow ends up substantially higher than where it started.