Transcript:

Curtis Worcester:

Hello, and welcome to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. This is one of your hosts, Curtis, here. For today's episode we're actually going to do something a little bit different. We actually had a sit down, round table conversation with some of our colleagues at Guidance Point Advisors. So in just a few minutes I'm going to cut away and we're going to jump to that round table conversation we had. We just thought it was a great time to really look back on the calendar year of 2022, talk about where things stand in the investment markets and what we see going forward. So hang tight and we will be right back with our colleagues, so Ben will jump in as well and our colleagues, Wes and Chris.

All right, welcome everybody to another Guidance Point Advisors roundtable. I know we've done a few of these. My name is Curtis. I'm an investment consultant at Guidance Point Advisors. Joining me today are a few of my colleagues. I have Ben Smith, Wes Del Col, and Chris Del Col. We are all investment consultants here at Guidance Point Advisors and we really just wanted to get together. I know we do this periodically, to just talk about what we've seen in the last year. I know we're recording this in early January of 2023. So I think we're going to talk a little bit about 2022 and what we saw in the markets and just some other talking points, all things finance if you will.

But as we dive into this conversation, I know one thing we love to start one of these off with is an icebreaker question. I'm going to ask the three of you and I'll answer it at the end myself as well. Today's question we're going to go with, what is the most dominant sports team or individual performance season that you all have seen in your lifetime? It's got to be from your lifetime here. Okay? I'm going to start it off with, we'll go with Ben first. So Ben, what is your answer there?

Ben Smith:

Growing up I was a big basketball fan, so basketball's going to have to be the one that I answer with. The 1992 USA national team. So the Dream Team. That was the first Olympic team that they scored more than 100 points in all games. They beat all eight opponents by an average of 44 points per game. So they outscored them by 44 points. And again, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, right? The whole thing and even the coaches, right? Is Chuck Daly, Lenny Wilkens, Mike Krzyzewski, the coaching staff was like the Dream Team. That was the one that I think everybody just spurred this worldwide phenomenon about getting into basketball. And I think some would argue that even the NBA today is still a feeling reverb of that.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely.

Ben Smith:

So 92 USA national team is my answer.

Curtis Worcester:

All right, I love it. I love it. Chris, I'll rotate to you here. Where are you going with the most dominant sports team here?

Chris Del Col:

I'm going to go with an individual sport. I'm going to say Tiger Woods's dominance in the game of golf. I don't have the statistics handy to say which year he was the most dominant, but his career and there were multiple years in which he just exceeded anyone in the history in terms of his position at number one and his winning percentage on the tournaments that he entered in. And even the top five finishes. He was the most dominant athlete and it's been a positive influence on the PGA tour ever since.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely. It is impressive. I think you still see it on any golf broadcast. No matter who wins, they say something crazy like, only 46 more wins to come in second to Tiger Woods all time. It's crazy. That's a great answer there. And I like the individual twist. Wes, who are you going to go with here?

Wes Del Col:

It's tough because I'm a big Boston sports fan, but if I really think about the most dominant team in my lifetime, it's hard not to piggyback on Ben's basketball and go with the 90s bulls and they had those two, three peats with the two years in the middle when Michael wasn't playing, he was playing baseball. They basically won six years in a row with him. It's hard to beat that dominance. So I think that's the one I got to go with.

Curtis Worcester:

All right, I love it. You can't argue with it. I think I'm going to chime in here and I'll say the answer I think we all were thinking with Boston sports fans here and the Pats. I think if I had to pick one year, I know we were talking a little bit pre-show, it's a weird year I think, but I think if I had to pick a Pats team, I'd go 2007 and that team was just very dominant until the very end when they weren't dominant, obviously going to 16 in 0 in the regular season and falling to the giants there, which was just terrible. But I think could argue there's been a couple Pats dynasties in my lifetime over the span of the, you got the 01 through 04 and the little bit in 2012, 13 and then recently the 14 and 16 and 18 or 19 or something like that. There's too many I can't keep up. So too many

Wes Del Col:

Many to remember.

Curtis Worcester:

We're just going with the Pats baby. That's great. So that was awesome. Thank you guys so much for loosening the start of the conversation here. I do want to get into really the topics that we want to discuss today. I think Wes, I'm going to have you kick us off here. So if we could just start, just go through a recap of 2022. Obviously it was a busy year, we've all had conversations I think offline, but I think it'd be helpful just to hear what we saw and really just give, even if it's a 10,000 foot view recap of 2022.

Wes Del Col:

I think when you think about 2022, you have to remember that the year started, at the end of 2021 we had really high valuations in stocks, bonds valuations were high as well. But I think what we'll probably remember most about 2022 going forward was the higher inflation, the aggressive rate movement on interest rates, you had China and its zero COVID policy and the slowing growth there. And then the other big piece in this was part of the inflationary angle was growth stocks, which had been screaming higher for years. I think people had tended maybe even to be overallocated in that area, really took a hit. And while value took a hit too, not quite as much. And so we learned in 2022, and this may play into some of the questions we're going to get into later, that inflation can take a toll on everything and certainly on both sides of the ledger with stocks and bonds.

The other piece that I haven't mentioned is the war in Ukraine. I think that was a huge piece of 2022 that you can't not include in any type of recap of the year. So you put all those things together with skyrocketing inflation and aggressive Fed tightening policy, war in Ukraine, China slowing down and it was a horrible year. It was a year I think we'd all from an investment perspective like to forget and move forward. But that's when I think of a recap of 2022, those are the things I think that will primarily be remembered.

Curtis Worcester:

I think you hit everything major there. Ben or Chris, anything you want to add there? Any comments, reactions, anything like that?

Ben Smith:

I'll just piggyback. I think even just going to a micro level of some of the conversations we were having with our clients, is just the experience they had with their investments and there's enough people that maybe they're nearing retirement or they just retired and thinking about everything, which I think when we do our financial planning, I know we'll talk a little bit about that in a bit, but to say, hey, well here's where we were and here's counting on certain asset levels and if I was really conservative I lost double digit returns typically. If I was really aggressive and I was down as well. It didn't really matter the risk spectrum.

Emotionally I think the clients that got hurt the worst were the ones that were saying, hey, I'm a conservative investor in something like bonds because I don't want to have that risk of stocks and that drop there and then that bonds had a pretty extreme drop. I think that was for us from a coaching perspective of walking people through where we are, what we're doing about it, how we're repositioning portfolios to take advantage of further future gains, but also protecting, I think that was a lot of our experience with our clients and having those conversations in 22.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely. Anything Chris there that Wes or Ben didn't bring up that you want to add there?

Chris Del Col:

I would just chime in that what we saw in 2022, the impact of interest rates on the valuation of the equity market and the evaluation of assets across the globe and then the impact of those level of rates by virtue of what the inflation rate is. I remember starting out at the beginning of 2022 and saying how much the equity market had morphed into a real growth weighted market. And it means when you're talking about growth stocks, they're talking about earnings down the road, well off in the distance and the impact of movement and interest rates on earnings down the road means that those growth stocks are going to get deeply discounted in terms of the value. And that change played out all throughout 2022 and it was something new that the equity market hadn't really focused on the bond market as much in the years past and I think 2022 brought it to light.

Curtis Worcester:

That's a great point. Thank you for bringing that up. I think a good continuation of this recap of 22 naturally is going forward and where we're going. One thing I think that almost anyone I think can see in the news lately, I know Ben, you and I talked about this the other day, this headline of the 60/40 portfolio and is it dead? Is it time to move on from that? And Ben, I'll start with you I think here, I guess that's the short phrase question, is the 60/40 portfolio dead?

Ben Smith:

I guess what I would point out is just what, again, what is 60/40, right? So 60% stocks, 40% bonds is what we're pointing out when we talk about these ratios. But again, leapfrogging on what Wes was subscribing from the, Chris as well, the movement in stocks and bonds last year is a 60/40 portfolio. I'm Looking at J.P. Morgan has a 60/40 annual return chart that was done 16% ish last year. And if you look at how that happened, both stocks and bonds were down. So diversification is I think the point we're trying to make here is, hey, when stocks are down, bonds maybe are saving the day or bonds are down and stocks are doing better. So they're offsetting each other most times. And that obviously didn't happen here in 2022.

If you go back to how bad of a 60/40 portfolio performance that was, you go back to 2009 where that portfolio is around 20% down. Again that was all equities being down and bonds actually had offset a lot of losses in equities, which is why we were that 60/40 actually performed pretty well relative to the loss in stocks. You have to go all the way back to get a similar magnitude of losses to about 1975 when 60/40 portfolio's down about 17%. This is a very abnormal case where you've seen a 60/40 portfolio really not mitigate some of the risk that we see out there in the investment world. So from the whole 60/40 is it dead? I think we all try to overreact. We all see something didn't work and it's terrible and diversification, everything's correlated now and it's all going to work the same way.

I would say, look, there's abnormalities that happen, but there is reversion to the mean I think is a rule that we all subscribe to, is that things come back and I know we'll talk about bonds, but I think that's where bonds maybe show up to the party here going forward. And I know Chris will talk about that a little bit, but from a 60/40 perspective, we've had a reset valuations from stocks and bonds, I think that's going to help 60/40, 100, zero, 100s. I think all those portfolios are going to be much better off in the future.

Curtis Worcester:

That's great and those are some really helpful data points you pointed out there Ben, and I'll just turn to you guys, Wes and Chris, anything you want to add there in the 60/40 world, are we still big believers in the 60/40 on you guys work?

Wes Del Col:

When I think of the articles that I see about, is the 60/40 portfolio dead? I think what they're asking, and Ben just describe this, is the efficacy of fixed income or bonds as a source of meaningful diversification? Is that no longer the case? I would say absolutely the 60/40 can still work very well, especially because as Ben just described, bonds now are providing real yield. Just to add a stat Ben to what you were saying earlier, I think since 1980, so it's like 42 years, the 60/40 portfolio has provided positive returns and don't quote me exactly, but I think it's like 35 of those years. So it's done pretty well most of the time. What we learned as we were talking about in 2022 is that when you have a situation where there's very high inflation, it's going to adversely affect stocks and bonds.

And that's what we saw in 2022, which makes it feel like this didn't work because the ballast, the bonds in my portfolio that I always thought were going to balance out, didn't really help me here. So perhaps in times of extreme inflation, yes there are very few safe havens, but in general markets or in a market now where we're saying where the bond market is recovered and yields have come up a little bit, I think very much so the 60/40 can be meaningful going forward.

Curtis Worcester:

That's great. Chris, I know we've teed up the word bonds a couple times here now for you, so I want to ask, I'll give you a two-parter here because our next segment of our conversation is going to be bond focused. So first I'll say anything if you want to add to that 60/40 conversation, please feel free. The next point here, sticking with the headlines we may see in articles, right, it's bonds are terrible, right? Everyone's saying, look, you guys all just talked about it last year, bonds were down with equities. I don't know if it's a reaction an overreaction right now. So Chris, could you just dive into the bond world for us and our bonds in fact terrible right now?

Chris Del Col:

Never had an investment call talking about stocks and bonds where bonds have been so much of the focus, but I think it's a very apt to talk about. Last year we had a rising interest rate environment and most importantly we had a rising interest rate environment, which we've had in the past, but a rising interest rate environment from historical lows when I don't know what the absolute low was on the 10 year, but almost 140 or maybe 130, 10 year. I'd have to look up, up to now where it's around a 3.5%. A 200 basis point move on a 10 year duration fixed income instrument is going to result in a negative return, total return and it's going to have the impact as I said on valuations and so forth.

The most important thing I'd like to say is that we came from, the bond market had very long duration by virtue of the fact that it was close to zero interest rates for last year and the years prior. We've never had that in the past and so any rise in interest rate was going to be exaggerated compared to what we've had in the past. If we went from 7% up to 8%, it would not have the same impact of going from 1% tenure to 2% tenure. It was a dramatic change to interest rates that we had never seen before. I would say on the 60/40 portfolio, one thing to highlight, of that 40% in allocated to bonds, it's important where in the bond market you should position yourself to reduce your exposure to that change in interest rates.

I always like to remind people that the Federal Reserve only controls the front end of the yield curve. It is the overnight borrowing rate. The rest of the yield curve is determined by market participants where they think inflation is going to be, where they think GDP is going to be over the next one year, two years, three years, all the way out. It's important to think about positioning and you can reduce your exposure to interest rates moves up and down if you stay short in the bond market. So composition of 40% in allocation of bonds, definitely they're not dead. It's important to just be cognizant of what your exposure is within the bond market.

I would say that the other thing to think about when it comes to the bond market is there's the treasury market, there's also credit risk within the bond market if you expose yourself to corporate bonds or municipal bonds and also mortgage backed bonds. There are other instruments within the fixed income space that can provide some incremental yield even above treasuries, but the bond market is definitely not dead and going to Wes's point, we're at an interest rate environment now where they are an attractive element to a portfolio for sure.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. Ben, you want to add something there?

Ben Smith:

I guess what I'll just add too, and I think Chris, I think you've made a really important point is, I think the 2022 is really around really duration and how long we were and how obviously interest rate increases were hurting people the longer they had their bonds mature. It was really around duration and interest rate risk in 2022. I think some of the concern here now in 2023, if we do go into recession, now credit risk becomes more of that conversation, right? Because if you do have a company that is more exposed to certain elements of the economy and there's a recession and that causes maybe a problem with their credit worthiness, that's a little bit of the concern there. So maybe where if interest rates stabilize, which I think what we're seeing right is the Fed is maybe closer towards the end of the rate raising cycle than they are at the beginning.

If that's the case then maybe we have a little more stabilization in the yield curve, but again, having some mindfulness about what risk you're taking as you're saying whether it be high yield is obviously would be even more impacted if there's more maybe bankruptcy risk or credit risk there. Things of that nature are something we're just keep an eye on for our clients here. I think looking into 23 just forecasting, but I think you made a really great point Chris, about the now impact of 1% increases in yield, the yield curve is going to impact these bonds differently than they did last year because of now you have a reset of coupons and interest rate which now are offsetting a lot of maybe that yield curve increase because we're getting much more interest payments than we ever have in the last maybe five or 10 years. That's I think the interesting part here going into 23.

Wes Del Col:

One more point I would add Curtis, that relates maybe specifically to our clients and as we're talking about bonds and even very short term and there's been a couple of articles in various newspapers even in the last couple days about this, is I would urge clients, investors out there to check their money market accounts at banks and see what interest those banks are providing you, because I know Fidelity right now, I don't know the money market's somewhere around 3.75 or something percent. You should be generating even some yield certainly above 3% for your cash and that was not the case, it hasn't been, it feels like for over a decade maybe since prior to the 2008 financial crisis. I would just urge people to take a look and make sure that they're squeezing as much out of their cash as they can, because there are opportunities there now that we're not there a year ago.

Curtis Worcester:

That's a great point Wes, thank you so much for bringing that up. I think it's important, obviously the bonds are, we just talked about the role that they're playing, but even just short, like you said, short term cash, I think that's a really great point. My next question I really want to ask all three of you individually here, Wes, I will start with you here. It's a financial planning question. Obviously we just had a great recap of 2022, where we're at with, I know it was 60/40 specifically, but Chris just gave us great insight into the bond market right now. So now I just want to put it all together and where we sit today. What can investors do when their financial plan is off track and I guess specifically with a market drop like we saw in 2022?

Wes Del Col:

Sure. You come out of 2022 and you weren't expecting necessarily you're close to retirement and now all of a sudden you've got 15% less in your accounts than you had. Hopefully if we're being good advisors, we have projected that those types of things can and will happen.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Wes Del Col:

It's not just a straight line up. Thankfully at least in a lot of the client conversations I've had, we've built in that there could be some negative years in the markets and so those are going to happen. But let's just assume you're still not comfortable. I think the thing I would tell people to do is to prioritize what they can control. There are only so many variables that you can control. So you need to focus on the things that you have control over, which can be your savings, how much are you saving if you're still working? How much of that are you bringing home? And you're spending, the spending side, the expense side of the equations. Those are two things you have great control over.

I remember years ago J.P. Morgan had a nice chart that would say things you have total control over, then there are things you have partial control over, like your health. We know as people move into retirement, healthcare costs can be really expensive. The more you can focus on yourself and your health can be a big piece of that. Your employment if you're still engaged in work, even if it's part-time, can really be helpful. Things like the markets you don't really have much control over. You can focus on your asset allocation, which is that 60/40 discussion we were having. Also your asset location, so am I being tax efficient with where I have things in my portfolios?

Those are all things that you have control over that can help you get back on track. Worrying about what the market's going to do tomorrow or what it did yesterday, it's never proven to be helpful. I think the biggest thing if you're off track is to prioritize and focus on the things you can control.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. Chris, I'll turn to you and ask you the same question and the conversations that you may be having with clients right now, and again what can clients or just investors that may or may not be clients, what can they do here? Right? We're off track at this point after 2022. What do those conversations look like?

Chris Del Col:

I think the way, Wes, summarized it is so important. It's what you can control and not control. And the discussions I've had with clients after a year like 2022, is getting them to really understand volatility. Volatility is going to exist in a portfolio. And like Wes said it, people want it to be a straight line but it's not going to be a straight line. And if they've just experienced volatility on the negative side on the market, the natural tendency is maybe wanting to dial down that risk and yet they will then be giving up on the upside of the market as well. And if you have the right model in place in terms of what your risk tolerance is, you have to believe in it and they're going to be down years and there are going to be commensurate up years and the net of it should be growth in the overall portfolio.

I think that's a difficult conversation to have with people, but you have to get them to understand that volatility does exist and you choose a certain risk tolerance that is going to exhibit a certain volatility and you go within those parameters. All you can do is control your side of the equation and that is the savings and expense side of things. And volatility also can be your friend like Wes brought up for those taxable accounts. Tax loss harvesting is a great strategy to maintain the risk in a slightly different exposure but capture that tax loss at the time and ride the upside to push off any capital gains down the road. Those are the things I would highlight in terms of going through a time like 2022.

Curtis Worcester:

That's awesome. I really appreciate that. And Ben, I'll turn to you here too with the same question. Again, we're off track after 2022, what are you telling people or how are you counseling people of what they can do here?

Ben Smith:

I think, Chris, you started going to almost the lemons and lemonade, right? Obviously we were handed some lemons. Tax loss harvesting and brokerage accounts is a really big deal also in qualified accounts. So what about maybe is this a time to do a Roth conversion? Can we buy equity? Can we convert equity is maybe down 20 or 30%, convert them over to a Roth and let them recover on an after tax basis and not pay taxes on the rebound? So when we take it out as income. I think that's another thing that we've been working on and advising. Obviously we don't get the investment return we wanted, but can we create tax return? Can we create the tax alpha? I guess is the terminology we heard a lot in 2022, creating extra sources of income or return by being smarter with taxes.

I think the other part is, for the retirees, the people that were going into retirement and obviously losing money doesn't feel great, but however many portfolios, thinking back to if I was retiring three years ago, I had to be having maybe a lot of enough equities in my portfolio to really gather enough return here going forward into retirement. If I was looking at my bonds and they're only yielding one, 1.5%, well, geez if inflation's 2.5%, that bond part of the portfolio is really just a ballast against equities and not really providing enough income to keep up with inflation, which is one of the main purposes of fixed income. So now flash forward going forward, geez, with a reset of interest rates and you have four or 5% yields in fixed income, and we were looking at capital market assumptions the other day, Vanguard published theirs in December, equities of six to 7.5% going forward and bonds at five to 6% going forward for the next 10 years.

If you go to Vanguard's Capital Markets assumptions in Google, you can see those numbers that came up. I think one of the things is, I think there's a fallacy right now, people, as we said about cash, being smart with cash that you can get 4% in cash, but if you look at cash at four and maybe bonds that might give you five and stocks give you six. There's a lot of meshing right there of everything seems to be pretty equal across the risk spectrum. The point of diversification is we don't know when those returns are going to happen. We don't know, does fixed income show up to the party first and then stocks and then cash? Having all those baskets be working for us because it is tempting right now to go, hey, I can go all the cash and be at 3.8% to that fidelity government money market we talked about.

But we have had a rally here in January of 23 where stocks have rallied 5% in the first three weeks of the market of the new year. I think those are things that we're counseling on right now and again from getting back on track is letting these pieces of our portfolio work. We need to practice patience and it is tough, tough, tough to do when we see losses in our portfolio, but patience is a really important thing because time is on our side.

Curtis Worcester:

I like that. Thank you all three of you for those answers. I think you all made some very great points and I know we all talk offline about these things as well, but I'm glad we're doing it in this format. We have one last, at least last on our agenda. It may not be the end of the conversation, but it's our last agenda item here to talk about, a general, again zooming out a little bit and just a general question of the economy I guess. And Wes, I'm going to go to you here or start with you here. Obviously we talked about 2022 inflation. I know you brought it up, Wes, in your recap of 2022 pretty early on. Should we still be concerned about inflation at this point? What are the conversations you're having around inflation and are clients asking you that question?

Wes Del Col:

Sure. I think absolutely we should still be concerned with inflation at this point. In fact, I think it's probably the biggest theme entering 2023, along with the interest rates and what the Fed is doing to try to fight that inflation. So all of these things get connected in a way that influence portfolios, they influence the bond market like we were discussing. And yes, we have been seeing inflation declining, but I don't think we're out of the woods yet. And so I'm really watching closely, and I think this will probably take place in the first half of 2023, does the Fed's tightening cycle, raising interest rates level off maybe even after the next two hikes?

And at that point, do we see inflation continuing to come down where they're confident enough that they can either flat or do we go fall into a recession and actually the Fed then needs to maybe ring rates back down? That could happen later. Inflation I think is a big piece of that along with unemployment and everything else that's bundled in there. But, no, I don't think just because we've seen inflation tick down since November, can we say job finished. We're just not there yet and I think it'll continue to be probably the biggest theme through the first half of 2023.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely. Chris, I'll turn to you around your conversations with clients and what you're seeing out there in inflation. I'm assuming it's going to be an echo of some of what Wes said because I think all four of us would agree inflation's still here and it's here to stay for a little bit, at least in terms of our mindset, but I'll turn that question to you, Chris.

Chris Del Col:

I think the Federal Reserve has such an interesting dynamic to deal with in this time period relative to previous time periods where they've had to fight inflation and it seems like a long time ago when they've had to actually fight inflation. But you're coming out of COVID, you've got the supply chain issues and labor and delivery of goods and you've got X amount of demand, so they're trying to tamp down demand and that will result in an unemployment rate going up. But the unemployment rate seems to be pretty sticky at 3.5%. And will higher rates actually bring out, we see some headline numbers of the tech community laying off people and that is what pretty much the Federal Reserve wants, but is it going to get deeper in and tamp down the demand side of the supply demand dynamic that causes inflation?

It's a tough call. I think that it's going to be around longer and I think what Ben said about patience, we're talking about a $26 trillion GDP economy, which happens to have a $32 trillion deficit or debt that has to be serviced. And so it takes time to tamp down that economy and that's needed by the Fed. Net of it all I think that core inflation is coming down, it's just taking a little bit longer than people expect, because we're going through this reigniting of the economy and a slightly altered economy with the changes of COVID that we've never seen before.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Ben, I'll turn to you here and you can give our final thoughts maybe on inflation and where you stand and your concern with it.

Ben Smith:

I think Wes and Chris you both covered the Fed positioning on inflation and where it is. Again, I agree that it's going to take a while for all this to sort out and to figure out, and I think one of the things that we've been saying from an actionable side of, hey, if you're listening to this right now, what can I do to maybe insulate some of my money against inflation? Again, equities in fixed income, that investible portfolio that we work on with you, obviously that's been pre-fighting inflation leading up. That's why we do invest as we are to have all of our liquid assets keep up and then when inflation pops up all at once, we've already pre-bought some inflation production there.

But from a cash perspective, one thing we've been asking a lot of our clients to just investigate a little bit more seriously is directly through the treasury, you can buy series I savings bonds, almost think about the series E savings bonds or those other savings bonds that we purchased when we were a kid and they were paper and they hand them down and they're 30 years and all that, is that there's actually one that is tied to inflation that resets every six months. So right now the series I savings bond, again directly through the treasury and you can do up to, I believe $10,000 into that purpose and per year, that's paying 6.89% and that's tied to CPI. So if inflation is sticky, well, you could be using some of these bonds to then keep your personal assets to keep up with inflation.

If obviously inflation goes to zero, that's not a great place to be because it doesn't have a coupon to it. But that's something where I think if there's folks that say, look, I don't need this cash in the near term. Again, it has to be in there for a year. That's something to consider, right? If you can look that up at treasurydirect.gov, you can check that out, the series I savings Bond. That might be something to consider just as a companion for your cash and management on how do I keep some of my savings tied to inflation so it insulates a little bit against that for me.

Curtis Worcester:

Absolutely. Thanks so much for bringing that up. I want to thank the three of you, Wes, Chris, Ben, for having this conversation today. I think it was a really productive one. I want to thank all of our clients. Anyone who may be listening or watching this that maybe isn't a client, I hope you got some value from it as well. To all our clients, again, thank you. Thanks for sticking with us. Again, patience is the key word I think of this conversation and we certainly look forward to all our conversations in the future with all of you and specifically here in the near term in 2023. But thank you again to the three of you for contributing today. Again, I think it was a great conversation and look forward to the next time we all catch up.

All right, well, thank you so much for sitting through and listening to that Guidance Point Advisors round table we just had. Hopefully you thought it was a productive conversation. I know we did on our side. Thought we talked about some really great things and it was great to reconnect with Wes and Chris and really get their insight as well with what the conversations they're having are sounding like. Thanks again for, I know this episode was a little different, but we thought it was a great time to have the conversation and wanted to share it with our listeners over here at The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast as well. So like most of our shows, we are going to have a little blog page for this episode as well. On there you'll be able to find links to the video for the show.

We'll have links to get in touch with us, our contact info and probably have a transcript up there as well from the conversation. So if you like to take in the content by reading it, you'll be more than able to do that as well. The website for all that is going to be blog.guidancepointllc.com/79. This is episode 79 of our show. Again, we can't thank you guys enough for tuning in not only to today's show, but all of our episodes. It's crazy, we're approaching 80. We've got some exciting shows coming up for you all. As always appreciate the listenership and look forward to all our future conversations.