No More TINA – An Investment Update

 

Walter Storholt:

Hey, welcome back to another edition of Retire Smarter. Walter Storholt here with Kevin Kroskey. He’s back, ladies and gentlemen. Wealth advisor, certified financial planner at True Wealth Design. Tyler’s got the week off as we bring Kevin back in for a fun episode.

Although I was a little taken aback when I saw the headline for today’s episode, Kevin, you sent it over to me and I said, “No more Tina? What happened to Tina?” I thought we were going to be mourning the loss of someone, but no, that’s not exactly what’s happening on today’s episode. Welcome back, my friend. It’s good to talk to you once again.

Kevin Kroskey:

Walt, it’s great to be back. I just had a flashback. I remember the first scary movie that I saw was Freddy Krueger and I don’t know, circa ’84, ’85. Freddy’s first victim was a blonde girl named Tina. I know you’re a younger millennial than I am and I’m not a millennial, but Walt, have you seen Freddie Krueger, Nightmare on Elm Street?

Walter Storholt:

I have not. It was one of those movies that I saw a lot at Blockbuster. Our family went to Hollywood Video because it was closer. It was always there. I’ve seen tons of those kinds of movies, but just came out just a little too soon for me by the time I got to be the age to watch those types of movies to then actually consume it. But I kind of know the character, know the idea, but no, I don’t remember Tina from Freddy Krueger.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yeah. I just looked it up. It was ’84, which I probably saw it around then. I’m thinking here of being a parent of an almost five-year-old and almost 10-year-old, and I was about eight at the time. Where were my parents? Why did they let me watch this thing? Or did they? They probably didn’t let me. Who knows?

But I remember after I watched it, we didn’t have much growing up and my basement was… Excuse me. My bedroom was in the basement of our house and the basement was partly finished. After I saw that movie, I just remember having to walk through the unfinished part of the basement to get upstairs and it creeped me out. I thought Freddy Krueger-

Walter Storholt:

Oh, man.

Kevin Kroskey:

… was hiding in the unfinished part of the basement. There was a cold cellar and all kinds of creepy stuff that you had in a circa 1940s home that the nicest. The light switch did not work at the base of the stairs. It only worked at the top of the stairs, so-

Walter Storholt:

Oh, that’s right out of a movie plot.

Kevin Kroskey:

For many months I got quite a workout just sprinting up those stairs to get the hell out of there.

Walter Storholt:

I love it. I love it. For me that was taking out the trash for me. We had a long driveway, and it was that long walk out to the end of the driveway and then feeling like something was coming for you and then sprinting back down the driveway to the house. I don’t know what movie that would relate to, but that’s my creepy come up the stair story.

Kevin Kroskey:

No more Tina.

Walter Storholt:

No more Tina.

Kevin Kroskey:

Tina, Tina, Tina. Tina has been a more popular saying at least kind of particularly pre 2023, but there is no alternative. As I researched it, apparently it’s been around for hundreds of years and it’s been made popular by politicians, but it was used to really talk about the stock market because bonds were near 0%. It was kind of a way to justify like, hey, where are you going to put your money? You can’t leave it in cash, you can’t put it in bonds, you’re not going to get anything there. There is no alternative to stocks.

Here we are in kind of mid 2023. We just got done doing some updates to our portfolio strategies. And when we do that, we write a client letter kind of detailing our thinking and what’s changing and why and just giving some general commentary.

But this idea about Tina really kind of came to mind. I don’t think I used it in the paper or in the client letter that was sent out, but I figured that’s what we’d talk about today, just kind of the state of the market, kind of an investment update, not really looking so much backwards but more so present.

And then nobody has a crystal ball. We’re not trying to say that this fund, and we won’t even talk about specific funds for compliance purposes, but we’ll just talk about where things sit in the market and maybe where you’re likely to get compensated well for risk and maybe some other places where you aren’t.

We’ll see where it goes. I’ll try to keep it high level, not get too far into the weeds. For clients that are listening, certainly we did post that client letter to your client vault. If for some reason you’re not using it or don’t have it, just send us an email. We’ll be happy to get it to you.

And of course for any of those non-clients, any of the stuff that we’re talking about investment wise, this is just purely for education for our clients. We give advice and we’re certainly responsible for that. But those are very customized relationships. We certainly know a lot about our clients. This is just two guys talking, right, Walt? It’s been a while.

Walter Storholt:

That’s right. Yeah. We’ll change the name of the show, Two Guys Talking. I kind of like that new idea.

Kevin Kroskey:

Well, maybe we won’t.

Walter Storholt:

No, we’ll keep it Retire Smarter. I like that. It’s the tagline now though, two guys talking.

Kevin Kroskey:

Two guys talking. There you go. I guess we should always start with why is this important? You think about some of the why’s. The show is, I believe, I know I’ve been gone for a while, but I still believe it’s entitled Retire Smarter. Money is a tool. It’s there to support who we are and things that we want to do. It’s not just a means to an end.

For the vast majority of our clients, we have financial life plans for them. We understand what their lifestyle is, what that costs them to live. We understand those expenditures that are more or less important to them knowing that in fact, if we did have to cut back for any reason, certainly we would not cut back from the needs but more from the discretionary spending.

And then also that helps to go ahead and provide a framework to do investment planning, making sure we’re matching the investments back to the financial plan, overlaying that with tax smart distribution planning as well, and even some estate planning on top of it.

So it’s really kind of foundational, the financial plan, but part of that plan is we have to put in return assumptions. So you need to make some projections. Of course they’re going to be imperfect. This is an ever ongoing thing, but it’s something that we have to do.

That’s kind of the why. When you’re doing the investment work, again, you’re going to need to put some, not only assumptions in your plan, but then when you’re actually doing the investment work in action, certainly you want to go ahead and try to maximize your return for whatever risk you’re taking. And a quick aside to that, Walt, you know how I love to ask you questions, Walt, that sometimes they’re softballs, sometimes they’re not.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. Sometimes they’re a little more cruel. We’ll see.

Kevin Kroskey:

This may be one that’s in the not category.

Walter Storholt:

Uh-oh.

Kevin Kroskey:

But it’s been a while.

Walter Storholt:

[inaudible 00:07:25].

Kevin Kroskey:

I’m allowed to do it. Dr. Harry Markowitz, do you know who he is?

Walter Storholt:

Oh, you’ve mentioned that name before, but no.

Kevin Kroskey:

Harry Markowitz. The reason why I’m bringing up really kind of-

Walter Storholt:

Was that the quiz question, or is this just the lead in? I’m already off track.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yeah, no, that was the quiz question.

Walter Storholt:

Oh, okay. Gotcha.

Kevin Kroskey:

Harry Markowitz is really considered the father of modern portfolio theory. He wrote a paper. I think he was pursuing his PhD at the time. It was back in the ’50s. It was called Portfolio Selection. The reason why I’m bringing him up, by the way, he just passed away within the last week. He was the ripe old age of 95, but he actually won a Nobel Prize for his 1952 paper.

For me anyway, one of the things I thought was really cool was it actually took a few decades to prove he was correct because the mathematical theory was in there was so complex that at the time they didn’t have sufficient computing power to prove that he was accurate. So later on as computers continued to develop, proved out that Dr. Markowitz was correct. And then I’m not sure exactly how it played out, but he went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics, I think in the ’80s or so.

Now, a lot of people will have heard about the efficient frontier, which is really what Markowitz is probably most famous for. For Harry, it was really about this efficient frontier and creating a portfolio and him having a mathematical framework to go ahead and do so where for whatever given level of risk, you’re really optimizing your return and you can kind of solve either way for risk return. And that’s kind of the efficiency of the portfolio and the efficient frontier.

That’s what he’s most known for. He really was a giant in the field and he made significant contributions. It was pretty cool to come up with a theory that okay, I think I’m right, but it took me a few decades to actually be proven.

Walter Storholt:

I’ll have to wait for computers to be invented to prove me right. Yeah, that’s kind of like a really thing to stick your chest out over. That’s impressive.

Kevin Kroskey:

You got it. Here at True Wealth anyway, we think of asset classes in kind of three very broad buckets. I’ll start with the simpler if you will. We call them preservation assets, so it could be cash or higher quality bonds.

We know that, and Tyler’s talked about it on the podcast, I talked about it back when the banking fiasco was really kind of front and center in March, rates have certainly gone up. When you look at cash or other cash-like investments, we’re getting paid quite a bit today. And a lot of people I’m sure have heard about this yield curve inversion. So Walt, question number two, buddy.

Walter Storholt:

I heard about it in news all the time, yield curve inversion.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yes. What is the yield curve inversion? High level, Walt’s words.

Walter Storholt:

It’s the normal yield curve but inverted the other way.

Kevin Kroskey:

Ooh, that’s a little fuzzy wuzzy, I’d say, Walt. I did ask for it in Walt’s words. This could be a new section for the show.

Walter Storholt:

Walt’s words, I like it.

Kevin Kroskey:

Walt’s words.

Walter Storholt:

I like it.

Kevin Kroskey:

I’ll use it this way. You go and you get a mortgage. I think most people had a mortgage. And when you go to the bank and say, “Hey Mr. or Mrs. Banker, I need a mortgage.’ And they come back and say, “Okay. Walt, here’s a 30-year mortgage and here’s a 15-year mortgage.” Now Walt, what can you tell me about the difference between a 15-year and a 30-year? Which one is generally higher?

Walter Storholt:

The higher interest rate typically is going to be the 30.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yes. Ding, ding, ding. Good job. That’s normally how the yield curve is. As you go out further in time, there tends to be a more risk and thus there tends to be higher rates. Right now, and not just right now but it’s been for a while, it has quite an amplitude right now where you actually have this inversion and you have short-term treasury bills just a couple months in duration paying north of 5%.

Meanwhile, again, and as of this recording on June 28th, as this is kind of what I’m talking about, these markets and these rates, you have a 10-year US government bond at about 3.7%. So we think of that as kind of a term premium if you go out to 10 years. And if you just subtract those two numbers, you basically see that there’s a negative term premium for owning a 10-year bond compared to a few month government bond. So about minus 1.4% to be exact.

Walter Storholt:

It’s kind of like why would you go for the longer term if the shorter is paying better?

Kevin Kroskey:

Yes. And so there’s kind of a decision matrix where you could look at that. Definitely rates would have to fall quite a bit at that 10 year level for those 10 year bonds to give a total return. Quickly getting down the technical rabbit hole here, so I might have to go back to Walt’s words in a moment. But total return is just your income return, which is your interest in the term of bonds, it could be your dividend income in the terms of stocks, plus the price change, whether something is going to increase or decrease in price.

And so you could have in theory, you could own these 10-year US government bonds and if rates went back down to say where they were in 2021 or early 2022, you could actually see a change in that yield curve where those longer term bonds would do better. However, because there is such a steep inversion, I would say that that’s probably unlikely. Also unlikely, at least right now because of some of the inflation that’s still out there, not just in the US but also in other countries as well.

So right now generally you’re getting paid very well to be in these, I’ll call them cash-like investments, T bills, cash-like investments, same thing. We’ll kind of use that as a building block. We’ll use that and we’ll come back to it when we talk about appreciation assets and stocks in a little bit.

But in short, there’s really only two components that drive returns in preservation assets or fixed income. That’s term, which we just spoke about. Again, everybody just experienced that term risk in 2022. As rates rose, and if you had bond in investments, you saw that that price component of your total return went down and it went down a lot more and provided total negative returns, even though those bonds or other yield based investments like that did have a positive income return.

Walt, you might have to start hitting the egghead alert here. I’m hearing myself. It’s crystal in my mind, but I’m getting a little worried here, so you might have to bring me back to speak English

Walter Storholt:

It wasn’t a specific term, but there were some numbers and phrases that all twisted together there. Might have triggered the egghead alert.

Kevin Kroskey:

All right. When I talk about the other return driver in fixed income, I am not going to use numbers. So credit, not the card that’s in your wallet, Walt, credit, but I guess it could be related to your credit card because if you didn’t pay your bill then you would technically default on your credit. So there you go. Credit is really the risk that companies whose bonds you may own default.

And so while term was really kind of the risk that was very present in 2022, credit was a risk that manifest in 2008 with financial crisis and there was a lot of defaults. Just because a company defaults, there’s different forms of that. And then there also tends to be a lot of recoveries because there’s different assets that companies may own. And importantly when you think of a priority of payments or what sometimes people call the capital stack of a company, the debtors get paid before the stock owners.

It actually can be a lot more complicated than that, but in basic principles, if you’re lending money to the company, certainly you’re foregoing some higher returns that stockholders could make. However, in the event that things go bad and the company gets liquidated or assets get liquidated, if you own their bonds, you are going to get paid first before there’s any residual claim paid out to the stockholders.

So term risk and credit risk. Right now, again, the term risk is really negative. And then it depends what you’re talking about for credit risk, but credit risk is I think reasonably compensated in some parts of markets and maybe not so much in others. The thing with credit too is when you do have a bad equity environment like a 2008 or just general equity market selloff, those credit securities often look a lot more like equity.

If you think of the old wiggle factors as I like to call it or standard deviation, things kind of move around, a lot of times you can look at these corporate bonds and look like, oh man, that’s nice. Oh, higher yield than government bonds? Okay, give me that. And then when it hits the fan is really where that risk is presented and those credit securities can be marked down quite a bit.

Those are kind of some high levels in the preservation category, but right now in general, at least within our category, and again more details in the client letter, but we really like kind of the short term component because there is a negative term premium and there is some credit components that we like. However, we’re kind of exposing ourselves to those in another asset class. So kind of short term, high quality I guess is the way that you could say what we are preferring at the moment within the preservation category.

I know bonds are maybe a little bit boring, but hey, if you can get more than 5%, that’s not too shabby. And we think we have some creative ways that we are doing it, which we outlined in the client letter as well. So Walt, before I put a button on preservation, any questions or comments, buddy?

Walter Storholt:

No. I do need to get a new sounder made just like the egghead one for wiggle factor for the next time you come back on the podcast, because I feel like that’s becoming a go-to mention for you. I’m glad we got a wiggle factor mention in the show today. Very good.

Kevin Kroskey:

Yeah, there you go, the wiggle factor rather than volatility or standard deviation. Wiggle factor sounds a lot more fun.

Walter Storholt:

It does.

Kevin Kroskey:

I got to try something when I’m talking about these boring investment updates to keep people engaged.

Walter Storholt:

There you go.

Kevin Kroskey:

I’m doing my best. I did go back while we were talking and episode 85 we did in November ’21 and the title of it was What’s a Conservative Investor to Do? Kind of in the Tina vein there, hey, rates are low, times are tough to be a conservative investor, what do we do?

I talked about that then. And that also coincided with the client letter that we wrote about some portfolio strategy changes that we were making. One of the things that we talked about at that time and allocated to was something called more private credit. On a high level, ever since the financial crisis, a lot of the lending has moved out of the banks and into these private markets or other sort of lending markets.

Candidly, it’s happening even more. We talked in March, Walt, with the whole Silicon Valley Bank. And then also at the same time the concern was about well hey, these regional banks, not only do they have some of the same sort of stresses that Silicon Valley Bank has, but they got this commercial real estate. Oh no, some of the malls are failing, people aren’t going back to work. What’s going to happen to some of this real estate? And oh yeah, these regional banks lent money for this real estate. What’s going to happen to the regional banks?

There’s been a shift really over the last at least 15 years, maybe a little bit longer where you’re seeing a lot of banks get out of the lending business unless it’s to the really big companies. And so when you look into the private credit and what we will call kind of a sub-segment of that in corporate direct lending, these are more kind of the middle market companies that are out there, the Citigroups, Bank of America, JP Morgan, really aren’t lending to.

Long story short, right now, if you look at the yields on these, and again I’m not talking about any specific fund, I’m just looking at kind of an asset class in general, the yields are close to double digits. What I have in front of me, a report from JP Morgan has kind of the yield around 9%. And then these credit investments will actually use some borrowing, so they’ll use some leverage.

If you put that all together, you’re seeing net yields higher than that 9% and into the low double digits. Now, like I said, with credit, when you get into an event like 2008, and it doesn’t have to be that bad, it’s just kind of more of an extreme example of one, of a credit event, but inevitably some companies are going to go out of business. You are going to have some losses. And even though you’re going to be collecting on some assets that are there, you may not get back dollar for dollar.

So there could be some losses, and I think it’s reasonable to think that hey, the loss ratios for these funds could even be a little bit larger on a go forward basis than what they have been in part because the borrowing costs are a lot higher. As rates have moved up, these are floating rate instruments. So when I talked about this with you in November ’21, Walt, the yields at that time for those markets were closer to around 7%, which may not sound like a lot today, but back then, the 10-year US bond was probably I’d say one and a half, 1.6% or so.

Rates have gone up quite a bit. This asset class in general has performed very well over the last couple years. We’ve talked about this in other client letters that we’ve written. Even though the rates are higher and these higher borrowing costs are putting stress on the companies because they have higher interest expenses, it still looks like even after expecting some additional credit losses on a go forward basis, it should still provide some pretty attractive returns.

For us, while we’re kind of decreasing credit risk in the preservation category, what I’m talking about right now is kind of in a hybrid category, we call it our diversifying assets. These could be private investments, it could be what we’re talking about from a lending standpoint, it could be private real estate. It could be other assets too where maybe traditional stock or bonds, but they may be used in a different sort of strategic way.

We think about this as a hybrid between stocks and bonds, maybe like 30%, 40% risk of stocks in the balance and bonds. This is kind of where we put private credit, but long story short, we’ve owned it for a few years, we’ve been very happy owning it, our clients have been very happy owning it. We’re actually increasing our allocation to it.

In part, it’s part of the total, it’s not just because we like the yields there, but we’re looking and reducing credit risk in the preservation category, going for the shorter term, higher quality. And then at the same time we’re pursuing that credit risk elsewhere in the portfolio where we think we’re going to get more adequately compensated for it.

Walter Storholt:

I’m starting to understand a little bit sort of this picture you’re drawing of the difference between preservation and then this kind of diversifying pocket or bucket of an asset class is how I think you described it.

Kevin Kroskey:

You got it. We think about it just a very broad asset class, so diversifying assets and then you can start winnowing down within there. And then private credit is a sub-asset class of that. And then corporate direct lending is kind of a sub sub-asset class if you will. I’m not going to go any further than that, but I think you get the idea.

Walter Storholt:

Okay. All right. I had to hit you on that one. You were trying to get the alert I think when you said the sub sub class or whatever.

Kevin Kroskey:

I did have a bit different intonation. I will admit to that.

Walter Storholt:

You did. You were angling for it. I felt it.

Kevin Kroskey:

All right. All right. So the third bucket, the one that everybody asks about, what about stocks? We call these appreciation assets, so not just stocks for us, but it could be private equity, it could be public real estate.

A lot of people don’t know if you own a REIT, a real estate investment trust, say through a Vanguard or Dimensional Fund Advisor sort of mutual fund or ETF wrapper, that actually tends to have a wiggle factor even greater than most stock asset classes. So we feel that that public real estate is actually more of an appreciation asset than a diversifier for, at least in part, those reasons.

But here’s the thing I want people to take away. For our clients we didn’t make any changes within the appreciation category. There were a lot in the preservation category and some in the diversifying. But within the appreciation category, you think about it this way, we talked about the short-term high quality bonds, treasury bills, a lot of finance theories is kind of built on, well hey, those are really kind of the risk-free assets. And so today you’re getting compensated about 5% for owning that.

So if I’m going to take more risk, whether that’s term risk or credit risk or equity risk or other types of risks, there should be a component or risk premium that I’m going to get on top of that risk-free rate. That changes over time. It’s least in part theoretical or forecasted. You don’t definitively know in advance what it is.

But I can tell you looking back over the last 100 years in the US market that that equity risk premium has been roughly about 7%. So if we look at just from that stage alone, say okay, hey historically it’s been 7%, the risk-free rate today is five. If I add those two together, 12, is that reasonable? Well, broadly speaking, US market is trading at close to 20 times forward earnings based on what consensus estimates are. Let’s just say that you’re not going to get to seven for that and you’re not going to get to 12 when you add those two components together.

There’s still a lot of clouds of uncertainty that are out there. There always are. It’s just the world that we live in. Inflation has certainly seemed to peak by a lot of metrics, but I think there’s more of a question, at least here in the US, well, yeah, maybe it’s peak, but how sticky is it going to be and at what level is it going to stick to if it does for a while?

They’ve been talking about recessions for quite a while now with the yield curve. The yield curve has been around for several months now, and it’s always been right in predicting a recession, but there’s also only been a few different iterations of that. So it’s not like there’s been kind of a million different examples that we can point to in history.

There’s still pressure in the banks with some of the regional banks and most notably some of the real estate that’s owned in there. Certainly we still got the war in Ukraine, who knows what’s going on in China, those sorts of things. Markets always discount risk, they factor in this information, they put it into prices.

If we go back just a year ago, and if you think about some of the headlines that were related to Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine, it’s like, oh my gosh, look at all these energy issues. What are the Europeans going to do when winter comes around? Oh my gosh, it’s going to take years. It’s going to be essentially a depression in Europe. And then you have a lot of innovative countries and companies and they move quickly and the winter wasn’t as bad and some of these known risks turned out not to be so bad. European equities have returned more than the US looking back over the last year.

And so it’s one of those things where you don’t necessarily have to have great news to get good returns. Things just have to be less bad. But I guess when we look at this and put it all together, when you can get those sort of double-digit returns in the corporate direct lending that we mentioned, when you can get the 5% essentially risk-free, if you will, in those short-term high quality assets, and there’s a few other things that we really like in our portfolios now too, I think it would be foolish to say that now’s the really kind of the time to pile on risk.

Walt, when we talked back when the world was still shut down three years ago and things were so uncertain, I remember back then we went from, hey, we’re doing the podcast twice a month to, hey, things are changing so quick, we got to do this weekly so I can talk to our clients.

It was scary back then, but those scary times are often the best times to invest because all those risks are kind of factored into the market and beat down prices and people behave irrationally. We kind of leaned into it then, and for clients we said, “Hey.” Certainly this was all financial plan driven, but one, for those that had risk capacity, we ended up recommending increasing risk at that time.

It was scary to do it. Obviously in hindsight it’s turned out to be a good decision. But now when we kind of look at where we are and seeing that there are other alternatives other than stocks. Stocks, not saying that they’re overpriced per se, but they’re definitely not screaming cheap and you have some other attractive assets.

Now is really kind of the time to go back to what Dr. Harry Markowitz won the Nobel for and say, hey, we have this new set of information, these new inputs going into our optimization machine to build this efficient portfolio. Are we really going to get compensated for the risk of owning equities?

I think the answer is not as much as what we have in the past, and that may sound fuzzy, but candidly forming a portfolio is uncertain. You’re always going to want to maintain very adequate diversification. We’re not saying get out of stocks or anything like that, but we are saying that we can get pretty healthy returns in some other asset classes with a lot less risk.

We feel like it’s kind of time to reassess our risk level and just re-look at where we are, what kind of returns we need from the financial plans that we constructed, and really make sure that we’re in the right strategy now and at least moving forward for the next several months and maybe few years.

Information always changes, but we really feel like this is the time to kind of reassess. Things are a little bit different than where they were just a year ago. Actually, they’re quite a bit different. It’s an ever flowing thing.

But that’s what we kind of detailed in the paper. I apologize for anybody that’s read it and fallen asleep. It is 12 pages. Yes, we have a lot of engineer clients. I think most of them are reading it. But in a more vocal friendly two guys on a mic sort of way, Walt, that’s what’s been going on.

Walter Storholt:

It’s a great breakdown. It’s helpful. Full honesty, Kevin, I can’t say I understand all of it, even hosting a lot of shows with you. This is high level. I can speak from experience in working with other financial advisors across the country that not every firm gets into this level of detail. So you guys are unique in that way in a very good way.

I don’t know if you want to be compared to the how the sausage gets made metaphor, but it’s kind of a little bit of a peek at that. What goes through your guys’ minds as you put together portfolios and plans for people and dive into the nitty ingredient, and look at alternatives and say, “Okay, the rest of the world’s moving this direction, is that the right way to go? Should we move in another direction?”

Sort of the old Warren Buffett quote of, “When others are greedy, be fearful,” and vice versa. Kind of resonated with me a little bit there with how you were talking about analyzing some things from the past. I just like seeing all that calculation going on in your head and in your guys’ minds.

I find it very helpful even if I don’t understand 100% of it. It’s still great to see where you’re heading and where you’re thinking, so I appreciate that. I know we’ll have listeners who appreciate that as well. It’s a wide spectrum.

I’m sure we have some that are in the Walt’s words camp where we’re just having fun along for the ride and we’ve probably got some that are pretty high level and would love to spar with you maybe on some points and have some fun picking it apart a little bit. Not everyone fell asleep reading that letter, I’m sure, Kevin. You had some that were a along for the full 12 pages. But no, great breakdown. Appreciate you outlining that for us.

If you are thinking that you got a question on your mind about something you heard today or something you read in the letter, if you’re a current client or if you aren’t a current client but would like to talk with Kevin about how that might look and discuss with the team if you’re a good fit to work with one another to revamp your financial plan or put together a true plan for the first time, it’s easy to have that first conversation.

In fact, you can set up a 15-minute visit with a member of the team, an experienced advisor on the True Wealth team by going to truewealthdesign.com and clicking the are we right for you button? Again, truewealthdesign.com. Click are we right for you. You can also call 855-TWD-PLAN. That’s 855-893-7526. We always put the links and the contact information in the description of the show so you can find it easily.

We’ll also have a link in the show notes today for episode 85 that Kevin mentioned back from 2021 if you want to go read a little bit more about that conservative investor, what to do. Although it was two years ago, there’s still some helpful information I’m sure in that episode to give you some more background on Kevin’s line of thinking on things.

But this was great to get today’s perspective, Kevin. Appreciate you sharing the shift and this concept with us and look forward to hopefully having you back again soon. I got to get that wiggle factor sounder made for the next time you come back.

Kevin Kroskey:

Well, I appreciate that, Walt. Tyler is doing a great job, and it’s good to have a team and even for all these investment. Ron Wyatt in Pittsburgh in our Pittsburgh office, he and I collaborate quite a bit on all the portfolios that we do. Aaron Seil is the CFA. Tyler is CFA and CFP. We have a growing, smart, motivated team that day in day out, we’re going to do the best we can for our clients. So hopefully that comes out. But thank you very much for your help too.

Walter Storholt:

We appreciate it. Thank you so much, Kevin, and thanks for listening to today’s show. Again, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, we’ll talk to everybody again next time right back here on Retire Smarter.

Speaker 3:

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