Five Jokes for Wealth Builders
It’s April Fools!
And I am absolutely flabbergastingly busy with a secret project!
So in honor of this day of mirth and humorous fun, we’re not going to talk about yield inversions or why the U.S. will probably see a recession in the next year or two…
Instead, I present to you five memes I shamelessly stole that perfectly capture how insane the stock market is right now…
(WARNING: If bad language and profanity offends you, you should stop reading right here.)
When You Realize What Your Retirement Might Look Like…
As a parent with a toddler, I normally find mind-expanding realizations endearing…
Not this one.
The context: MarketWatch published an article where a couple in their 50s are realizing that $1 million put aside for retirement isn’t going to be enough to live comfortably.
A respondent on The Twitter reads this and has a realization of his own…
Presumably because he, like 50% of Americans, has less than $5,300 in savings.
Considering that I ran the numbers and found that a modest retirement is going to cost the average person between $1.8 million and $5 million…
Yes, this gentleman might be in trouble.
(If you want to know exactly how much you need to retire, and what you can do to hit that number faster, read this post on DIYwealth and download the free calculator I built.)
I Feel Attacked
Ok, yeah, I’m guilty of this.
Hate to imagine how much money I’ve wasted letting leftovers go bad.
“War… War Never Changes”
Love or hate it, defense contractors are typically big, solid businesses with high-paying customers and steady profits…
And they benefit from conflict and strife.
As I write, the here are the year-to-date total returns on these stocks: General Dynamics (GD) is up 17.8%, Lockheed Martin (LMT) is up 26.2%, Northrop Grumman (NOC) is up 17.5%, and Raytheon (RTX) is up 17.8%.
Only Boeing (BA) is down -3.1% this year so far… possibly because another one of their planes crashed.
Don’t Fight the Fed
A lot of people blamed the market correction between January 2022 and April 2022 on the uncertainties and supply chain disruptions arising from the Russia-Ukraine Crisis.
Sharper minds, of course, know that the market was on shaky ground already, anyway…
And this is partly due to the… let’s say “gentle” approach to monetary policy adopted by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank and its chairman Jerome “JPow” Powell.
(If you want to learn more about this, I have a quick and dirty explanation of how Fed interest rates affect the stock market here.)
You Call This “Investing”?
There’s a reason I make a distinction between trading and investing…
If you’re buying low to sell high in less than a year… you’re trading at best, speculating at worse than best, and drunkenly gambling at worst.
In fact, I have the perfect response created by DIYwealth’s own meme queen Kiara, who makes sure we have the best “finfluencer” Instagram out there.
My portfolios?
They look fine. Been trending up through all this year, despite the downturn.
It’s because I bought and have held the stuff I’ve been recommending since DIYwealth launched…
It’s because I use the CBA Phenomenon to take advantage of market downturns and remove emotion from my investing…
And it’s because I’ve been keeping the bulk of my money on the sidelines until the economic situation in America starts to look better.
If you actually want to make money investing in the stock market?
Not lotto winner insane buy a yacht retire rich drive a lambo amounts of money…
But enough to help you and your family retire comfortably down the line?
Well…
I’m not going to tell you what to do…
But as your surrogate Financial Father, I do strongly suggest you consider following my example.
