People's growth now, as in 2026 and beyond, has to get more strategic. Welcome to the Retire On Time q and a podcast. I'm Michael Decker with David Franson here from Kedric Wealth, and this show is all about answering your retirement questions. We don't wanna give that oversimplified advice you've heard hundreds of times. This show is about the nitty gritty.

So text your questions to (913) 363-1234, and we will feature them on the show. Just remember, this isn't financial advice. This is just educational, informational, raise your awareness, so to speak. Alright, David. What do we got today?

Hey, Mike. I am behind on my retirement savings. What should I do?

If it were ten years ago, I'd say just, you know, focus on maybe take a little bit more risk, maybe focus on QQQ, SPY, you know, some some equities, right, stocks

Okay.

In the growth side of things. But we're not ten years ago. We're not fifteen years ago. And that's not a cheap hindsight kind of commentary.

The the most macro thing that a person can do, this I don't know if you spend much time on FinTwit, which is FinX. Maybe I need to be

there more. Yeah. They

it's just the funniest phrase when people throw this around. Never go full macro. So macro macroeconomics. Right? It's you all you you need to have the story that the details and the big details.

Like, the little details, the big details, you gotta kinda balance that.

That's the macro?

You never go full macro macroeconomics. But the the point is this is the most macro or the most, like, large scale trend that I'm aware of, and it's the flat market cycle. And so what I'm getting at here is if you if it were 2010, it's like, okay, we've been flat for ten years.

We

might have one or two more years of difficulty, but then historically speaking, we should be like, you know, rockets to the moon or something. You know, it should just be incredible at that point. And it's because every now and then the markets just go flat for like ten plus years. This is a historical pattern that a lot of people gloss over saying, well, lost decade will never happen again. Well, look at what happened in the mid sixties to the mid seventies or even early eighties.

The equities market didn't grow. Look at what happened from 1929 for over ten years. That was devastating. Look at what happened from nineteen o six, and that ten plus year bear market. I mean, it's multiple significant crashes that don't allow the equities market to actually grow.

And so if we are following these historical patterns, we're kind of near the the entrance or on the doorstep of the next flat market cycle Oh. Potentially speaking. And this raises a couple of questions. First off, if you're about to retire or near retirement, and let's say you did save enough money, man, what you've just experienced over the last ten years will probably not happen for the next ten years.

Which is a lot of growth?

A lot of growth. I mean, if markets only went up, you wouldn't need a financial adviser. Like, really.

You could just throw money at it and it just grows.

It just works. Right? Mhmm. But if you're trying to catch up, and this is kind of where I'm going in the whole conversation, if you're trying to catch up with your investments and your savings, typically people say, well, more risk, more reward. Mhmm.

That's not true.

Is that like no pain, no gain?

Yeah. Which is also not true. You can work out and create all sorts of pain and soreness and never get anywhere.

But it's the same in finance. Taking more risk doesn't guarantee that you're gonna have more of a reward. It means you are taking a risk that if it works out, will reward you for the risk that you took. It will also punish you for the risk that you took depending on how the chips fall. So going all in on risky assets or leveraged ETFs or things to try and catch up, I think is one of the worst things that someone could do right now.

I think it people's growth now, as in 2026 and beyond, for the next ten, fifteen years or so, has to get more strategic. This universal idea that you can just buy low cost indexes and it's just going to go up is ludicrous. It flies in the face of market data. Because markets don't just go up. They don't.

Wouldn't it be great? Oh, boy.

And so this is where you have to start to think outside the box just just for what it's worth. So for example, during the financial crisis, right, not much did well.

This is, like, 02/1988.

Yeah. Not much did well. Mhmm. I mean, cash, bond funds did okay. Mhmm.

Right? If you're in bond funds, that kind of helped alleviate some of the the market crash. But there weren't many options there. If you look at two thousand o one and

o two when the dot coms were going down pretty hard, like the Nasdaq lost, what, 70 some percent

from top to bottom. That's pretty rough. But real estate made a killing. Bond funds did okay. So you have to really develop either a system for investments or start to look outside of other markets.

Instead of just the stock market, you're looking at how to strategically move money within the bond market or with the real estate market or the alternative market. I'm not saying private credit, by the way. That's right now going through a whole thing.

Okay.

It's kind of a catastrophe.

That's probably another podcast.

Yeah. If you haven't heard, some of the major funds, these massive private credit funds are restricting redemption.

Oh. People can't, like, cash out. They're invested in it.

Which is it's normal for private investments to restrict. That's a part of the deal. But it also is like, well, hold on. Why are you having to restrict now? Why do you need to keep the money there?

Why do so many people wanna get out? What what are the delinquency rates? So but but anyway, going back to the person, if if you're trying to catch up, don't throw caution to the wind and just go all in on risk. That's a great way to really leave yourself exposed, especially after the last fifteen years of incredible growth. Historically speaking, if the patterns continue, we could be entering into another flat market cycle, which means you're throwing a lot of money into something that's probably gonna hurt more than help.

You've got to think outside the box. You've got to think more strategically. You've got to have we we have an expression here. You you know, you know this one. Mhmm.

Follow systems, not sentiment.

Right.

Don't let the idea that you've lost time or that you've maybe missed out on opportunities and you're trying to play catch up, don't let those emotions compromise your investment making decisions. There's another expression that says, the better you need a deal, the more bad the deal's gonna be. Something along those lines. Okay. Like, the more more bad you need it Yeah.

The worse it's just gonna be.

So be very careful in in those things. And also, just let's have some fun with this. For those who I've spoken with that are in this boat, many times they're saying, well, I need to make X amount of money to be able to retire. Many times that's just not true.

Oh, they have a mistaken, like, thought of what they what they think they need may not be the reality.

Yeah. They're like, oh, I read online I need a million dollars.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. Well, do you? I don't know. It's what online tells me. Well

I see a lot of ads that say I have to have, like, 1.4 or 1,600,000.0 to retire.

And the Internet's never lied. I think Abraham Lincoln said that on his social media.

Undoubtedly, he did. Yeah. So

consider just for a fact how much income do you need, what's the standard deduction, what's your Social Security gonna be, and then what's the gap that you need to bridge? And

then at that point, maybe maybe you you work till 67 and not 65 or something along those lines,

but Social Security is the lion's share of it all, and you're able to sustain yourself. Maybe you're able to take a part time job. I know a lot of people that love working at Home Depot in retirement because it's just it's the fun, you know, craftsman DIY. Lowe's is fine. Nothing against Lowe's.

Right. You know, it's the other one. I just always go to Home Depot. But but I mean, you get don't throw caution to the wind and take tons of risk. Think predictable in areas that you can control.

If you worked a couple of hours a week and that bridged the gap between what you need and you had flexibility to travel, you had like, that's not a bad deal. Mhmm. Really. Life's not about avoiding work. It's not about retiring and sitting on the golf course every single day.

Yeah. That sounds good on

paper. Well, for the people that like golf. Yeah.

Right. Alright.

Yes. Many people that I know that retire and go golfing a lot end up getting burnt out. They actually don't like it as much as they thought they would. And the same is true with fishing. A lot of these are the hobbies.

It's like, you know, too much literally means there's too much.

Yeah. Right.

You overdid it. So but that's that's my 2¢ is be very mindful about your investment approach. Have a system. Don't use sentiment. Don't throw caution to the wind.

And do some good old fashioned planning on how are you gonna blend your incomes, what's the actual tax ramifications of those, what's the the difference that you really need, and then just start backing in the numbers.

I mean, if you just needed to earn, like, an extra thousand bucks a month working part time, that might be a very easy thing to do. Instead of being really risky with your investments. And hoping that just works out.

So just be be wise. What more could I say?

Yeah. I see what you did there.

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