 If you are like majority of Americans, the condition of the economy is troubling you, and after watching the uproar on the stock market over the past several months, you may be feeling powerless about your investments. It would be only natural to wonder, “Will I ever regain my value? How low will it go before it recovers?”
Advice from a typical “financial expert”
From coast-to-coast, so-called financial experts have offered advice like:
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Cut your expenses so you can survive on a much smaller retirement income.
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Keep investing, and you’ll be fine in the long run.
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Change your asset class from stocks to bonds and money markets.
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Seize the opportunity to convert your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.
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Don’t pay any attention to your account statements.
We believe that conventional financial advisors are completely missing the underlying issue: most Americans never expected to  find their nest eggs in this predicament. But before this “calamity” occurred, did their investment professionals offer them a basic expectation about their asset class choices?
Whether investors knew to ask or not, they needed to know the answer to THIS question: Is there a strategy that can get me decent returns when the stock market does well and protect my account so I don’t lose a dime when the market plummets? A qualified advisor should have been addressing this question all along.
No one can predict the future of the market
At Laser Financial Group, we have always maintained that it behooves people planning for retirement to be positioned ahead of the incident, rather than needing to act when it hits. As a result, we recommend that our clients utilize a more stable, less volatile investment strategy that provides some predictability in managing their nest eggs.
The fact is no expert can predict the exact future movements of the stock market. Sitting in as an invited guest on a TV show, or penning an Op-Ed piece, should not be misconstrued as the solution that millions of Americans crave. They call it Monday morning quarter-backing for a reason – almost anyone can assess what went wrong in hindsight. But how are the investments of those analysts’ clients holding up? Probably about the same as everyone else’s.
It does not matter how long you have been saving – if your investments are in the stock market, any decline will impact your entire account – principal and all the gains you’ve accrued. Do investors who have been in the market for a longer time see a smaller percentage drop? Of course not.
A different strategy
Here’s a method that may be new to you. You can link your investments to a stock market index, participating in its gains up to a predetermined cap, with a contractually guaranteed minimum interest that allows you to lock in the gains from year to year. Here’s an example:
For an investment with a 2 percent guarantee, a 15 percent cap, and a 100 percent participation with an annual point-to-point link to the S&P 500 index, if the S&P 500 were to gain, say, 12 percent over a year, your account would be credited 12 percent. The new balance would then lock-in and would not decrease (even if the index were to lose). Therefore, if the index were to lose 10 percent the following year, your account would be credited the 2 percent guarantee, and so on.
This, we believe, provides downside protection without sacrificing the opportunity for decent equity-linked performance. Although they utilize exactly the same game board, only a few people are playing chess; the majority are playing checkers.
There is a lot of talk in the financial planning community regarding the need for retirees to employ much safer investment strategies. The reality, however, is that every major market correction negatively impacts the majority of retiree accounts, most of which are, interestingly enough, overseen by these very same so-called financial experts.
Perhaps you have experienced several epiphanies regarding the profitable new strategy and concept we are introducing. The central issue is direct versus indirect investment strategies. Now is the time to take a serious look at your investment portfolio and ask yourself, “What if I had been a client of Laser Financial Group?” Isn’t it time you discovered common-sense alternatives to simply following conventional wisdom? Are you getting the best financial advice? Don’t just settle for good enough when excellence is possible.
To request your no-obligation consultation, please call (301) 949-4449 or visit www.laserFG.com today!
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