Your Sources of Resiliency – Touchstones in Trying Times

We often find ourselves mentioning a few things that we think are your sources of resiliency. And, given that we’ve been making frequent reference to these things, we thought we’d start a collection as a place where you can revisit what helps you stay resilient and inspired whenever you need a reminder of your own strength. What else would you add to this list?

• Your financial plan addresses all of the other aspects of your financial life, and there’s so much more to it than investments. Living your plan, regardless of what the market may be doing, is a way to exert control over what you can control. Let us deal with the rest – it’s what we’re here for!
  • As a testament to your plan’s resilience, recall that we stress test every plan we create by engineering 10,000 scenarios, confirming that your projected success rate is robust. We don’t project potential headlines or which political party might be in power, but we absolutely do plug in market volatility that is representative of what we’ve experienced over the past several decades.

• Aside from your investments, your emergency fund is one of your biggest sources of resiliency, as you can tap into that readily available cash if you need funds in a pinch. If you need more than what’s available in that reservoir of cash, we’ll make a plan to get you what you need.

• If you’re living off your portfolio and your plan is guided by our Safe-Spending Policies, recall that we keep 5-7 years’ worth of your spending needs in bonds and cash (this is your Stable Reserve, designed to act as a bridge across low points the markets may serve up). We specifically designed the Stable Reserve to give the stocks in your portfolio enough time to recover from whatever may be happening in markets at any given moment. And note that the bonds in your portfolio are up by nearly 1% year-to-date.

• Whether your portfolio is acting as your paycheck or not, know that we are reviewing your accounts every two weeks for opportunities to rebalance and best position your investments for growth. And that those investments are spread across more than 10,000 stocks around the world, mitigating risk through broad diversification.

• Finally, we’ll invite you to revisit our list of ways to Live Big in trying times – we’d love to hear from you if you have items we can add!