Let's Talk Money

to me and they want to help me. I've been doing the radio for thirty years, so I'm used to working every weekend and doing the radio and I love being here with you, especially the last weekend of twenty twenty four, and what a year we're having. Anybody who thought that this year was going to be a mess, for whatever the reason may be, boy, they were proven wrong, which goes to show you can't time the markets. You cannot be a market timer in this day and age.

diversified portfolio. The key is what's your tolerance for risk? How much money can you afford to losing any single given day. We know that stocks go up and down. It's headlined every day, what did the stock market do? Everybody knows what the stock market did, But the other asset classes go up and down as well. Bonds go up and down, gold, commodities, real estate, they all go up and down. And remember today you can get four point six percent for a US ten year Treasury note.

That is pretty darn good, and we'll talk about that later in the show. For those of you that wants some conservative investments, I'm surprised actually to see interest rates be creeping up like they are while the Fed is cutting interest rates. But it's a crazy world. You'll never figure it out, folks. We don't have a crystal ball, which is why being disciplined, being having that commitment to your portfolio, having it well managed, well diversified is what matters the most.

for On January first, it'll be thirty five years. I've been helping clients for thirty seven years, so I have a little bit of experience. I've seen a lot through the almost four decades that I've been helping clients manage their portfolio. So if you have any questions, the phone lines are open one eight hundred talk WGY. That's one eight hundred eight two five five nine four nine. Any questions whatsoever. One eight hundred eight two five fifty nine

forty nine give me a call. Zach Harris, my long term producer, Zach. Merry Christmas to you. Did you have a good holiday?

was a good year, folks. Listen when you look at the S and P up twenty five point two percent, with dividends almost twenty seven percent, Russell two thousand up eleven percent, NASDAK up thirty two percent, the QQQ NANSDAK one hundred, Composite up almost twenty eight Not a bad year, folks,

not a bad year at all. You can't expect to get these returns every year, but when you do get those returns, it just makes you realize if at the beginning of the year, and believe me, the beginning of the year you had, especially a couple of the Magnificent seven stocks were down pretty big. In the month of January. There were a lot of bad news bears out there trying to talk you out of the market fear cells.

And this is why when you get a bad news bear, they like to really highlight them because they're telling you something you don't want to hear. And when you don't want to hear something, you just listen that much more intently. But if you weren't scared out of the markets, you had a pretty good, pretty good year.

You don't pay any state taxes on it. So your four point sixty three for a ten year is actually a little bit more. I'd rather see you buy a treasury than a CD unless you can really get a really better rate in a CD. And then obviously you can buy some corporate bonds and maybe get even a little bit more. Now you have credit risk with the companies, and remember go back to two thousand and eight September fifteenth,

to be exact. Lehman Brothers on Monday was triple A rated credit triple A. That's the best you can be. On Tuesday they were out of business. So even though you have a great company, you just never know whereas this great country of ours, the good old USA US ten year treasury note is pretty good at four point six three percent, I'm very comfortable with.

So we for let's make believe of clients in our growth and income strategy, sixty forty sixty percent will be invested in stocks, forty percent will be invested in bonds. Alternative investments. Now, alternative investments can be could be real estate, could be commodities. In this case, we use a premium income which uses some you know, derivatives and so forth to get some better yields. And you know last year it was up almost ten percent twenty twenty two, when

the bond indecks was down thirteen percent. Jeffy was down as well, it was down about three and a half percent, not as much as the bond indecks. And as I said, this year, when the bond indecks is up one percent, this part of our portfolios up fourteen percent. So Ryan and Pollo and Ed and Dave did a good job putting these alternatives together. And I think that's why our portfolios have had the stellar returns that they've had.

The only difference is I'm very comfortable with risk the stock market. Volatility does not scare me, does not concern me, does not sway me. So I'm one hundred percent invested in the stock market, and I'm very very comfortable with that. I have some sandbox accounts. Those are the accounts that you play with and I play. We all like to play. What's wrong with playing. There's nothing wrong with playing. It's not my core portfolio. It's my play accounts. So we

call them sandbox accounts. So I have a few sandbox accounts that have done well. I have ed Willhelm in my office. He's our portfolio trader. He kind of helps me pick. One of them is stocks, one of them is ETFs, and one of them, believe it or not, is the Magnificent Seven. When the market had that kind of drop in the summer, and I think I shared with the listening audience that I put some cash to work.

I kind of, you know, looked in the cookie jar and you know, you know, under this and under that, and I got as much cash as I could and I put it to work. I told that, I said, I want to have three sandbox accounts, and this is how I want it split up, so they're all doing well. Out of the three the Magnificent seven. Believe it or not, I guess it's no Surprisees doing better than the other two, but all three are doing well. So we all have sandbox accounts and that's okay as long as it's just

a small part of your overall financial net worth. That if you lose money, it's not going to affect your life. But if you want to have some fun, if you want to buy this stock or that stock. We don't really advocate buying individual stocks for the most part. So we're managing one point five billion dollars and most of that money is invested in ETFs exchange traded funds. We only have two individual stocks in the portfolio. That would be Apple and Amazon. We're happy that we have Apple

and Amazon. They've been very good to our clients. And believe me, Apple, I think in January was down twenty five percent. It did not sway us if anything, for clients that were underweight, we load it up on it. We volatility is an investor's opportunity. You have to think of it that way. When you see volatility, you have to just put your thinking comp on and say, all right, how can I profit from this. We know the world's not going to come to an end. The stock market's

not going to zero. So when you see volatility, if you need to kind of reshift some things in your portfolio, that's the time to do it. Use or volatility is an opportunity for you to really really kind of shake things.

something that I believe. In this weekend, I'll be I carry Walmart and Stewart gift cards with me and when I see people that I sense are in need, I try to help them out by handing them out and trying to make a different in ondesday. And I do my best. I truly do my best. And there was something in this weekend's Wall Street Journal the nation's homelessness problem worsened again this year, no surprise, supposedly, an that estimate a record estimate of almost eight hundred thousand people

were homeless in twenty twenty four. That's eighteen percent more than last year. Now there's a lot of things why, you know, you have the influx of migrant families, you have lack of affordable housing, natural natural disasters, so you got a lot of things up against us. And there's a lot of people that are just down and out, just down and out, and you have to My heart goes out for people one and believe me, folks, I learned.

and you would never know it. They hide it real well, they keep it close to their vest, but they're they're suffering inside. So part of the homeless problem, there's a lot of mental illness.

how people are suffering. One eight hundred eight two five, five, nine four nine, give me a call, talk to me what you're thinking, what you're thinking about doing for the new year. Remember, there's there's a couple things you can do right up until you fire your taxes in April, which we'll talk about in the second half of the show. But anything you're thinking about one eight hundred eight two five fifty nine forty nine. Let's go to the phone lines where we have Peter and Nisky Juna.

new setting on that. But when when you look at the treasuries themselves and you're buying treasury bonds, if you're buying them direct, and you can you can buy them direct, there's no fees. So if you know that that you want to go in and buy some bonds, there's no fees to do that. I think I lost Peter, Peter, thank you for the call. One eight hundred and eighty two five five nine four nine. So yeah, so as

so long as I'm talking about the eyebonds everybody. Most people are are familiar with the double Savings bonds, and that current rate right now is two point six percent, and that resets as well every November first and May first, and the most that you can purchase is ten thousand dollars a year. You can start with as little as twenty five dollars, so that's a nice part for people

that don't know how to get started with saving. And if you want safe money, you can do as little as twenty five dollars as much as ten thousand dollars a year. You can cash the I bonds in after one year, but if you cash before five years, you'll lose three months of interest, kind of like a CD If you cash a CD out early, you're going to lose a little bit of interest. But we do like bonds. We put bonds in our portfolios a lot. We feel they're good, good holding instead of buying bond ETFs. And

we don't own any mutual funds right now. Every once in a while we'll buy a mutual fund if there's a money manager that we want access to and that's the only way we can get to that money manager. But right now we don't have any mutual funds. Usually the fees and mutual funds is more than the fees in exchange credit funds. And as I said, when you buy, when you buy bonds direct, there may be a small transaction fee if you're buying it through approkerige or something.

Everybody's different, swab, fidelity, you know, a TD America trade, although I guess TD am error trade is now.

One think about that one opportunity to retire. That means that if you work for thirty forty fifty years and you didn't plan, and all of a sudden you go to retire and you can't you can't go back and make up for all those years that you should have been saving and putting money away and preparing yourself for retirement. You get one opportunity, and that's why it's so important. Somehow, someway if you're not, and make this a new year's resolution.

If you're not saving at least ten percent of your paycheck. And I know that sounds like an astonishing number, but I can assure you if you come into our office and you sat down with any of my colleagues and we did a financial plan for you, more than likely we're going to tell you need to be saving about ten percent if you want to be able to retire at the age that you hope to and have the quality of life during retirement. Remember, if you want to work during retirement, we only want our clients.

So if you're not saving ten percent, just I want you to think about that between now and Wednesday, January first, And if you have it within you to walk into your HR department and say, hey, up my payroll deduction into my retirement plan to ten percent, my hack goes off to you, worst case scenario, you really can't live with that kind of money going away. But what happens more times than not, you get used to not having

that money in your pocket. And we're all used to spending what we have in our pocket, right, So if that money's out in your pocket, you can't spend it. So that's a beauty about paying yourself first, putting money into whether it's a four oh one K, a four h three B, have it come out of your checking account, going into a traditional IRA or a roth ira. If you're self employed, a solo four oh one K, whatever the pension plan is, Uncle Sam helps you. Uncle Sam

will subsidize that. That means that if you put ten percent away, maybe you're only missing seven percent because you're not being taxed on that ten percent. If you're putting one hundred dollars in, you're not taxed on that one hundred dollars. Maybe you're saving yourself twenty five thirty dollars in taxes, depending on what your marginal tax rate is. So that's another consideration, another important part of saving for retirement.

Uncle Sam helps subsidize that. Why not put money in one eight hundred talk WGY one eight hundred and eight two five, five, nine, four nine. Any questions on here, and I would love to talk to you. So this week, you know, it was Christmas week, so it was a shortened week. We had the markets closed on Christmas Eve, A won. Obviously the markets were on Tuesday at one, and obviously the markets were closed on Christmas Day. Wednesday,

you had Congress averting a government shut down. Remember you know what they liked to play, kick the can down the road, That's what they liked to play down there in Washington. Hopefully it gets better. Hopefully, God, God help us. Hopefully it gets better. Routers reported that China plans to issue a record four hundred and eleven billion dollars in bonds to stimulate consumption. Treasury yields were up, as I said, four point sixty three percent. We ended the week for

a ten year US treasury note. That's not bad, folks, that's not that's not bad.

eight percent. And I highlight the NASDAK as much as the SMP because those are our for the most part, our two core holdings, our two core holdings. We own them equally. Thank god, they've been very, very very good to our clients over time. I can't begin to tell you I've had a commitment to NANSDAK for a long time. Your fifteen year average and the S and P five hundred fourteen percent year in year out hasn't changed much in your fifteen year average in Nasdaq about nineteen percent.

So is Nasdaq a little bit more volatile than the broad stock market? Absolutely it is, And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. You're taking on more risk because Nasdaq is chuck full of good companies. I call them good companies technology companies, which you know, I believe in technology right now. In NANSDAC, Apple makes up about ten percent, na Vidio makes up about nine percent, Microsoft about eight percent,

Amazon about six percent. So our two top holdings, Apple and Amazon, they happen to be two of the top ten holdings Nansdak.

Not this coming Friday, not January third, there won't be a jobs report, but the following Friday we'll get the jobs report from December.

might rekindle inflationary pressures. I'm not sure a lot of people know the terroriffts don't be afraid of the tarriffs, remember Donald Trump sometimes, listen, he will stand up for this great country of ours. We know that there is not a leader around the world that will go toe to toe with Donald Trump where Donald Trump will back down. Donald Trump will I'm guessing when time in time out,

Donald Trump will will win in the tariffs. He's sending a strong message right up front, either let's balance things out so it's fair for the United States of America, where the United States of America is being treated in the right manner. And he'll throw out a lot of threats, but at the end of the day, not all of them are filed through on So I know a lot of people were concerned about the tariffs. I'm not so

sure you need to be concerned about the tariffs. And as I like to say, in hindsight, everything's crystal clear. So we'll see, we'll look back and we'll see if things were as bad as some thought or not. One eight hundred eight two five fifty nine forty nine. Give me a call with any questions that you have.

for things to happen. The Fed cuts we saw, you know, another quarter point cut, bringing its policy down a full percentage point since they started cutting in September, and the new projections showed that officials expect fewer cuts next year, in part in part because they're you know, they're they're looking at data. Now this could all change. We know, the Fed in years past have said one thing, done

in other things. So don't don't think that that this is you know, absolutely going to happen where there's going to be fewer cuts. If the data comes in, if inflation shows to be stubbornly high, if it's not going down as much as j. Powell and the FED Open Market Committee hopes for it to go down, then you know what, you'll see more cuts. If by chance inflation does come down, we'll have less cuts. We'll see in hindsight, not to repeat myself, everything is crystal clear. We'll see

what the Fed does. You know, most FED officials penciled in just two cuts for next year and two more in twenty twenty six. Now in September, most officials anticipated at least four cuts next year, so they saw data that kind of they went from four cuts to two cuts. We'll see what happens, whether it's two or four.

We'll see what happens. I'm guessing right on day one you're going to see some changes, and probably some drastic changes at that. There's probably going to be a lot of things that will take place and happen that maybe we'll be surprised about, maybe we won't. The difference between President elect Donald Trump this time in his first time, his first time, he had no Clue surrounded himself by people, and not all those people did as good of a job.

This time, he has the experience, he's been there, he knows what to expect. He's already surrounded himself by a good team. And I say that because he's surrounding himself by one a lot of talent, a lot of youth, a lot of younger people. He's not he's not getting the dinosaurs you know that have been in office for you know, fifteen sixty years, and some business people and folks. I think this is all a positive. And I'm not a diehard Republican sitting here saying this. I'm not a

Democrat either. I'm a blank I'm not enrolled in any party, but I do I am optimistic that we're in for some some good times and I think changes are going to happen right up front. And this is no reflection on either party. I just think that there's going to be changed, and sometimes change is good. One eight hundred eighty two five five nine four nine. Let's go back to the phone lines where we have Ron from Queensberry.

And the main reason why I'm calling today is because I heard you mentioned at Wilhelm's name, and I just want to let you know that Vinnie had referred my questions regarding my daughter's four h three D to ed and he so kindly went through the entire choices that I had regarding her mutual fund investments, and he took the time out to actually break down one hundred percent of what she should be investing in for her four

h three B, and we processed the paperwork. I'm just waiting for the account to be set up and then we're going to start doing the four oh three B contributions. And and Andrea has been incredible in follow ups. So anybody who's listening, let me tell you, you know, whatever you're telling regarding the service that you provide, it out did any of my expectations. And I'm so glad that I finally made the move and convinced my wife to join join in my my marryment. So I want to thank you very much.

I ask every client. Are we needing your expectations? That's my goal first and foremost is to make sure we're meeting expectations. And I'm surrounded by a team second to none. I mean Ed wilhelm Is. He's just a rock star studying to be a CFA. We grabbed them right out of Siana College. He was a statistician this major and captain of the rugby team. Believe it or not, Ron, would you believe that looking at Ed that he was the captain of the rugby team.

It's kind of like our pro bono. We kind of extend that that service to clients and help out their children or their grandchildren. You know, sometimes it doesn't take much. Sometimes listen to us. Encouraging a college grad to maybe get right into the pension plan is different then mom or dad telling you know, their their their son or daughter to get into a pension plan. Sometimes it comes across a little easier coming from us being wealth managers,

doing this for living, this being our career. So it's nice when we get it's nice when we get phone calls like that. So thank you Ron one eight eight, two, five, five, nine four nine. So every year, you know, there's there's a strategy that's been going on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. You get the you get the gist of it right forever, the dogs of the Dow. It's you know, we'll see what happens

next year. But boy, I'm telling you, the strategy calls for buying the ten highest yielding stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the start of the year. So whatever the highest yielding stocks are. So right now, if we look at this year's this year years, you know, dogs of the Dow, Walgreens Man oh Man seven percent dividend sounds pretty sexy, doesn't it. You're down sixty three percent year to date, while the SMP is up twenty

seven percent. Verizon a seven percent dividend year to date, up only six percent, three m almost a six percent dividend year to date, up twenty percent. How about Dow a five percent dividend year to date, You're down twenty seven percent. The only dog of the Dow that outperformed the SMP was IBM with a four percent dividend, up

almost thirty eight percent. To round it out, Chevron good dividend, down three and a half percent, Amgen down almost nine percent, Coca Cola up only six percent, Cisco up only nineteen percent, Johnson and Johnson down seven percent. So these are great companies, right name brands that you know with dividends, good dividends, but the dogs of the Dow. It's a strategy where every year you bought those top ten, So for this year,

for twenty twenty five. Right now, it looks as though Verizon, Chevron, Amjin, Johnson and Johnson, MRK, Coca Cola, IVM, Cisco, McDonald's, Procter, and Gamble will be twenty twenty fives dogs of the Dow. High dividend yield can be a sign that something is wrong at the company, and buying the dogs is a bet that things will get better, but it doesn't always work out that way. The dogs, you know, so this year's dogs, you know, underperformed the Dow by fourteen percentage points.

So the Dow is up twenty five percent. You know, this year's this year's dogs did nothing. In fact, the dogs of the Dow underperformed the Dow and the S and P in five of the past six years. You know, is there room to be optimistic about the dogs of the Dow? Maybe once again. If you have a play account and you like the sounds of the Dogs of the Dow, then go for it. But I wouldn't be putting my client's hard earned money in this strategy. It

really hasn't played out as they said. They're good names, good dividends, but just because you're getting a good, good dividend, remember total return. Total return is if you invest in a bond, you're getting interest, and then the bond is maybe up or down in value, and you add the interest to the gain or the loss, and that gives you your total return. The same with the stock. You know, if you bought Walgreens and you're getting a seven percent

dividend yield, that sounds really good. But if you're down sixty three percent in value, I don't care what the dividend is it just doesn't make sense, and that's why you got to be careful. If it sounds too good to be true, do some digging. Have your advisor. If you're working with an advisor, help explain things to you so that you go in with your eyes wide open. You want to truly make sure that you are you know everything that you own. You are just no surprises.

You're invested in a well diversified portfolio for all the right reasons. And there you have it, folks, there's really investing is easy if you take a long term approach, and if you're working with an advisor, you're getting good advice. We advise our client's assets by fee only. We don't sell any investments. We don't get paid any more money to have our clients in this or that, and not every advisor can do that. Some advisors selling newdies get

paid a lot of commissions. Mutual funds, same thing. Maybe they're selling B shares and the internal fees are bad. Anyway, there you go, folks. You are listening to Let's Talk Money brought to you by Bouche Finance Group, where we help our clumits prioritize their health while we manage their wealth for life. I can't thank you enough for tuning in today. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy holidays. We have

the new year coming up. Happy New Year. Let's hope twenty twenty five from a financial standpoint, is as good as twenty twenty four. Thank you for tuning in, folks, I can't thank you enough. Go to our website for Mark Bouchet dot com