The United States has elected Joe Biden to be its next President. Despite there being a last-ditch effort by President Trump to muddy the waters with claims of massive voter fraud, the country is beginning to move ahead. The S&P 500 has rallied 6.04% as of the morning of this writing (November 18th) from the day after Election Day (November 4th) and is pricing in a smooth transition of power. This transition of power is what separates the United States of America from other countries in the world and is the backbone of what makes our country so strong. President Trump has displayed that he has no intentions to concede, and will fight the results of the election until he has extinguished every option. This uncertainty may provide some market volatility in the short term, but I expect that volatility to be short-lived.
As Regis Philbin once asked, “Who wants to be a millionaire?”
You’re might be saying to yourself “I do, but I don’t want to go on a game show to do it.”
With a combination of patience, persistence, and self-control…you too can be a millionaire without having to answer any multiple-choice questions.
Here’s how you can do it.
We are halfway through 2020 and it feels like we are at a crossroads. The first 6 months of 2020 have been a whirlwind, to say the least.
Strictly speaking of the stock market, we saw the S&P 500 decline by an unprecedented fall of -33.92% in the span of a few weeks quickly followed by a slingshot rebound in the market of 44.47%. At the halfway point of the year, the S&P 500 was down -4.84% as of the close on June 30th. With everything that has happened this year, being down -4.84% feels pretty good.
This post isn’t going to have much to do with personal finances at all. I tell my clients that financial planning is really planning for when life happens. Well, life happened to me in the past year. I was born on Father’s Day in 1985 so it’s always been a holiday I had a connection with, yet I never gave much thought to it and what Father’s Day actually meant until now (unfortunately, in my family, we didn’t pay much attention to “Father’s Day” in its own right-- even though my Dad was one of the best).
COVID-19 and the call to flatten the curve has wreaked absolute havoc on the United States economy. GDP shrank -4.8% in the 1st Quarter of 2020 and the 2nd Quarter is looking to have a large contraction with an even larger recovery in the 3rd Quarter. Total first-time unemployment claims since mid-March have grown to 36.5 million, which represents a 22.4% unemployment rate. The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high of 3,386.15 on February 19th and closed at a low of 2,237.40 nearly a month later on March 23rd. That means the S&P 500 fell by -33.92%. Since the end of WW2, over the past 75 years, there have only been four instances where the S&P 500 fell greater – assuming the worst is now over. This was, by all means, an epic drawdown in the market. However, had we not social distanced the economic repercussions would have been even worse.
That is the bad news.
One of the questions we often get is “What does a financial plan look like”? Without actually seeing one, it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. So look no further than this sample financial plan I completed for Jim and Pam Halpert (of “The Office” fame). While they lived in Pennsylvania for the show, in this plan they are living in Tennessee.
