It's that time of the year again, time to step back from the complex tax strategies,

the Roth conversion debates, and the retirement planning deep dives, and have a little fun.

For the past few years, I've dedicated an episode to sharing surprising statistics about the markets,

investing, and retirement planning.

These episodes have been some of my favorites to research and record, and based on your emails,

many of you enjoy them too. So today,

I'm sharing seven facts that challenge conventional wisdom. Some of them are counterintuitive.

A few might make you question things you've believed for years, and at least one of them

involves math that should make anyone using insurance products as a retirement savings tool,

hit the pause button. By the end of today's

episode, you'll walk away feeling a little more confident about the proven, sometimes boring,

academic approach to investing that we talk about so often here on the show. And if nothing else,

you'll have a few holiday dinner stats to drop between bites of pie, far safer than politics,

and only slightly riskier than

talking about crypto. Welcome to another episode of the Stay Wealthy Retirement Show. I'm your host,

Taylor Schulte, and every week, I tackle the most important financial topics to help you

stay wealthy in retirement. And now, on to the episode. Okay, let's kick things off with a stat that gets to the

heart of how most people think about investing. If I ask you what the average historical return of

the SMP 500 is, most of you would likely answer correctly by saying around 10%. Over the long run, that's the number

everyone references. It's the number many financial advisors plug into projections, and it's the number

that makes the math appear to work in a lot of retirement simulations. But here's the thing.

The stock market has only produced an annual return within 2% of that 10% average in four of the last 97 years.

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