Welcome to the Stay Wealthy podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today I'm talking about

how to earn a healthy 7% rate of return on your money in this difficult environment. The average

interest rate for savings accounts is 0.06%. National home prices just reported their highest one-year gain in history. The U.S. stock

market is up almost 700% since March of 2009. And then you have things like cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is up over 7,000% in the last five years. When everything seems risky and overbought, how do retirement savers invest their

money if they're hoping to earn a healthy 7 to 8% rate of return on their investments over, let's say,

the next 10 to 20 years? I was recently asked this question by Stay Wealthy listener Robert G, and I thought

I would expand on my

answer here on the show so everyone could benefit. Before I do, as always, you can grab the links

and resources for this episode by going to you staywealthy.com forward slash 127. So before I put some

real numbers to all of this, one simple exercise to start thinking about

the current environment and what it might take to earn a 7% rate of return is to rewind

back to, let's call it the early 90s to the early 2000s before the financial crisis hit.

You might remember that during that timeframe, cash in the bank was paying

you anywhere from 3 to 6% depending on what interest rates were doing that year. Let's keep it simple

and say you were earning about 5% on your cash during that time period. Well, in that scenario,

you didn't have to take much risk or look very far in order to stack on an additional 2% of return to achieve that healthy 7% rate of return on your total investment portfolio.

You could keep most of it in cash and treasuries and sprinkling a few blue chip stocks and you're there.

When cash, a riskless asset, is paying 5%, earning 7 to even 10%

rates of return feel pretty easy and attainable. But when cash is paying nothing, you have to take

an immense amount of risk in order to go out and get a 7% rate of return. Literally, all of your return has to come

from risky assets. And yes, it's been fairly easy up to this point. Over the last 10 years,

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