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

inflation. Specifically, I'm sharing five important things that I think retirement savers need to know.

And I'm not even going to waste any more of your time with this intro except for letting you know

that the show notes can be found

for today's episode by going to you staywealthy.com forward slash 143. So as most listeners likely

know, in January of this year, the U.S. Labor Department reported that inflation was 7% in

2021, the highest level in 39 years. While this news is not something to laugh at or ignore,

the headlines don't quite tell the whole story. But they sure have investors worried. I think I've

had more questions about inflation in the last 30 days than in my entire career. And look,

inflation can be frightening. and it's normal for fear

to creep in. Fear is useful. It can help us avoid making costly mistakes or even life-threatening

decisions. But as Professor Amir Statman recently put it, when fear is exaggerated, it can lead us

wrong and steer us away from taking prudent risks.

We can exaggerate our fears through cognitive shortcuts that turn into errors,

like extrapolating recent events and focusing excessively on what is readily available in memory.

We are wise to pause, gather information, and reflect on these errors before we act on our fears,

potentially jeopardizing our investments and or diminishing our well-being.

So to calm some nerves and prevent you from acting on your fears, especially for those in retirement or close to it,

I'd like to first set the record straight on a few things and share five things that I think

you ought to know about the current inflation news. First, for the most part, this was expected.

In fact, I published an episode on inflation last October when the CPI numbers started to surface. And I said in

that episode that economists anticipated higher than average inflation to continue into 2022. So here we are.

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