Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I'm your host Taylor Schulte. And today I wanted to share the highlights from the free market volatility webinar that I did last week with dimensional funds. Now, unfortunately,

the webinar was not recorded, but I pulled the three most important things from the presentation

that I think will benefit just about everybody who's saving and investing money for retirement.

For all the links and resources that I mentioned today, head over to you staywealthy.com forward slash 71.

Okay. So the first thing I want to highlight from our conversation was this conversation or

discussion we had around why invest in the stock market to begin with. In other words,

knowing how it feels when we see our hard earned money go up and down and up and down on a daily basis or a monthly basis.

And then knowing how it feels when things get really ugly like we've experienced this year a little bit and we've experienced it in the past.

But knowing these things, why do we continue to invest in stocks?

Like why not invest in something more conservative and just

spare us this emotional roller coaster? So we invest in stocks for two reasons. And here's what we kind of

outlined in the presentation. The first reason is to earn a healthy enough rate of return so that

you can reach your financial goals. Two, we want to invest in

stocks or typically we need to invest in stocks because inflation is one of the biggest threats to our

retirement and we need to invest in stocks or higher returning asset classes in order to combat

inflation. Now, most of you know that the stock market has delivered an average

annual rate of return of about 10% going back to 1926. And you might have said something like,

well, I don't need a 10% rate of return. What if I can just get 3% or 4% or 5%? What if I just

get that year over year and take a more conservative path? And you can,

by the way, you can do this, especially if your financial plan tells you that you don't need

a high rate of return to reach your goals. It might be possible to target a lower rate of return

while still retiring safely. Maybe you have other income sources

...