In this episode, we talk more about market volatility and asset protection. How to protect your digital assets, along with your portfolio

Well, good afternoon and welcome to another episode of the 1715 Treasure Coast podcast. My name is Thomas Davies and I'm a wealth advisor here in Stewart, Florida. Don't forget to like and subscribe if this benefits you or you like it. Anyway, it's good to see everyone a little delayed this week as we encountered Hurricane Ian here on the Treasure Coast.

Very thankful that we did not get much of that hurricane. We did have some flooding and some high winds, but just our thoughts and prayers certainly go out to everyone on the west coast over in Naples, Fort Myers, also in Orlando and Daytona Beach as they got hammered pretty well too. So, you know, just want to keep them in our thoughts and prayers and hopefully we'll rebuild soon and we're Florida strong. So with that, this week we are going to talk about asset protection and why that's important to you.

Among other things, we'll talk about some of the market volatility another week as we hit the lows in the S&P 500, the 52-week lows that is, on some of the indexes. And what are you to do? If anything, maybe that means nothing. But anyway, here we go.

So, asset protection. With Hurricane Ian, could you imagine if everything you had was washed away or taken away? Your computers, your files, everything that you own is gone. And for some it's unthinkable.

I know for myself, I couldn't imagine what some of these people are going through. And you have to be prepared. And so how do you do that? What do you do?

Well, first and foremost, most of us, like now, live in the digital world. And so everything is basically online or digital for the most part. And if you're not, I would suggest taking those documents that you have that are vital to you or your business and scanning them and getting them online now. Now, there's a lot of ways you can do that.

There are certainly a lot of services that will back up your computer that you can just go out and it'll automatically do it while you're sleeping. Maybe some of it is manual. But first and foremost, get your computer backed up. Get everything backed up on there.

Passwords are another thing. Some people, they say, well, I keep a book to write down all my passwords. Well, that's great. What happens if you lose the book?

So there's some great online programs out there that will hold your passwords and create passwords for you. You just have to remember one password, which is the master password. So I would start there. I think it's a great way to secure that all your online accounts don't have that same password.

So God forbid, if you do get hacked, they can't hack into all your accounts. So you have different passwords for all those accounts. So get a password program. There's quite a few that are out there.

You can search that. I'm not going to recommend one or the other, but I recommend you do get some kind of password program that's out there. So you want to look into that. Once you have that, then you're going to want to back up your documents, everything that's online, your files, pictures, whether that be in Google Drive, Microsoft Cloud.

There are a lot of services, Apple Cloud, iCloud. There are a lot of services out there that will do it for really a fairly insignificant price. And the cost of having those things, especially you look at these people that lost everything, is somewhat priceless. So get your computer backed up.

Use one of those services. And for those of you that are still writing stuff down or have to use documents on paper, get them scanned in. You can actually take them to an Office Depot or a Kinko's or one of those places, and they'll scan them for you for a certain price and put them on a drive. And so now all those things are digital, and you can have them forever.

Back up, back up. This is part of asset protection. These are your assets. Your pictures, your memories, nobody ever wants to lose those.

So get those backed up. It's important to do it. Don't try to do it all at once. I'm sure it can be overwhelming.

Steps, one step at a time. Like I said, start with the passwords. Get your passwords backed up. Make sure that those are backed up.

Get an online service. Either do it yourself or have an online service. I know I use a Mac. They have a great built-in feature in Apple that will back up your computer.

So that's something I use also in addition to using Google. So get those digital assets backed up. The other part of asset protection, well, let's talk about market volatility. And certainly we saw it again last week with the Dow down 800 plus points on Friday and just a horrendous September.

Really bad month. And as I mentioned in my previous podcast, you know, sometimes, you know, these are the times that you want to take a look at your portfolio, see what you're doing, how those assets are invested, where they're invested. You know, some people unfortunately wake up to the surprise. Oh my gosh, my account is down XYZ.

And they don't realize how much risk they have in their portfolio. One of the things that I like to do when a new client comes in is look at that portfolio and do a real detailed analysis of, you know, what's in it, how much risk is involved. And then, you know, then we'll ask the questions. We'll do a risk tolerance questionnaire, see how much risk they are actually willing to take.

And we'll, you know, tell them, hey, look, you know, your risk questionnaire is telling me that you're only want to take so much risk, but your portfolio is telling me otherwise. You know, so it's kind of an eye-opening event there sometimes. But as people right now are, you know, as we're, like I said, in those lows of the 52 week indexes, index lows, people are, you know, getting their September statements and going, oh my gosh, it's just a horrible month. So what do you do?

What do you do to protect it? I mentioned, talked a little bit at length about this last week in last week's podcast. And sometimes, you know, it's not, there's nothing you can do. You're doing everything right.

And the market just goes down. We know it doesn't go down in a straight line to zero, and it doesn't go up in a straight line to a gazillion. And there are going to be ebbs and flows in the market. And during those ebbs and flows are the perfect time to look at your portfolio and, you know, maybe make adjustments.

Sometimes you don't make adjustments. You know, sometimes doing nothing is the right course of action. You know, there's an old saying that, you know, a flat C doesn't make a great sailor or something similar to that. But, you know, it's things that you need to do, you know, is really examine what you're doing here towards the end of the year, and start thinking about 2023.

The Fed, you know, has said that we are going to get to 2% inflation. And, you know, we're going to do whatever it takes. And that includes basically, you know, taking your home values down. Interest rates last week went to 7%.

I know like most that they're not going to give up that two and a half, three percent mortgage to get a 7% mortgage. They absolutely have to. You're not going to sell your house just to, you know, increase that to pay three or four more percent in interest, unless you something dictates like you, you know, you have to change jobs or whatever reason you have to move. So the likelihood of home prices and values going down is probably what's going to happen.

And he actually said we need a correction in the housing market. So it's coming. Whether it's going to be now, two months from now, three months from now, but they're going to do whatever it takes to get to that 2% inflation. So what can you do to protect your assets?

Right now, it's all about protecting your assets. I don't think it's really about making money and finding how to grow your money. It's about the asset protection of money. And I mentioned that depending on where you are in life, whether it be grow and protect or protect and grow.

And basically for those of you that haven't listened, that basically means as your younger years that you're in the growth mode. And as you get older, you become more in that protection mode of your assets. So depending on your age and where you are in life, you know, it's either you are in a growth mode or you're in a protection mode. And that is how you invest, you know, and that is how you need to look at your assets of where am I and how much of my assets are in that growth spectrum.

And should I be more in an asset protection spectrum? And most of the time that's been fixed income. And fixed income this year has not performed. Those bond funds, income ETFs, they're down 10 plus percent.

That doesn't feel good for someone who's retired. Now, if you are retired, and you are on fixed income, hopefully those assets, those dividends have not changed. Your principal may have gone down, but the income portion of that has not changed. And that's one of the things we do here is we'll take a look and make sure that that income will maintain, even though sometimes when the markets go down and your underlying value will go down, the income does not change.

That way your lifestyle does not change. So those are some of the things that we look at in asset protection, you know, along with your fund portfolios, your home, you know, I'm not going to talk too much about insurance, but it certainly is one of the top things that as a homeowner, as someone with a family, those are things that you want to make sure you have the appropriate coverages. You know, here in the state of Florida, flood insurance is probably four or five hundred dollars a year, at least that's what it has been. I couldn't imagine not having flood insurance for less, you know, for the cost of 20 to 30 dollars a month, you know, with the storms that we've gotten.

So, you know, getting insurance, you have to have it, you know, unless you are wealthy enough to self-insure, then even that aspect of it, you would want some type of an umbrella coverage like a Lloyd's of London or some type of insurance for a catastrophic event, whether it be driving on the road, a hurricane, tornado, whatever it may be, you know, even the wealthy have some sort of umbrella policy to cover for an event. So that's a little bit about asset protection, that's a little bit about market volatility of what's going on, you know, I'm always looking for comments and feedback, things that maybe you want to hear about. I try to take questions that I receive during the week. This week, once again, was kind of an odd week with the storm, you know, really interrupting everything from my standpoint here in Florida, so it was about getting my house ready for a hurricane and thankfully we did not see much other than some palm fronds down on the lawn, so thank you Lord for that.

You know, so lastly, I just kind of want to wrap up and, you know, really talk about, you know, some of the things that I've talked about in the first couple episodes, which is market volatility, retirement, 401k, you know, those are some of the things that we deal with day in and day out. You know, retirement right now, for those of you that are seeing your assets decline in the market, it doesn't feel good, you know, if your portfolio has gone down more than you think it should, you know, give us a call. I'll take a look at it. No pressure, no commitment.

Let's take a look at it. Let's see what's going on. You know, I've mentioned that maybe you're doing everything right, everything correct and the market's just, you know, going down and that's just the way markets sometimes work and sometimes your portfolio, once again, you're doing everything correctly and it's just the way the market, you know, but give us a call. We'll take a look at it.

You know, the income portion of it, you know, can be really important to be set up correctly so that your lifestyle does not change and that you continue to receive that same amount of income or your income increases, you know, as you go along in retirement, even though sometimes the underlying assets may lose value or go down in value, not necessarily lose unless you sell, but we want to make sure that those incomes stay steady, I think is the word that we're looking for here. So hopefully all of you have a great week. We'll put another episode here at the end of the week. Hopefully no interruptions this week.

Thank you again. Don't forget to like and subscribe and we will see you all next week and thanks again.