The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 243 Rebecca Walser, JD, LLM, CFP of Walser Wealth

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Rebecca Walser, JD, LLM, CFP of Walser Wealth

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from TheChrisVossShow.com TheChrisVossShow.com Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives, all those folks to sign up for The Chris Voss Show podcast. They can do it on iTunes, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Spotify. You can find us on any of the great podcast apps out there.

We certainly appreciate you referring your friends to the show. Now, as always, we have the best guests on The Chris Voss Show, and I've got a most wonderful, super smart, brilliant gal. Her name is Rebecca Walser. She is the Wealth Management Advisory Professional, and that's the name of her company, actually. So we're having her on. She's a certified financial planner. She's an experienced wealth strategist, best-selling author, and she's uniquely qualified to access, structure, and implement the best income maximization, wealth maximization, tax mitigation, minimization, and optimal legacy

strategies for her clients. And if you don't know what that is, she's going to tell us and explain all to us. She has a book, Wealth Unbroken, Growing Wealth Unrupted by Market Crashes, Taxes, and Even Death, where she truly brings a wealth of understanding to the personal finance book space. Welcome to the show, Rebecca. How are you today? I'm so great. Thanks for having me, Chris. I'm excited to be here. It's exciting to have you. As we talked in the pre-show, you've got a lot of great ideas and concepts on how people can better manage their wealth. Give us the website plugs on where people can find you on the interwebs. Absolutely. Walser Wealth, which is W-A-L-S as in Sam E-R, walserwealth.com.

And the book is available on amazon.com, of course, Wealth Unbroken. And so it's walserwealth.com. Sounds good. Welcome to the show. And so you're a financial advisor, a certified financial planner. And so you help people with their wealth, help people manage their money and all that good stuff. I've looked over your website. You've got a client basis where clients can come on and work with you and all that good stuff. Give us a good overview for a layman who isn't familiar with who you are, what you do, as to how you do it. Excellent. So, you know, my background's a little bit unique, Chris, in the sense that I was in finance for a decade before I became a lawyer. So after working in finance in corporate

America for almost a little over a decade, I went to law school and then I went and got my advanced law degree in federal taxation from NYU in New York City. So, and that's the best tax law program there is. So my background really led me to come out of that after being in finance for a decade, working in tax law exclusively for a while. And that just didn't work out for me because I would go into these meetings with these clients and they would not know my financial background. So I'd be meeting with them as their tax lawyer, with their advisor in tow, giving them financial advice. And it was just impossible. It was a no-win situation. My ears would start

burning as the financial advisor started talking. So I knew that was not going to work for me. And about four years ago, I'm going into my fifth year now, I opened my own practice holistically so I could marry the practice of tax, which is so important this day and age for Americans in the perspective of building wealth and sustaining wealth. So that's sort of where my practice is, is the convergence of tax into wealth and maximizing wealth that we have and can maintain. So, you know, people plan for retirement, plan for their well passing away, life insurance, all that sort of good stuff. Basically how they can do the whole package to live their lives successfully financially and do well. Yeah I mean it's I am what I would put myself in the category of anti-conventional. I'm outside the conventional box and thank God because that's what we need

at this day and age. And I basically, my mission and the reason I wrote the book really, because I wanted to get this message out way beyond what I can do physically, you know, myself. Talking to you and talking to other people and doing interviews and traveling the country and having a book tour. It was just not enough of me to get out there to speak to an individual. So writing a book is getting your message to as many as you possibly can. And the book really conveys why things are so different and why we have to really change where we're headed now until the future. Now, in your book, you talk about being an unconventional certified financial planner. What does that mean to you? What does unconventional mean for you and how can that really help people? You know, our society, Chris, is really lazy.

Americans, we have become, and I don't mean to offend anybody, but we've just become very complacent and very lazy. And so what has happened over the last three decades now is the government has sort of realized that for most people that are working in the world, you know, 40% of them don't have access to what we call the 401k plan at their employer. It's a small to medium-sized business. They don't offer a 401k. So most, like 40% of our population who are working don't have access to this plan. So the government has just gone ahead and assumed that the fact that 60% of our workforce has access to a 401k means that because they have access to something that's better than nothing. And so the 401k has really become the default retirement plan since really 1981. And nobody really did the

critical analysis of when it came into prominence, if it made sense, if it really was going to bear fruit long-term because it happened by accident. And so when things happen by accident, you don't do these critical calculations. I have been running these calculations now for 10 years of my life. And I am here to tell you that conventional advice to max out your 401k, to max out your IRA is probably the absolute worst possible advice you could take in 2018 and beyond. And so that's where I'm anti-conventional. I, the, the lazy side of America is this is what everyone has access to.

So let's use it and maximize it to its fullest without really any regard for it. Does this really make sense? Is this the best plan to use? Yeah. Conventional wisdom sometimes can bite you in the butt. I studied to be a stockbroker. And so understand you know Federal Reserve and one I'm to investing I used to do day trading on the Nasdaq level two and and yeah so people people that follow the conventional wisdom you know the conventional wisdom is

basically the sheep run together amen Amen. That's right. When they want to run off a cliff, I remember I got very lucky and moved to Las Vegas in the 2000s right before the bubble popped and sold my home in Utah and then moved to Las Vegas. And thank God I didn't have assets in a home uh we came to las

vegas to invest and after meeting with the real estate agents here i found that the bubble was about to pop and i found why it was about to pop and uh thank god i was a cotton home but at that time there was so many people that i was talking to in the real estate business and mortgage business that i was in at the time um that had lost their life savings or they were planning on those homes to be part of their retirement communities. And, you know, we talked in the pre-show about how a lot of people, you know, when they hit their fifties and sixties, they need to quit being in volatile sections of the economy for investment. They need to be in areas where it's much more secure, maybe a lot less risk, but you're not going to lose your retirement.

You need to think about these things because a lot of people, I'm an entrepreneur. I probably, hopefully will be lucky enough to keep working seven years after I die, like Warren Buffett says. And I may have to at this point to pay for dog treats for my Huskies. But, but I mean, people really have to think about this thing and, and throwing your money. I can see, I've always wondered about 401ks because when they first came out, they were tax free and I'm like, they're not, that's not going to be tax free forever. They're going to tax that eventually.

And they did. Yeah, yeah. It's like anytime there's something the government makes like, hey, this is tax-free, everyone sign up for that. They're going to be like, I would change their mind. Yeah, yeah. I know. I hear you. So what are some vehicles that you counsel your clients on?

They can get with you and do financial planning for their portfolios, what they want to help achieve. What's the sort of things that you usually recommend for them that are unconventional? So on the tax side, not talking about the other problem, which is market volatility, which you just were talking on and touching on just now, Chris. But on the tax side, we really only do have two tax-free asset classes. We only have two choices. People are mistakenly under the belief that federal tax-free municipal bond income is tax-free. It, in fact, is not an asset class I qualify as tax-free. And that is because it's part of what we call the provisional income calculation, meaning that when you retire and the government goes to calculate how much tax

you have to pay on social security, which was also supposed to be tax-free, like you were just talking about. Now it's been taxable for quite a while and substantially increased in taxation in the 90s. The provisional income calculation includes your tax-exempt municipal bond interest. So if you have nothing but municipal bond interest income and you have a Social Security benefit, just give you an easy number of $25,000. The government can easily say and does often say, okay, you have to pay us back $4,000 tax of this $25,000. In essence, we are reducing your benefit or means testing your benefit based on your other income from $25,000 to $21,000 because we're recollecting back or recapturing $4,000 in a tax.

So for that reason, municipal bond income is not one of the two asset classes that are truly tax-free. That leaves us on the tax side of just two asset classes, which is the Roth. And the Roth, it can be a Roth 401k. It can be a Roth IRA, but which is the Roth and, you know, the Roth, it can be a Roth 401k, it can be a Roth IRA, but it is the Roth. And then the other asset class that's more tax-free than the Roth and probably way more heavily protected than the Roth is cash value life insurance. As a note on cash value life insurance, a lot of people, you know, hear this and they'll turn off automatically. Their mind is sort of conventionally tuned to say, oh no, gosh, I know that's bad. I've heard the buy term invest the difference, keep insurance, insurance, investments, investments. And I will just say that's

just a really, I don't want to call it ignorant, but that is a really dumb move to just automatically shut your brain down to the opportunity for life insurance. Because the rich in our country, like going back all the way to the Rockefellers, have been leveraging the use of life insurance for hundreds of years to maximize wealth. A lot of people mistakenly believe that life insurance is only for death benefit. That is not what we're talking about. We're talking about leveraging life insurance for its living benefits, for accessing your cash value and your cash buildup during your lifetime tax-free for the rest of your life legally. It's a legal domestic tax shelter.

So that would be your other second option really on the tax side. And what you have, Chris, is you have a lot of people out there in America that have built money pre-tax in a 401k and have potentially maybe rolled it over to an IRA or when they retire, they'll roll it over to an IRA. And they think, well, it's too late for me. I've already done these things. Well, it's not too late for them. You can convert any money that's already been built up in a 401 or an IRA to a Roth, at least under the current tax code, you can make that conversion. You can choose to do that. It doesn't matter how much you make, you can convert. And you can also take distributions and fund life. And so you can reposition a pre-tax tax forever account,

which would be the 401k, the IRA into a tax never again account, which would be the Roth and the life insurance. So you do have options on the tax side to really take advantage of the fact that our tax code now is the lowest it has been since the 1930s under FDR. That's pretty amazing. So do I need a lot of money to open up a Roth account, say if I'm working for myself, or is it something, and the other question I have for you is,

do I, if I'm already retired, can I make these changes, or is this something I need to pre-plan for? You can make these changes. As long as the code allows it, you are not too late. And if you're not dead and not breathing, it is not too late to make these changes. So I have a lot of clients that come to me that are on the verge of retirement, retiring or already retired. And they're like, okay, here's what I built and here's what I have. And is it too late? And the question, the answer is no, it's not too late. In fact, this is the perfect time to do it because since we just got the tax reduction of 2017, end of 2017, with tax loads being as low as they are now, you easily can do a five to seven year, what I call reposition window, where you're moving, systematically moving over that five to seven year period, what you've already built pre-tax inside of an IRA or 401k into the Roth or taking a distribution

and moving it into life. I'm seeing your quote here on your website. It's not how much you make, it's about how much you keep. My mom was a teacher for 20 years. So she has, I believe she has an IRA. I know she complains a lot about her retirement account. And one thing that was shocking and eye-opening to her was the amount of taxes in distributions if you take that money out. And I think they give you like a yearly cap you can take. And then if you take more, then they punish you more. So certainly having pre-retirement strategies is really important. And I don't think a lot of people realize some of the back end of this until they get into retirement and their eyes get open and they're like, whoa, holy crap, there's still lots of taxes back here. You know, Chris, I hear what you're saying. You

don't know how important it is, but what's really important right now, have you ever heard of that analogy or that little, I don't know what you'd call it, little like parable, I guess, of the pot where the frog is in the pot and the water's warm and it feels nice, but what the frog doesn't realize is that it's slowly being turned up and they're boiling to death. They just don't realize it because they don't feel it. It's so slow, so gradual. And this is what's actually happened with the US tax system for the last three decades. We were told in the 80s that we should contribute and build up this pre-tax accounts because why should we pay tax? Don't pay the tax in your peak earning years while you're making

the most. Defer the tax, put the money into the retirement account. And when you retire and you're in a lower tax bracket because you're making less, take the money out then and pay the tax then. So we've been kind of promised this lower tax rate if we will wait till we retire and we're making less money. The problem with that conventional advice is that it requires tax rates to stay the same. And that is a mathematical impossibility. We are on the verge of the largest demographic shift in the baby boomers, retiring and going from working and paying and contributing to collecting on Social Security and Medicare as they are rightfully entitled to do. I don't mean to make this sound like a negative. They're entitled to do it, but we have to look at the economic impact of what is happening.

And the economic impact of what is happening is every single time one of these baby boomers retires, it is a double negative to our federal budget because right now they're paying and contributing. Simply retiring means they're stopping to contribute. So that's the first negative to the federal budget. And then they start becoming a recipient. So now we're paying out. So every single one of them is a double negative. The problem is nobody's talking about the problem. That's the problem. And so what's happening is we have been told by the government for 15 years that we would not get to two people paying into social security for every one person getting benefits until the year 2030, which is a special

year because that's the year the last baby boomer retires. It's like the end of the boomer retirement period. But in actuality, December 27th of 2017, there was a special news bulletin that said record number 61 million Americans on social security for the first time. 61 million Americans on social security in December of 2017, when we had the equivalent of 126 million full-time workers. So we hit essentially two to one in 2017, 13 years ahead of schedule. But what's more important than that, Chris, is that it was before 70% of the entire boomer population has even began to retire. So we're already at two to one now before 70% of our boomers have even started to retire. They will begin to retire in four years in 2022 and a five to six year succession,

one year after the other year, after the other year, after the other year. And this is when you're going to see our tax policy have to mathematically completely change to where it's unrecognizable than what we've had for the last 30 years. And what you're going to have is all of these Americans that have built all of this wealth,

as they've been told in 401ks and an IRAs pre-tax, thinking that they were going to get a lower tax bill, actually be shocked at how much the government has to take from what they're taking out to live on. Yeah. My mom has complained about how I think she's seen a small increase in taxes or her financial planners warning her. She might see a small increase in taxes. her financial planners warning her she might see a small increase in taxes and yeah like you i believe these i mean we we made a guarantee to these people we promised them something and it has to be delivered um but i think your point is is that people need to look out for themselves they need to plan for themselves they need to invest in good strategies with their financial money because who knows what the future will hold i know my mom worries a lot about you know there was some recent uh talk in in congress about how they might need to raise taxes or do something with entitlements and she's like i worked all

my life for that money and you just never know what the future is going to hold or what maybe you know what if they decide in the government they're like hey we're going to tax the crap out of this, that, or the other. You've got to protect yourself and look out for yourself. And looking over your website, it looks like you talk about a lot of strategies, like you say, unconventional where people are, you know, they need to make a plan. If they don't make a plan, well, then they're probably going to reap the downside of that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's all about control. And you know, when you have wealth, it's going to be controlled by the government for the rest of your life, which it is if it's not tax free. If it's perpetually taxed, the government is perpetually

in control. And that's the problem. Because the government's got a really bad set of facts that they're going to be dealing with very, very soon. So right now we're in the pot, the water's warm, we think everything's fine, or at least it's not uncomfortable enough to complain. What's coming is what we have to prepare for. We have to jump out of the pot before we get boiled. And that's what we do in a nutshell. Yeah. If you don't look out for your money, no one else will.

In fact, everyone else will spend it. That's right. That's my experience. That's right. You know, if I don't have one person spending it somebody else will spend it but yeah you've got to look out for yourself and for a lot of people when they retire they're not getting income after that i mean like i said i'm self-employed so i'll probably always get retirement or i'll have income past retirement but then i have to start looking at strategies

because i get penalized for money I earn after a certain age that gets taxed, I believe, like 50% or something like that. So I'll even have to incur that. But a lot of people don't realize, you know, at the end of retirement, you end up getting taxed for a lot of things that you didn't think you'd get taxed for. I know that's been a complaint from both, from all my parents. And then also the distributions and stuff that you're going to make, and you're not making any more income. There's nothing more really coming in unless you have like a side business or some sort of other thing. But even then the taxation on that is huge. Right. Exactly. I mean, you build up what I call during your accumulation phase of your whole life, which is the first more than half of your life building and saving and building up a pot of wealth. And it's supposed to sustain you for the rest of your life.

So people don't factor in the government control of the wealth that they've built and what that means in the future. They just don't factor it in. So when they do get the bill and they see the tax that's been withheld from the distribution, they're like, wait a minute, what's going on here? Yeah, that's the actual withholding of the pie. So we have to build that in so that we can be prepared. Yes, 100%. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is that people are living longer now, and the way they're kind of going with some of these new medical things, we might be living into our hundreds, and if you're retiring at 65, that's about 40 years of income that

you've got to stretch out, make work, and make happen. Exactly right. I mean, the fact that the longevity of our lifespan has increased and at the same time, the cost of medical care has also increased is a big problem for the fact that it used to be that you could maybe just augment social security for 15 or 25 years, 20 years, 25 years at the most. Now we are a lot longer on that time frame. So you're exactly right. And you bring up an excellent point. The longer you're living, the more health, you know, costs you're going to generate and the more probably complications you're going to have. My mom, God bless her. She's, you know, she's having her knees replaced. She's had one knee replaced. She's scheduled to have another replaced. You know, you just need, the older you get,

the more you break down, the more work you need. And you're still alive, so that's good. But, you know, you're going to need more health visits and payments to hospitals and everything else. And certainly it's a challenge. And like I said, I remember when the housing boom busted. And there was a lot of people I talked to who were in their 50s and 60s who'd taken out these home equity loans and different things. And suddenly they were upside down by $200,000 in their home. And here they thought they would have all this equity that they would convert into their retirement. And so for a lot of them, it's sad here in Las Vegas. I actually

go to like Costco or Walmart or other places and I see very old people working there that I'm like, you know, I don't want to be mean, but I'm like, this person looks like they should have retired a long time ago. Yeah. That's probably because of the housing boom that happened, bust that happened here in Las Vegas in the 2000s. And so, you know, for all I know, I'm probably going to work in the streets when I hit 70. No. I'll be out there in a new skirt hustling or something. I don't know. But you've got to protect yourself. You've got to control your money and manage your money.

And you work with clients to help them do that. It looks like you have a client portal, so people can, I guess, go in and work with you on your website and see what's going on. Yep, absolutely. Definitely. You know, I think once we get past the tax and we figure out how we work, Chris, is we like to reverse engineer. So let's take, for example, you. If you said, hey, Rebecca, I'm going to retire in 10 years and I want to have this much per year. We sort of do a gap analysis. We say, okay, we're here.

We're starting here. We know we're ending here. So we always begin with the end in mind. And we kind of reverse engineer where we are to where we want to end up. And then we figure out what is the gap. So based on what you've already accumulated, what you already have. Some people have nothing. A lot of America has nothing.

Believe it or not, Chris, you know, half, more than half of America has nothing outside of social security. Another reason we have to be very, very concerned, the people that have built wealth, that's where it's going to be taken from. So for those people that have means, they have to be all the more protective and looking out for themselves. I hate to say this, but it's just because of the fact that the government has to go and get the money where the wealth is and the wealth is held by less than half of the country. So for the people that have means and have wealth, and how do we get to where we're going? We start off with what kind of lifestyle do we want to maintain the rest of our life? Not having to work just passively. What's the

lifestyle? And then we figure out what does it take to get that lifestyle? What is the asset base it takes? And then we're obviously building tax implications into that picture. We're also building volatility because like you said, at a certain point, the market is not your friend. Once your investment horizon, 10 years or less from retirement is there, once your 10 years are out from retirement, just the fact is, unconventional advice about to be delivered, the fact is we cannot afford to go through a market correction of 50 percent and this is what we have had now this is what I call the new normal in the book ever since globalization through the internet and cell phone technology which is came about in the late 90s and early 2000s. So you have what I call the industrial technological revolution, which made us a global world. We had a 49% peak to trough, top to bottom decline from

the dot-com bust. And we had a 57% peak to trough, top to bottom correction from the Great Recession. So what we have now is this new age of the new normal, which is super high market highs, followed by super low market lows. This has become normal and it's going to happen again. And when you are 10 years out from retirement, if your portfolio sustains a 50% correction, the last two times it took five years from the dot-com bust and it took four and a half years from the housing bust of the Great Recession for the market to return to its pre-bust level. So that means if we have 10 years left, and it takes us half that time just to get to what we had before the correction, now we have five years left to grow our money. It is a losing proposition. Once you get into retirement, it's impossible because now you have to take money out of that portfolio every year to supplement social security to live off of. And if the market has

crashed and your portfolio is down, the last thing we, any financial advisor, you know this from your days in Wall Street, the last thing any financial advisor wants you to do is take money out of a portfolio that has just been decimated down. You have to let it breathe. And unfortunately, letting it breathe for four or five years, if you're retired, is not a possibility. So the wealth killer in retirement is market volatility, which means and demands that 10 years and out from retirement, we have to look at alternative strategies. There is just no other mathematical way to read this. And we may be entering another recession, I think, in 2020. I think that's about where we're going to go with the way the market's

going. China's about ready to, I believe, enter into a new age of economic weakness where their money policy that they've been tricking their economy on for about, I think, the last 10 or 15 years, they've been generating their own GDP by just building cities. You're right. Ghost cities, as we call them. Ghost cities. And they're starting to hit market volatility with their financial markets. You know, you were talking earlier about, you know, not knowing what the government's going to do or what's going to happen with economies and and maybe them taxing stuff much uh it may be and this may be speculative i may be a little bit hyper bullish but we saw kind of this in england great britain and we also saw this in greece where the economies crashed there

to a point they had to go after entitlements uh for retirees in fact uh greece just removed i i think like 10 000 priests or something i guess priests are part of the government payroll over there they've had to get really hard on on retirees which is very unfair um but you know this is just one of those things you need to plan for because you're going to need to plan for volatility you need to plan for crazy government tax increases you You know, what's the old line? The two things most certain life or death and taxes. That's true. Exactly. Yes. Paint that on your forehead, tattoo it and go, I need to plan more better for my wealth and everything else. So there could be a future. And this might be a little scary, like I say, or hyper bullish, but we could have a sort of Athens type Greece collapse.

I think Italy went through a little bit of it, but I know the retirees in England had to deal with some of their entitlements and stuff that they were receiving as well. We could have that sort of situation here in the U.S. And certainly planning is important. Right now, I think most people that plan, they think somehow that $15 they spend every morning in Starbucks goes towards their retirement plan. Isn't that true? You know, what you're saying, it could not be more closer to the truth. You know, Chris, it's 100% a fact. I truth you know chris it's a hundred percent a fact i actually uh did a couple of radio shows a couple years ago on the similarities between the united states of america and the fall of the roman empire and how similar our two countries are um you know it's just it's just incredible the roman empire you know um save maybe the british empire um once

you know pre you know british imperialism, basically, with the exception of that period of history, the Roman Empire was the most vast on the face of the earth. And it was a result of two main things, the wars that they kept conquering once place after another, and in order to support those efforts, had to tax their people to basic death. And so between the raising of debt to finance their military strategy across the world and to tax their people to death to pay for these strategies, they imploded upon themselves.

And the United States cannot escape economics forever. We are not immune to supply and demand and the economics of what we offer and what we produce. And because we've been the world reserve currency since 1944, Bretton Woods, the end of World War II, and really taking that position, we have leveraged that, the heck out of that, to sort of borrow against our future. And that's our $22 trillion of debt. We have borrowed against our future and lived a lifestyle that we can't afford to the tune of 50% a year. And just to really quickly tell you what that means, we collect about half of our spending in tax revenue. The other half is spent through debt financing. So that's why we're basically raising our federal debt every year by a trillion dollar deficit. If we were tomorrow no longer be

able to sell our debt because we were tomorrow no longer the world reserve currency of the world, hypothetically, Bitcoin came along and all of a sudden was universally accepted everywhere and could be used as a scalable currency. So nobody ever wanted the US dollar to trade anymore and we couldn't sell our paper, we would overnight experience a 50% decline of spending nationwide. So this is not, what you're saying is, even though you're sort of, you know, off the cuff saying, oh, we could have entitlement cuts, we have a lot of things go very wrong. And I think people just need to prepare that, you know, these things are coming. And I got a lot of people that will quickly off the cuff sort of say, well, people are never going to elect politicians that are going to raise taxes. And they're just missing the point so

badly. They're missing the whole point. It is not a matter of blue and red and who's going to raise my taxes. And I can't believe I elected you. Let me fire you. It's a mathematical problem at this point. It is black and white math. It has nothing to do with politics. It's about economics. And like I said, we can't fake it forever. And we're due for a recession. I mean, what a lot of people don't know, and this is why they should hire people like you to do financial planning with them, is you guys follow what the Fed does with their rates. Right now, we have the Fed doing what's called cooling the economy. They're raising the Fed rates to cool the economy. We have more jobs than we have people to fill them. And because of it, either employers have to do one of two things.

They either have to lay off and cut back on their growth and their expansion, which we're seeing GM do, and rejigger their outlines on what they want to take and accomplish with their companies in the future, or they can increase pay to employees. Well, increasing pay to employees reduces profits, which Wall Street doesn't like, and then blah, blah, blah. There's those pressures there. But they are ratchetingeting and they've made their signal very obvious from the fed which they normally don't do but they've you know i think of being this year or last year they stated we're going to go through several different jumps and increases and people don't realize they will cool the market to keep inflation down and in in every move that

this that the fed always makes and the 20 years years that I was a mortgage agent, a real estate agent, they always overshoot it and they always overcompensate. And then we go into a small recession, sometimes a bigger one. And then it takes us several years to come out of that. And it's the constant ebbing and tithing. I always counsel people, if you want to, you should read some books on the Fed, Federal Reserve, how it works, how it affects the economies, and sometimes how it's trashed whole countries around the world and creates sometimes real economic instability by some of the Fed rules and policies that it's taken made so uh dealing with someone like you who can financially plan for the future who can financially plan and monitor the federal reserve the recessions

pending stuff i really think we're heading for a recession in 2020 uh if not late 2019 that we might enter it there's only so long a economy like ours can hum along without starting to hit inflationary pressures. And the Fed has to move to regulate those. And because of that, it is designed to slow the economy and slow inflation. And given it will have effects where, you know, we'll probably see joblessness increase. We'll go through a two or three year period of whatever, just like we've talked about, where there'll be a correction and then somehow you've got to play catch up after that. I agree. I mean, I think that the correction,

it could even be starting late 2018 and you've seen the bubble from October, November, now December going on forward. So if it's not 2020, it could be sooner. The thing is, Chris, you never know when the market's going to actually have it. But what we do know, what we can talk about is what we do know. And what we do know is that this is the longest bull market uninterrupted by a bear thus far, which is a 20% decline or greater, as you know. It's the longest bull market in the history of our country. So anyone that tells you, I can't stand the financial advisors or planners or money managers that go on television on a business channel and say, oh, this market's going to last two or three more years. You know, Milton Friedman could go on to the same business channel.

He could say it. I wouldn't believe him. I mean, nobody knows. We are in totally uncharted territory, and we have no idea how this is going to end up. What we do know is we're seeing the VIX index, the volatility index, extremely high, you know, uncharacteristically high. We just added an inverted yield curve between the two and three year rates and the five year rates just, you know, a little bit ago. And so those are all precursors to recession, always indicating recession. And I do think that we're simply just, if you forget about every underlying fundamental of the economy and just

look at the macroeconomic timetable, because we're in the longest bull market in the history of our country, we are overdue for some kind of correction. So all of those factors together and you add in geopolitical risks from China, trade, Russia, you know, Turkey's currency, everything in the world, North Korea on the, you know, military front, and you've just got a potential recipe for crazy disaster. But I mean, this whole, I've always, my problem, because I always feel like I'm such a negative naysayer and I'm such a positive person, but it's so, I don't know how I do my job, honestly, because I'm such a positive person, but everything I want to come out and say is negative, negative, negative. But the truth is

the best thing I can do in my life with my message is educate and tell as many people out there, all of these things so that they can take and self-empower themselves to take responsibility and take action while everyone around them is doing nothing. I mean, it's kind of like the story of the Bible of Noah's Ark. He started building this ark, this big boat, and it's not raining yet. It's a drought and everyone's making fun of him saying he's crazy, crazy, crazy. I get a lot of conventional financial advisors saying, I'm crazy that there's not the tax policy is going to be stable for the next 25 years. The market's not going to crash. Everything's going to be fine. And, you know, I'm just going ahead and building my boat with my clients. Well, you've got to do that because

you don't you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, I always call it not being negative, but looking the dragon in the mouth. And, you know, if you look the dragon in the mouth and go, I don't want to go there, you can take steps to prepare. That's right. That could happen. And there are so, like you talked about, there are so many different aspects that can come at you from government taxes, death, retirement, health. Your health can go into the toilet really quickly. I've had friends that they're feeling fine one day and all of a sudden they've got cancer and they go right off the rails financially and with their life and they're playing catch up and you just never know what's going to happen. And so, you know, I think some

of your website talks about this. If you don't have a plan, you plan to fail. So you've got to you've got to look at some of the crazy stuff that can happen in the world and go, how do we how do we hedge for this? How do we make sure that we've got protections in place and we've we've made a plan? Because you're right. That's what the rich do. The rich hire these financial planners to come in, plan for the future, plan for every element, plan for different tax strategies. I mean, that's half the reason I'm self-employed is because I can take a lot of, I can use a lot of tax strategies to my benefits, write-offs, things that, you know. I mean, between owning businesses for all that I have since I was 18, I can't imagine not living with the write-offs that the

IRS gives me for business and everything else. And a lot of people don't have access to that because they're employed. They work for an employer. They don't want to take the risk of being self-employed. And yeah, you've got to manage your money because if you trust somebody else with it, they're probably just going to spend it or ruin it. Recently, one of my friends on Facebook was complaining about how one of the wealth managers out there, that's one of the popular ones, probably top five ones, keeps burning all his money through these ups and downs that the market's now starting to do because the market's starting to adjust and plan for a recession or some sort of correction in the market coming in the future. And they planned years ahead of time for this stuff.

And so if the markets go down, your portfolio and your 401k or whatever is going to go down unless you make sure that you've got an asset put into the right allocations for your cash or gold or stocks or whatever bonds, whatever you want to take and do and working with financial planners like yourself. Yeah, absolutely. You're 100% right. And that's what we do every day. And that's what we sort of live for. So, you know, the failing to plan is planning to fail exactly what we say. You're 100% right. Definitely. Definitely. So anything more we need to know, how could clients get in touch with you,

potential clients get in touch with you and work with you and maybe have an assessment done on their sort of thing and how you meet and greet those folks. We work with clients all over the country because I have a national-based practice. So we do work with clients all over and we have clients that come to us from all over. So we do a lot of our virtual meetings, which are our best friend, you know, and we do meet with clients face to face when they do come on board at least once. But we do do a lot of virtual work with clients all over the country because it's, you know, we can meet, I meet with clients in the United Kingdom, you know, virtually, no problem. So the website is the best way to get

in touch with us because all of our contact information is there, our phone number, our email address, you know, our address, physical address, all these things. But you can email us, info at Walser Wealth, Walser is W-A-L-S as in Sam, E-R, info at Walser Wealth is one way to email us. You can go to our website, walserwealth.com. There's a contact form. And of course, there's the phone number. So you can just call us and we'll be happy to set up a call and talk with a client. Sounds good. So everyone go to their website, check out Rebecca's site and get in touch with her. Make some plans because I think there's volatility that's going to happen here in the future in some case.

And from probably different, if not one variant, some other sort of multiple variants. And you definitely want to plan. I mean, I constantly talk to my mom, and she'll tell me about this distribution and this tax, and she didn't know that this tax was going to come from there. They don't tell you a lot of this stuff when you plan this out. Hey, you're going to have these taxes. A lot of people are the impression that, you know,

you get your money back, and that's it. It's tax-free, and it's a free ride, and blah, blah, blah. Even, like, Medicare distributions have issues. it it's tax-free and it's free ride and blah blah blah and it even like Medicare distributions have issues I have two sisters who are on Medicare now that are in homes one has MS the other was born with issues and and so there's issues to deal with with the government on their end and everything else especially when it comes to paperwork so you have to plan for these things. You have to be aware of them and get them going on.

So anyway, thanks for being on, Rebecca. We certainly appreciate you. You shared a wonderful amount of knowledge with us. We probably should have you on here as we go through the next year. We'll have you on every time some market crash happens or some sort of tax change happens. How about that? That sounds awesome. It was great to be with you, and I appreciate your time.

Thank you very much. And to my audience, be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube, hit that bell notification button, refer your friends, neighbors, relatives, youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. You see all the notifications we're doing. We're going to be having sponsors for the new CES show coming up in January. So be sure to watch for that. And we're still doing the course reviews for all the gifts you should be getting for your family. If you love them or not, get them awesome gifts. You can find those on the Chris Voss YouTube channel as well. Tell your friends to go to iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes. They can subscribe to the show, share with your friends, neighbors, relatives.

Get them listening as well. And we certainly appreciate everyone who tunes in. Thanks to my audience. Thanks to Rebecca for being here. We'll see you guys next time. Thank you, Chris.