Retire With $500K? Key Questions | Money Matters Podcast

Wes Moss [00:00:01]: Welcome to Money Matters. Your host, Wes Moss. What a week. What a whipsaw week in markets. It’s just me here in studio right now. And then Christa DiBiase and I will be answering some, another large amount of financial questions. We’ll do Q&A, but really for the first part of the show here today, I want to address what I know was a crazy week. It’s a whipsaw week for markets.

Wes Moss [00:00:29]: The midterm elections, yes, the polls showed that we would have a big pendulum swing from red to blue in the United States. The polls probably underestimated how big of a swing we ultimately saw. We saw it quickly. It was only a few hours after the polls closed, and I think most people knew pretty definitively what the results were going to be. And then we woke up the next morning and knew, and there’s a lot of political change. And we have now, at least what we experienced this last week was a ton of uncertainty and an absolute whipsaw. You could call it a reverse bungee cord market where we went up dramatically the day after the election. The Dow was up over 1,500 points, which is a rare up day, and then gave it all back the next day, down over 1,800 points.

Wes Moss [00:01:21]: And the Nasdaq was even, was much worse than the Dow Jones. Down over 5% for the day until we saw what I would call a fair amount of stabilization, a deep breath on this past Friday. But again, it was a whipsaw week, and I know that. And I got— there were lots of questions and worries. How can we continue to be invested if you didn’t like your political— if your political party didn’t win, you’re probably nervous. If your political party did win, you’re probably excited. And we’re here to Remind all and remind us, our listeners here, that we’ve gotta take a breath and have a kind of a measured approach and not get emotional about the political environment. And I wanna explain that today here on this first part of Money Matters.

Wes Moss [00:02:14]: So I would call today, it was a whipsaw week for markets, a giant pendulum swing when it comes to politics. But the kind of the, where do we go from here is what I think people are asking. And I would call today, or today’s topic, if I had to name it, would be the certainty of uncertainty, which is one of Wall Street’s oldest clichés is that the market hates uncertainty. Good news or bad news, investors can price that in. What they can’t price in is not knowing. And this week put that idea to the test. So again, Wednesday, the day after the midterm elections, Dow up roughly 1,570 points. It’s the best day we’ve seen in a year and a half.

Wes Moss [00:03:00]: On Thursday, gave it all back. Dow fell more than 1,800 points. S&P 500 lost more than 4%. The NASDAQ dropped about 5.5%. Say that another way, the market got its answer on Tuesday night, accepted the answer on Wednesday, and then spent Thursday, realizing the answer came with a lot of new questions. The pattern that we’ve seen historically, so for some context, midterm years have historically been among the most volatile and the lowest returning years of the whole 4-year presidential cycle. Every year stands on its own, whether it was inflation in 2022, interest rate hikes in 2018, but the tendency is hard to ignore. What comes next has historically been a different story.

Wes Moss [00:03:47]: Since 1950, and I know we’ve gone over these numbers here on Money Matters before, but since 1950, the S&P 500 has been positive in all 19 of the 12-month periods following a midterm election with an average gain of 15% compared to 10% in a typical average year for market. So better. So in other words, the year after the midterm has been one of the best stretches of the entire cycle. Well, why is that? The old theory goes that uncertainty causes volatility and certainty about the power in Washington is what lets market kind of take a sigh of relief and then move again higher. Certainty. Once the unknown becomes known, investors can start to plan and kind of, hey, okay, where, where do we stand? So this year, I would say we, we do have certainty now. It’s a different kind of certainty. We’d argue that we, what we’ve seen unfold in just the last couple of days is kind of the— it’s a little different than that.

Wes Moss [00:04:58]: Yes, we have certainty and that’s a good thing, but the certainty, there’s almost certainty now of the uncertainty. And here’s what I mean by that. Democrats won. Both chambers of Congress, along with governorships in some of the most important data center states in the country. Data center. That’s Texas. It’s right here in Georgia. It’s Ohio.

Wes Moss [00:05:19]: Several of those governors campaigned on pausing new data center construction. Goldman Sachs estimates that states most likely to tighten rules account for 45% of planned US data center capacity. Texas alone has roughly a quarter of that. So naturally, that starts to stir up fears in a market led by spending associated with these data centers and the artificial intelligence buildout. The worry ripples outward from the data centers themselves to the companies that own the power, to the companies that build them, to the chips that fill them, to the manufacturing of those chips, to the equipment that makes those chips. So you get the, the point of that longer chain. That’s not a new story. Semiconductor stocks have been under pressure for a while now, many months.

Wes Moss [00:06:09]: The NASDAQ 100 had already slipped into correction territory as of Monday before a single vote was even counted. The election results didn’t necessarily create the nerves. They kicked them into high gear. It also isn’t a one-party story. Outgoing Texas Governor Abbott had already paused new data center approvals before the election. And this week, voters across the country approved the vast majority of local ballot measures restricting data centers. So what do we do, or where do we go from here? The honest answer is that it’s difficult to separate political rhetoric from policy. We don’t know whether moratorium will be a true moratorium or maybe just a bargaining chip to get the latest technology companies to invest more in those local communities, pay more of their own power costs, use maybe cleaner energy.

Wes Moss [00:07:12]: So to really try to understand this and just look at it at face value, there’s certainly more risks now to the AI trade than there were prior to the midterms. Building data centers in America has, has the potential to slow down a little bit and be more expensive, or at least more expensive in the near term. If you look at some of the analytics or the analysis around this, it makes sense now. Expect AI spending to potentially peak sooner than it did from what we knew a week ago. With, with as much as a fifth or 20% of the planned data center capacity coming off the drawing board. So 20% less. Now, it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that what do we do as investors? Well, we need to remain calm in times like this. And yet calm isn’t the same as ignoring risk.

Wes Moss [00:08:09]: It’s weighing it against the facts. And there’s some important facts on the other side of the ledger. Do we really think the AI data center trade and the buildout of the, one of the greatest technological revolutions we’ve seen in 100 years is going to stop? Thursday, it seemed like it was going to stop. That’s what the markets are saying. And I just don’t buy that even remotely. Governors are not going to tank their own economies. Campaigning and governing are two Very different jobs. In a lot of these states, data center investment has been one of the largest sources of new construction, new jobs, and guess what? Local tax revenue.

Wes Moss [00:08:53]: In Ohio, the industry is mentioned in the same breath now as the big auto companies, as agriculture. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers pay enough in property taxes to fund the county’s entire operating budget. Are states just going to get rid of this as an industry? It just, it does, it makes no sense. It goes against all incentives that whether you campaigned on it or not, are we real, are governors really going to expunge an entire industry from their states? They, it sounded like that when they campaigned. In real life, are they going to do that? No. In my opinion, that is not going to happen. Projects are already underway. Permits are already in hand.

Wes Moss [00:09:38]: Companies, they can’t build in one state. What are they gonna do if they do get kicked out? They’re gonna go build in another. So markets though, what’s also interesting, they can’t have it both ways. Here’s the part that is a little bit of a head-scratcher. The last couple of months, the market had begun to doubt the, the, the biggest, biggest technology companies for their spending, spending too much on AI. Combined free cash flow for a lot of these companies went from $60 billion a quarter to negative last quarter. So $60 billion in 2024 to negative last quarter. And companies are getting punished.

Wes Moss [00:10:14]: Alphabet is an example, down 12% because they were spending too much. This week, the market punished the AI trade on fears that spending was going to slow. So Microsoft and Amazon rose on Wednesday on the idea that they might spend a little less. Meanwhile, Then they reversed course with the rest of the market on Thursday because of spending fears. So in other words, the market can’t decide whether AI spending is the problem or the product. So a perspective on those fundamentals. At the start of the year, the 5 largest cloud companies were expected to spend over $500 billion on AI-related infrastructure in ’26. That, that estimate is now about $800 billion and estimates for 2027 over a trillion.

Wes Moss [00:11:02]: Now take a fifth of that away. Let’s say that disappeared and next year would still land above this year’s record. Slower buildout, but not no buildout. And in fact, it’s still a massive, going to be a massive part of this economy. So what hasn’t changed under the headlines? The economy’s still solid. Third quarter productivity grew. At over 3.5%, weekly jobless claims at a 57-year low. On Friday, we just got the jobs number, 165,000 new jobs in October, unemployment rate down to 4.1%.

Wes Moss [00:11:39]: Those are the forces that drive long-term earnings, job growth, earnings growth, continued army of American productivity who— that will find a way to continue to Expand and progress. And that did not change on Tuesday night. So, and these changing landscapes are nothing new, whether it’s war or tariffs or taxes, inflation, the Fed, or policy shift. Markets have a way to absorb that change. Now, each time, each issue, yes, it feels like a very big thing and it feels like everything is going to change. But each time, what happened? Every time markets figured out, they adapt and they move on. So that’s what I would encourage our listeners on both sides of the aisle, regardless of your party, not to let politics become an investment policy. Markets aren’t one party’s mood.

Wes Moss [00:12:42]: They’re the sum of millions of decisions by consumers and Americans and business owners and investors. Regardless of political red or blue, an investor who held— and we’ve heard, I’ve done this too on Money Matters before— uh, only if you invested only under Republican presidents, $10,000 from 1953 until today turns into about $400K. Investing only under Democratic presidents since 1953 only turned into a— not only, these are big numbers— turned into $660,000. Staying invested that entire period, $10,000 turned into what? Over $25 million. There is no comparison between staying invested through political cycles, red, blue, red, blue, versus trying to choose one of the two. The historical data on that is very, very clear. Balance though is our friend. We know that balance is our friend in environments like this for many years now, we’ve said a couple things, that AI will be a transformative technology.

Wes Moss [00:13:47]: And it, and it has already become indispensable to most companies in America. And that we want to balance that exposure to this new technology and to non-artificial intelligence companies alike. And that’s exactly what we’ve pounded the table on here on Money Matters. Do you want to be all in on this AI trade? As exciting as it has been and, and as exciting as the future still is, it’s too much concentration in one area. You can see it in the major averages. Wednesday, Thursday combined, the big update and the big down day. What was the result of those, that 2-day whipsaw? The Dow was down about 250 points, the NASDAQ down about 4%. And if you’re looking at a dividend growth ETF, the average dividend growth ETF fell less than 1%.

Wes Moss [00:14:42]: So balance is our friend. What could this mean for you as an investor? And I know, and all investors are different, different time horizons, different goals, different risk tolerances, but we know that turbulence and a smooth landing, they’re not mutually exclusive events. So even when The historical trend has been positive. We still plan for volatility. We should expect it. If you look at those 19 post-midterm periods, and again, we’ve already talked about this, and they were, all of them were positive 12 months later. In 11 of those cases, the market fell more than 10% along the way. 2018 midterm stocks fell about 16% before ending 12% higher a year later.

Wes Moss [00:15:28]: The bumps are part of the pattern. They have not been a break from that pattern. So it’s in times like these that we should be looking for opportunity. We look across portfolios and we decide if anything, what needs attention. Often the hardest and the best decision is to choose to not change course. Sometimes the right decision is to stay still. Sometimes it’s to reduce risk, particularly if, but if you’re already highly diversified and you’re not overexposed to any one area or tech in this case, or in the AI trade as an example, then you are probably well-balanced and you’re okay. And sometimes it is to add where others are selling first and then they’re asking questions later.

Wes Moss [00:16:20]: That may be an area to be adding to. And that is The beauty of understanding what you own and staying diversified. The election is decided. The policy, I would say, yes, it’s, it’s still going to be changing and yet to be written, but long-term diversified investors do not need to be panicking. And the vast majority of folks should very likely, or I would say almost all investors should Remain patient and let the emotions of politics subside and continue to stay the course. We are going to run to news, weather, traffic, more Money Matters straight ahead. This Thanksgiving, when you’re sitting around the table, take a look around because after studying thousands of retirees, I found the happiest ones aren’t just doing things, they’re doing things with People cooking with, traveling with, laughing with. We’re in the middle of a friendship recession in this country.

Wes Moss [00:17:24]: In my new book, The Retire Sooner Method, I’ll show you ways to fight back and build the connections that make for happy retirees. Pick up your copy today on Amazon or your local bookstore. Wes Moss here, along with Christa DeBias. Christa, can you retire on $5 I hope

Christa DiBiase [00:17:45]: so, because that’s what

Wes Moss [00:17:47]: most— The majority of Americans, that’s the median number. It’s actually more than the median number. Fed’s new survey is out very recently, their 2026 release, which has 2025 numbers. Median ages 65 to 74 in America, the median family, family net worth is $431,000. Now, the average in that age range, 65 to 74, is $1.9 million. Well, how did it get to $1.9 million? Doesn’t mean the average family has $1.9 million. It means that you’ve got— literally, we have trillionaires in America, and those trillionaires and multi-billionaires and $100 millionaires, they skew the numbers. So, the reality is that that is not a representative number for most families.

Wes Moss [00:18:33]: What’s representative is the median. So, you line up everybody in America and you pick the middle point. $431,000 means actually 50% of people have less than that. So I think it is, is an important question to say, can you retire on $500K? And the answer is, the short answer is it is possible, but it is difficult. And just because it’s difficult though doesn’t mean it’s not possible. And there are a couple of ways to make this work. Number one, The question has to do— and we’re going to assume you have $500,000 in liquid savings, whether it’s an IRA or a brokerage account. We’re not going to get specific about taxes here, just that, that’s the gross amount.

Wes Moss [00:19:16]: If you do not have a mortgage payment and your mortgage is paid off by your retirement date, then all of this does become, in my opinion, very possible. Can you do it at 62 when Social Security kicks in? You have $500K and Social Security kicks in at 62. My answer is again, likely not, because 62 you have your most reduced Social Security payment, and guess what has not kicked in yet? Medicare. So you have this 3-year gap and you have that extra, extra expense for healthcare.

Christa DiBiase [00:19:53]: Right.

Wes Moss [00:19:54]: So even though you can go and get healthcare through the exchange, and if you keep your income really low, maybe you do get some sort of supplement, but I think that’s even too early. So, if you’re— if we’re trying to make this work, here are 2 variables that get us there. There’s really 3. One, wait at least till 65. 67 is better. That’s your full retirement age for most people. Number one. Number 2, if you don’t have a mortgage, that means that giant cost of housing is mostly out of the picture.

Wes Moss [00:20:23]: Yes, you’ve got property tax, etc., but that makes it very possible. And here’s the third one, and again, we can’t control this necessarily. It’s really hard to do this when you’re single.

Christa DiBiase [00:20:34]: Mm-hmm.

Wes Moss [00:20:35]: Because you have just one Social Security payment. It makes it easier if you’re married and you have 2 Social Security payments. So here’s the way I look at this financially. If you’ve got $500,000, And you’re, let’s say you’re really pushing it and we’re going to go above the 4% rule and we’re going to go all the way to 5%. So again, a little high on a withdrawal rate, but at round numbers here, 5% of $500,000 is $25,000 a year, about $2,000 a month. Then I take the average Social Security payment, which is about $2,000 a month for folks at 67. It’s obviously less than that. It’s more like $1,400 if you take it early.

Wes Moss [00:21:18]: That’s why it’s better to wait a little longer if this is the situation that you’re in. But imagine if you have 2 of you making $2,000 in Social Security. So you’ve got $2,000 plus $2,000. And then again, you can make the argument, not everybody’s going to have that amount, maybe less, but let’s say $2,000, $2,000, and Social Security 1, Social Security 2, and $2,000 a month from the assets. Now, we’re at $6,000 a month, or a little over $70,000 a year. And if we can get there and have no mortgage, oh, it’s very possible and very likely. So, I think the good news is that it’s possible. The big variables that we went over today are things to think about if you, if you may end up in this situation as you’re eyeing your early to mid-60s.

Christa DiBiase [00:22:10]: Okay. We’ll go to some questions. Steven in New York says, I’ve always been interested in personal finance and I love helping out friends and family with the basics of investing and budgeting. I’ve always had the idea of becoming a financial advisor one day, either as a side job or post, ideally, early retirement. I have a full-time job, but is there something you think I should do or can do now? Should I start studying and working towards the CPA exam? Or is that something that I should consider when I’m fully in it? And I think maybe, you think CPA or CFP? I was kind of wondering if you met that.

Wes Moss [00:22:45]: Uh, well, you could, you could do either. I’d say CFP would be, would be better.

Christa DiBiase [00:22:50]: You’re right. Okay. So this is Steven again, and he says, for background, I’m in my mid-40s.

Wes Moss [00:22:56]: Steven, there are a couple of different ways to look at this. Depends on how much of a gradual transition from your current career. I mean, I, for, I don’t know what you do. Uh, maybe you’re a teacher or an engineer or any sort of other career, it is pretty tough to be able to go study for the CFP, pass the CFP. And then the big catch on that is that you can’t really, quote, be a CFP until you put in a lot of hours. You have to have something like 6,000 hours, I want to say. Mm-hmm. But if you were— and I’ve talked about this shortage I was looking at the McKinsey study about financial advisors.

Wes Moss [00:23:34]: The real shortage, it’s a projected shortage over the next several years. It’s that because so many advisors are in their— there are baby boomers of retirement age, there is a projected 100,000 less financial advisors over the next 5 to 10 years than are needed.

Christa DiBiase [00:23:56]: Hmm. Wow.

Wes Moss [00:23:57]: So, Steven, the industry needs you. So you have a less supply of advisors, and then you have more demand of more and more people in America are seeking financial advice. A, we’re a wealthier country than we’ve ever been, and there’s more and more people getting to the point where they’re saying, hey, I’d like some help. So I think a reasonable path— and 40 is still super young. I’ve known many people that are in their 40s and later that, that started, went from engineers or teachers by, uh, um, marine biologists that have transitioned to becoming advisors.

Christa DiBiase [00:24:30]: Wow.

Wes Moss [00:24:31]: And the radio producers who have gone from radio production to becoming financial advisors. And it just takes some time, but it’s a nice gradual— you can do this gradually. So you, and you have to enroll in a program. That’s the other thing that makes it— you gotta enroll in a CFP program. that allows you to then take the test. Of course, that’s going to take a while to study. And then once you have that though, I bet you, you, if you applied for 10 jobs, even part-time, I bet you get 9 out of 10 of those jobs. If you are somebody who’s already passed the CFA, you won’t be able to use it right away.

Christa DiBiase [00:25:11]: Mm-hmm.

Wes Moss [00:25:11]: But you’re, you’re a zero risk for an employer because all you have to do is put your hours in and then you can then you will be able to use it. And that’s a huge leg up. So that’s how I would, I would do it.

Christa DiBiase [00:25:23]: Okay. I would also recommend, as I always do for any career change for anybody, is do some informational interviews, sit down with some CFPs and talk to them about what their day-to-day work is like and things like that, just to get more of a sense before you commit financially to studying it. I would

Wes Moss [00:25:39]: agree. Talk to many, many firms. Okay.

Christa DiBiase [00:25:41]: This is from James, in parentheses, Bond in Oregon. Should I ditch the bond funds?

Wes Moss [00:25:47]: Oh, that’s why. That’s even a funnier name. Very punny.

Christa DiBiase [00:25:49]: Very punny. That’s cool.

Wes Moss [00:25:51]: James Bond in Oregon.

Christa DiBiase [00:25:53]: Should I ditch the bond funds? I was hearing on another podcast why bond funds are inferior to owning specific individual bonds and why losses can occur. I’ve been a longtime holder of 3 Vanguard bond funds. They’ve all been in the doldrums since 2022, so I’ve got unrealized losses of 6 to 12%. Would I be better off exchanging out of those into something else at this point? They make up less than 10% of my portfolio, and I’ve got other dry powder like money market CDs and I bonds.

Wes Moss [00:26:26]: James Bond in Oregon, if you’re going to continue to maintain dry powder and you want flexibility, then you— it’s always about where are we starting? Just like any investment, it’s really about where are we starting today moving forward. And what you see on a statement, if you have mutual funds, first of all, you’re not seeing the interest that you’ve collected. So you may have an unrealized loss, but you’ve probably made some money if you were to count all the interest you’ve gotten over those years. So I think sometimes mutual funds paint a more dour picture than what’s really happened because you don’t really— you’ve very often you don’t see the income that you’ve gotten. So they probably haven’t been as bad as they might look, number one. Number two, it’s all about where rates are today moving forward. So depending on when you listen to this particular podcast, rates change every single day, just like the stock market does. Right.

Wes Moss [00:27:28]: If you’re a bond investor today and the 10-year Treasury’s at 5% or 5.25%, then there’s a very high likelihood that you make around 4 to 5% per year over the next several years in many of the different total bond market funds. So just because they haven’t been great because rates were lower and went and normalized doesn’t mean they won’t be pretty good moving forward. So I would just, I wouldn’t be ditching bond funds, especially today. The next piece of the equation is that rather sure, individual bonds can be very good and I own some individual bonds. I really like that. What is in the middle between a total market bond fund and an individual bond? A target bond fund or an ETF. So there are ETFs that give you a specific year of maturity, get lots of diversification within the ETF. You get to pick your year and build a bond ladder that way.

Wes Moss [00:28:26]: Super low cost, flexible way to do it.

Christa DiBiase [00:28:28]: Okay. Cath, the Curious Kathy in Washington It says, Wes mentioned this order for withdrawing assets in retirement. 1, brokerage account. 2, traditional retirement account. And 3, Roth retirement account. Wouldn’t it make more sense to withdraw from the traditional retirement account first, keeping withdrawals low enough to stay at the 12% tax bracket or lower, and then withdraw from brokerage accounts, or even stay within the 22% bracket with withdrawals? By minimizing brokerage account withdrawals, there would be more of a chance of passing on stocks to heirs with a step-up in basis.

Wes Moss [00:29:05]: Kathy, you’re thinking about this the right way. And I guess the conventional wisdom is this order: brokerage, IRA, then Roth. So if you have to do a simple rule of thumb, and thumbs are meant to be non-precise, then that is the general order. But the way you’re thinking about it is the right way to think about it. In practice or real life, there’s usually a combination happening of all 3. Now, most likely in the early years, it is brokerage and IRA. And yes, you manage your IRA withdrawals to what level may be comfortable for you. So if you want to stay in the 12 bracket, and that means you can only pull out— that you could pull out $2K a month from the IRA and you’re still in the 12 bracket, and then another $1,000, $2,000 from the brokerage account, and that gets you to your spending while keeping your overall marginal tax rate at a comfortable level.

Wes Moss [00:30:05]: That’s how it works in practice. So I know we, we love rules of thumb and I talk about them, but they are the starting point. The nuance and real-world application is usually a combination of these accounts, and you’re thinking about it the right way.

Christa DiBiase [00:30:20]: Scott in Georgia says, with RMDs occurring later in your lifespan, why do advisors recommend you spend brokerage money or HERO accounts first? I thought the order of spending was brokerage, traditional, and then Roth. Should this be reversed to avoid RMDs?

Wes Moss [00:30:36]: Scott, um, that is the order. It’s brokerage account, then IRA, then Roth. You’re saying, why not do Roth first? You’re trying to flip it? Then IRA, then brokerage?

Christa DiBiase [00:30:50]: He’s saying brokerage. He thought that it should be brokerage, traditional, and then Roth. And then he’s saying, should this be reversed to avoid RMDs?

Wes Moss [00:31:00]: No, because it doesn’t eliminate your RMDs. If you take your Roth money out over the first 10 years, then your IRA is still growing. And then you get to 73 or 75, and now your RMD is even bigger. And then you get to brokerage, which at that point may be even more highly appreciated. And then everything you’re taking out might be more long-term capital gain. While if you do that early, you may be able to manage your taxes better in the brokerage, you are reducing your IRA as you’re spending it. And then you ultimately get to the Roth, which is the most powerful account because it’s in the crockpot that allows money to come out tax-free. So, no, the, the traditional way to think about that, it’s not perfect for everybody.

Wes Moss [00:31:45]: There are nuances to it, but that is the— Right general order. I would not be flipping it upside down. Chris, I love having you here. I love these questions. So thank you as always for being in studio. You can find me throughout the week. We’re at yourwealth.com. That’s Y-O-U-R, yourwealth.com.

Wes Moss [00:32:04]: Have a wonderful rest of your day.

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