Prices Keep Rising – Make Sure Your Money Rises With Them

You wake up every day, check your bank account on your phone maybe, and you see all your money sitting there just as it was the day before. How do you feel? Pretty good, right? That number hasn't moved. It's exactly where you left it. Safe. Here's the problem. That money is slowly disappearing, even though you can't tell by just looking at your banking app. This is because every single day, the purchasing power of that money is quietly shrinking. The things you will actually buy one day with those dollars— groceries, gas, insurance, healthcare— are getting more expensive, but your balance stays the same. So it feels fine. However, it's not fine. That's inflation. And most people will go their entire lives without sitting down and doing the math on what it actually does to their money over 20 or 30 years, and take it seriously because we're too busy watching Netflix, and wasting time wondering how our neighbor could afford that nice new car.

Today, we're explaining the two best, and in my opinion, the most effortless ways to fight back against inflation to make sure that your money keeps up with rising prices. Because let's be honest, they're never going to start trending backward.

00:01:40
Hello and welcome to Retired-ish. I'm your host, Cameron Valadez, certified financial planner and enrolled agent, and founder of Planable Wealth. This podcast is for people who are in or approaching retirement, and they want the real story about their money. No fluff, no filler, no financial media BS, just what actually matters and why. And this episode is about inflation. And I know what some of you are already thinking: inflation? Like, that's, that's a snooze fest topic, and you've talked about it 100 times before. A lot of financial podcasts, blogs, financial TV, etc., treat it that way, kind of this boring topic. They'll give you the 60-second economic textbook definition and make you feel like the only solution to rising prices is to get a different career that offers you more pay, or if you're retired, go back to work. And while both of those are definitely viable solutions, we're not doing that today.

00:02:41
Here's what we're going to cover. First, why beating inflation matters more than most people realize, which is essentially because the compounding effect of inflation over a 25 to 30 year retirement is one of the single most underestimated threats to your financial independence. Then we're going to talk through what I believe are the two best and most effortless inflation hedges available to most individuals and families, and those are owning a home with a fixed-rate mortgage, or just owning a home outright and maintaining an investment and/or retirement portfolio of primarily equities. In other words, stocks.

00:03:27
Let's start with the basics, but I'm going to make this hurt a little bit in a productive way. Over the long run, meaning decades, the average annual inflation rate in the United States based on CPI data going back to 1914 is approximately 3.3%. Now, the Federal Reserve has a target where they want inflation, and currently, that is at around 2%, and we'll sometimes hear that cited as the standard. By the way, the Federal Reserve is just the institution that controls interest rates and manages the overall health of our financial system in the United States. But in reality, across more than a century of data that we have, we've averaged closer to about 3% inflation. So that's the number I want you to carry with you through this episode as a minimum for your own planning. So, absolutely feel free to use a higher number if you want to be more conservative.

00:04:27
Now, 3% per year doesn't sound like much at first, but what happens when you let it compound over a 20 to 30-year retirement? Well, here's a rule of thumb. Divide the number 72 by whatever inflation rate you want to use, and you get roughly the number of years that it takes for your purchasing power to be cut in half. At 3% inflation, your dollar's purchasing power is cut in half in approximately 24 years. At 4% inflation, you're looking at roughly 18 years. Let me put a real number on that. Let's say that you retire with $1 million plus. Could be a million, could be 2, 5, whatever. You feel good about that, and you should. It likely took you decades of hard work to build a 2-comma nest egg. But if inflation runs at 3% over the course of your retirement and you're not investing that money in a way that allows you to outpace it, in about 24 years, that million dollars will only have the purchasing power of $500,000 in today's terms, meaning everything that costs $100 today will cost roughly $200 at that time. So your money hasn't gone anywhere, but the world has become twice as expensive. Again, at a 4% inflation rate, and we've seen inflation run well above even 4% for extended periods, that halving of your money happens in only 18 years. So that is a potential planning failure that can largely be avoided. And we're gonna talk about here shortly, how we can do that.

00:06:10
One important thing I want to acknowledge upfront, your personal inflation rate is not the same as the headline CPI number you see on the news or even the 3 to 4% figure that I just gave you. Inflation is unique to each person based on what they actually spend money on and where they are in life. Someone who is still working and receiving discretionary bonuses or has contractual pay increases is in a very different position than someone who retired at 62 and is living primarily on a pension with maybe a 2% cost of living adjustment. The person with the growing income has a natural buffer. The person on a fixed income or close to it is fighting a slower battle against something they can't see or feel on a day-to-day basis. However, many people nowadays experience both of these situations throughout their lives. They just experience them at different times.

00:07:09
Before we get into my inflation-fighting tips, I want to come back to that bank account example from the beginning because I have this conversation, or at least I find myself having this conversation, all the time with prospective clients. Someone will have, let's say, a few hundred thousand dollars and sometimes more sitting in a savings account or, like a money market account, a CD, maybe earning some modest amount of interest or maybe even nothing. Usually, that is the case. They look at it every day, and they feel nice and cozy, which is totally understandable. I get it. The big number is, it's always there, and it will be years from now if not spent, you know you have that safety net. But here's the thing, the number simply being there is not the same as the value being there.

00:07:57
Your bank statement will show you, let's say, $300,000, whether that $300,000 buys what it can today or half of what it buys today in the future. The statement doesn't adjust for that sort of thing. Of course, the app doesn't adjust for that either. You have to adjust for it. And the overwhelming majority of people don't. And this is financial suicide. And this is especially true with retirement accounts. If you've accumulated a vast majority of your nest egg inside of a pre-tax retirement account like an IRA or a 401(k), then not only are you fighting inflation, but you're also going to be fighting taxation as well. Inflation will eat into the value just as it does with the money in a bank account, but when you withdraw the money from the retirement account, you're also going to be subject to taxation on every dollar, not just the earnings. It may even cause other forms of additional taxation that have nothing to do with the account itself. Crazy. Yes, I know. But that's our tax code. It's true. When you look at a statement of your retirement account, and you see your big 6, 7, or maybe even 8-figure balance, it's actually not even close to that number by the time it's cold, hard cash in your hand, and you are able to spend it on something. This is one of those hidden realities about money. Inflation is intuitive enough that everybody nods in understanding when you explain it for the most part, but almost nobody actually runs the numbers to understand the impact on their own life, or they just kind of push it to the side as something that doesn't really exist or doesn't matter. So we need to start taking inflation more seriously.

00:09:43
Let's talk about the first inflation hedge. This one surprises people because it's simply your house. And now I want to be precise about what I'm saying here because the nuances matter. I'm not telling you that buying a home is a slam dunk investment. In fact, I don't consider your home an investment at all in the true financial sense. I'm not telling you that after you add up every dollar you've spent on property taxes, homeowner's insurance, repairs, the new roof, the new AC units, landscaping, vinyl fence, the kitchen renovation that you half regret, that you're going to sit down and calculate some incredible rate of return still on your home because you're probably not. Over the entire time period that you've owned your home, it may have gone up in value substantially, but you have very likely lost money on it overall because of those things I just mentioned. And that's okay because that's not what I want you to get out of this.

00:10:34
Here's what I want you to know. A home that you live in with a fixed-rate mortgage is one of the most powerful inflation hedges that most middle-class and upper-middle-class households will ever have. And I'm not saying that if you buy a home, you must use leverage and get a mortgage. I'm simply saying that if you are going to get a mortgage, having a fixed-rate mortgage is likely to be your best bet in the long run when it comes to fighting inflation. When you take out a 30-year or 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, that principal and interest payment is fixed for the life of the loan, period. Your lender can't come back to you in year 12 and say, "Hey, inflation's running a little hot, so we're going to increase your payment.” It doesn't work that way. The number is set in stone the day you close, unless you refinance or something down the road.

00:11:23
Now think about what happens over time if you're still working or earning an income. Wages historically have risen with inflation. They don't necessarily rise at the same rate, but they usually rise in tandem. Your employer typically gives you some sort of cost-of-living adjustment. You get promoted, you negotiate a raise, they start offering you benefits like healthcare, whatever. If you're self-employed, you grow your business hopefully over time and earn more. Whatever the mechanism, over the long run, wages have broadly kept up with inflation. Here's the dynamic at play. Your income is likely going up over time. Your mortgage payment is not. One of the largest fixed expenses in your budget is becoming, in real terms, meaning after the effects of inflation, smaller every single year. And that is a meaningful advantage. Think about it this way. Let's say your mortgage payment today is $2,500 a month. That feels like a lot. In 15 years, at 3% annual wage inflation, you'd be earning roughly 56% more than you do today in nominal terms. That same $2,500 payment now represents a much smaller slice of your income than it did on day one. You got a pay raise relative to your housing cost every year without doing anything.

00:12:51
The second piece to this, over the long run, nominal home prices in the United States have risen pretty significantly. To put a real number on this, let's use data from the Census Bureau. In 1972, the median price of a new home in the United States was approximately $27,500. In 2024, the median price of a new home was approximately $420,000. That is roughly a 15-fold increase in nominal terms over 52 years. Does that mean home prices provide a better return than, let's say, stocks? No. And we'll get to that when you adjust for inflation. And for those of you that are curious, I'm going to use Robert Shiller's home price database. This is data that goes back to the late 1800s. The real inflation-adjusted appreciation in home values over the long run is much more modest. Shiller's data shows that in real terms, homes have appreciated, but not dramatically. The nominal gains look impressive, largely because inflation itself has made everything more expensive over time. So what the data also tells us is that over high inflationary periods, home prices have historically risen alongside general price levels. So during the inflationary 1970s, Shiller's inflation-adjusted price index actually ticked upward, meaning home prices were keeping pace with or slightly outpacing inflation in real terms during one of the worst inflationary decades in modern U.S. history. That's the behavior you want from a hedge. When the cost of living rises, your asset's value is rising with it. Preferably, your income rises alongside it, but if anything, you want the value of your assets to also rise. You don't want to be going backward.

00:14:50
Now, let me tackle some potential objections to this because you've probably heard them, or maybe you have these objections yourself. And the first one is, hey, but homeownership is expensive. Taxes, insurance, maintenance, it all goes up. Yes, it does. Property taxes and homeowners' insurance will generally increase over time. You'll have unexpected expenses. Of course, AC units break. Like I said, roofs age, pipes leak, you name it. I'm not going to pretend that those costs don't exist. They do. They are real. But, and this is important, think of those costs as the cost of getting to live in your home. Your home is not purely an investment. It's your home. You are deriving enormous value from it every single day. Those are the costs of enjoying that value every day. When you frame it in that way, the question isn't, is my home a great investment? The question is, am I getting protection against inflation as part of the deal here? And the answer to that would be yes. When you look at your monthly budget— health insurance, groceries, gas, electric, utilities— you can effectively cross your mortgage payment off of the list of things that you need to worry about inflating into unaffordability land. Okay, you've locked it in. Think of the property taxes, the insurance, and the maintenance as the cost of your lifestyle. Think of the mortgage as the thing that you've neutralized.

00:16:17
Another common objection: my home is illiquid. I can't spend it if prices go up. This again is absolutely true, and it's actually the biggest limitation of using home equity as a primary inflation hedge. If inflation rises sharply and your cost of living jumps, the equity in your house doesn't help you buy groceries or fill your gas tank, at least not without taking on a home equity loan, HELOC, or what have you, which actually costs you more money in the form of interest. This is precisely why homeownership alone is not enough. It's not the answer. It is one optional piece of the puzzle. The second piece, which is an investment portfolio that's made up of primarily equities, aka stocks, addresses exactly this part of the puzzle because an equity portfolio is, for the most part, fully liquid. You can actually spend from it without borrowing. And again, we'll get to that in a minute.

00:17:16
Third objection: What about a rental property? Is that an even better inflation hedge? It definitely can be, but it depends on several things, such as your management of the property, your luck with the tenants that you have in the property. You can raise rents over time, while generally speaking, the property value also increases over time. But here's the reality: rental properties are highly specific. and each can be very unique, and the math is often tighter than people realize. So let me give you a quick example. Let's say you have a rental property that brings in $3,000 a month in rent. Your property taxes are $6,500 a year. Your insurance runs another $2,000 a year. That's $8,500 per year in just those two costs. If they go up 2%, that's a $170 increase, $1,000 per year that you have to pay. If you raise your rent by 2%, you're collecting an extra $720 a year. So that part works out, right? Your income is rising over and above the inflated costs. Then you add the random expenses, the AC replacement, the water heater goes out, the tenant who trashed the unit, and you had to fix the walls and repaint and, you know, replace the appliances, whatever. That's where the math gets murky. Rental properties are not apples to apples to something like your own home, where you are the perfect tenant, or with owning a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks. Every property is different. Every investor is different. Costs are different. Every cash flow situation is unique on each property. Some own a property outright and paid cash for it. Some have it leveraged to the hilt. So that's going to change the cash flow dynamics. So it can work out well. It can also consume a lot of time, money, and energy to simply tread water against inflation, let alone outpace it. So I would give rental property a depends rather than a firm yes. Also, I definitely wouldn't lump it into the effortless class.

00:19:27
In summary, inflation typically causes home prices to rise over time, and in the process, it also slowly chisels away at the real cost of your fixed-rate debt or your mortgage. You borrowed money in today's dollars, you'll be paying it back in tomorrow's dollars—dollars that are worth less technically over time, which is actually a good thing for you, the borrower. The bank lent you, let's say, $400,000 in $2,024, and by 2040, you're paying back the same nominal dollars, but those dollars have less purchasing power. Meanwhile, your home is worth more in nominal terms, and your income has hopefully grown. That is a compounding advantage that most people don't consciously recognize as the inflation protection mechanism that it is. Your home isn't an investment per se; it's your home. But it happens to be a decent inflation hedge. And in that way, the two things are not mutually exclusive.

00:20:29
Okay, now on to our second inflation hedge, which is the best one in my opinion, since it's rather effortless. However, it's not necessarily easy. That is having a globally diversified investment portfolio of primarily stocks, which is the same thing as equity ownership in the world's greatest, most enduring businesses. The US stock market specifically has returned on average approximately 10.2% per year in nominal terms, which means before inflation, which also includes dividends since the year 1926. That's nearly 100 years of data covering the gamut of crises such as the Great Depression, World War II, the inflationary 1970s, the dot-com bubble, the financial crisis in '08, the global pandemic, and every disruptive and terrifying news story in between. And the long-run average keeps landing around 10%. In fact, as of late, the multi-decade average is actually creeping a little bit higher. Inflation over the same period has averaged approximately 3 to 3.3% per year, as I mentioned earlier. So, in real terms, meaning after we adjust for inflation, equities have returned roughly 7% per year. You are outpacing inflation by approximately 7 percentage points on an annual basis over the long run. That is not just keeping up with inflation; that is literally lapping it.

00:22:08
Let's just talk about what that means in practice. Healthcare inflation, which is a major concern for retirees, has historically run higher than the general Consumer Price Index number, which is that 3% or so. So healthcare inflation often falls in the 5 to 6% range annually over long periods of time. That's the average. An equity portfolio returning 7% above general inflation has more than enough headroom to absorb even healthcare inflation. So you're not just staying even with those rising healthcare costs. You're also building a buffer. You're building more discretionary dollars. You are earning enough above general inflation to also handle the categories that might inflate faster than the average. And healthcare is not the only one. You know, occasionally we get gas prices that inflate faster, housing costs might inflate faster, you name it. And the best part about it is this method, so to speak, takes relatively little effort on your end to access those returns. But— and I want to be careful here because I've said this before on this podcast— relatively little effort does not mean easy. There is a distinction. If successful long-term investing in the stock market were truly easy, if it required nothing of the investor mentally or emotionally, then virtually everyone you know, including yourself, would be doing it, and everyone would be wealthy. We know that's not the case, obviously. The discipline that is required can be extreme at times, especially the more money you have. Because the more dramatic the ups and downs that you experience, the bigger dollar amounts that are moving, and the more emotional that experience becomes. We'll come back to that.

0:24:03
I want to go one level deeper here because understanding why this works makes it a lot easier to stay the course when either the US or the international stock markets get ugly. When you invest in the stock market, you are not just buying a ticker symbol that you see on TV or on your stock app. You are buying an ownership stake in an actual operating company or companies, real businesses with real employees and executives who show up every single day with one primary objective, and that is to make this company more successful than it was yesterday. And that's not an abstraction. The people working at these companies from the floor-level employees all the way up to the C-suite, to the board, they are going to work to win and advance in their own personal lives. Their job is to make decisions day after day that move the business forward, grow the revenue, manage costs, expand into new markets, develop new products, and ultimately generate more value for shareholders. That is the mission, explicitly or implicitly, for every publicly traded company of any significance. The market has two categories for those companies: ones that keep growing and rewarding shareholders, and ones that eventually fail to do so and they get replaced, or they go out of business. That is the beautiful simplicity of how a market-cap-weighted index works over time. So you might be wondering, what in the heck is that? Essentially, when you are looking at the financial news or again at your stock app, and you see the S&P 500, for example, that is a market-cap-weighted index. And a lot of people will look at that as a representation of the US stock market. So that is one example of an index, and that specific one is market-cap-weighted. The way that works is the winners grow, and they get weighted more heavily in the index. So the more successful a company, the bigger they grow, they end up taking up more of that index, potentially your portfolio as well, depending on whether or not you own a product that mimics those indexes like an index fund or maybe an exchange-traded fund of some sort. The losers, they shrink. And eventually they get replaced. So the index is sort of a self-cleaning mechanism.

00:26:35
Now, how do the winners reward the shareholders like yourself? Well, they can in a few ways. One is they can grow their earnings, and that's the major one. Their profits get bigger over time, which drives the stock price higher. They can pay dividends, which is a direct cash distribution back to you, the shareholder, and they can execute what are called stock buybacks, which means they can purchase their own shares in the company, which increases the value of shares that remain. Crucially, history has shown that corporations in the aggregate have grown their earnings and dividends at a significantly higher rate than the average rate of inflation, even though, along the way, there are many companies that have gone out of business. So, not just keeping pace with inflation, but beating it materially and fairly consistently over a very long time horizon. That is what 7% annual real returns means in practice. The companies you own are raising prices, expanding margins, and compounding their earnings well above the rate at which the cost of a dozen eggs goes up or a gallon of gas. And if you own these companies, if you have some equity ownership, you can benefit from that.

00:27:54
In addition, your portfolio is a wonderful source of liquidity and flexibility compared to other types of investments because of the fact that when you invest in the stock market, you are investing in publicly traded companies, and there's almost always a willing buyer and a seller for a transaction. And the transaction itself of buying or selling stock nowadays is incredibly inexpensive. This means that even if the stock market is not rising at the same exact time that you are experiencing inflation in your personal life, you may still live off of your stock portfolio and temporarily increase your withdrawals to help you keep up with inflation and your expenses in real time. And you don't have to borrow to do it. You don't need to pay the money back. You don't need to pay interest, and you don't need to wait to find a buyer. Of course, you don't need to try and temporarily increase your rent on your tenant while gas prices are elevated for the next 5 months, right? How unrealistic would that be? This flexibility is an underappreciated perk, in my opinion. And you can even have a degree of control over the taxes that you pay. And when you pay them, if you do some careful planning. So that's kind of the beauty of using an equity portfolio to help you do your retirement planning.

00:29:21
Now, I want to revisit the short-term inflation issue that I pointed out earlier because there's an important nuance here that doesn't get discussed enough. I mentioned earlier that when inflation unexpectedly spikes very sharply in the short term, an equity portfolio isn't necessarily going to save you in that moment. That, that is true. In fact, equities can take a serious hit when inflation runs hot unexpectedly because rising inflation usually brings rising interest rates, which increases the discount rate applied to future earnings of the companies that you're investing in, which can push stock valuations and prices down. So we lived through a perfect example of this in 2022. In the short run, equities are not a perfect hedge against an inflation spike, but to be honest, there's not much that is.

00:30:17
Here's what I want you to understand about the long-run picture. This is something most people don't even think about. When inflation is low, stock prices tend to rise higher than their long-run average, sometimes much higher. In these periods of low inflation and low interest rates, companies can borrow cheaply, they can expand aggressively, and therefore stock valuations or prices usually expand alongside their increased earnings, meaning stock prices generally go up. The market tends to run hotter than its historical average in those environments. So what's actually happening over the full cycle is this. The extra return you get in these low inflation years is, in part, making up for the years where equities aren't covering you against inflation. When you get these short-term temporary spikes, it's not a constant. It's a long-run average that balances out over time. Some years contributing more than their fair share, and some years contributing less. This is exactly why being a true long-term investor matters more than almost anything else in this conversation. And I don't mean just calling yourself a long-term investor when times are good, but being one when things are bad as well. When inflation is running hot, the headlines are terrible, when your portfolio is down, and it feels like everything's falling apart, that is when the long-term investor has to make good decisions and not let a wave of emotions take over. And that's the hard part with investing in the stock market, because the compounding can only work if you remain invested. The moment you panic, and you move to cash, or you do the opposite, and you go chasing this year's hot investment, you're going to either lock in losses or you're going to miss the recovery, or you're going to buy a future loser more often than not. And so you're going to hand inflation an easy victory.

00:32:16
As I've said before on this podcast, successful investing is not easy. However, the barrier to entry to access the returns of the stock market is low, meaning it's easy to just start investing. But the emotional discipline to do nothing during a crisis when 6 to 7 figures disappears off your investment statement, that's where most people fail. If you can master that, the math works in your favor over the long run. If you can't, there's no strategy in the world that's going to save you. At the end of the day, the only way to truly lose out to inflation permanently is by not investing at all. Cash sitting in a bank account earning 1 to 3% before taxes, while inflation runs on average at 3%, is a guaranteed loss in real terms every single year. It's quietly compounding against you. This is not a risk. It's, it's a certainty. Stocks carry short-term risk, but they also carry a long-term track record that over 100 years of data has never failed to ultimately outpace inflation by a wide margin. So pick your risk wisely because there is no such thing as no risk, even with a bank account.

00:33:34
Here's the beautiful thing about combining a fixed-rate mortgage with an equity portfolio. They cover different parts of your financial life. And the gaps in one are covered by the other. Your mortgage is locked. You've eliminated housing as an inflation variable from your monthly cash flow. This is usually the single largest expense in most budgets other than taxes, and it's neutralized. Your equity portfolio is liquid, and it's growing faster than inflation over time. When gas goes up, when groceries go up, when health insurance premiums go up, you can draw from your portfolio to cover those increases in retirement if your other income sources aren't growing at the same rate. You don't have to sell the house, you don't have to take out a loan, you don't necessarily need to go back to work or get a higher-paying job. You tap the account that's been quietly outpacing inflation for decades. It is a tool. And if you are still working and have wage increases, or retired and receive Social Security cost-of-living adjustments or pension cost-of-living adjustments, those add another layer of protection. Even if Social Security cost-of-living adjustments aren't enough by themselves, they can provide a floor combined with a growing equity portfolio and a fixed housing payment or even a paid-off home. You have a structure that is designed to let you age through retirement without your purchasing power just collapsing on top of you.

00:35:02
Let me also say this about those of you who might be sitting on a ton of cash, and maybe it's not you, but it might even be your elderly parents. Cash is inflation's easiest victim. If you have more sitting in a savings account, money market, or CD than you realistically need for liquidity and emergencies in the short term, and I mean like 6 to 12 months worth of expenses, maybe a bit more for peace of mind or an upcoming purchase, the rest should be working for you. Sitting on half a million dollars in cash because it feels safe is allowing inflation to quietly steal from you in a way your bank statement will never show you. Don't let that happen.

00:35:48
Let's tie this all together with some core takeaways from the episode. Inflation should not be brushed to the side as just some term that you learned about in economics class. It's a very specific, very personal threat to your ability to afford your life over the course of a 25 to 30-year retirement. When you're younger and you're in your peak earning years, you don't worry about it so much because your income tends to go up over time. But once you think about retiring, you quickly will notice how big of a problem it can be. At 3% inflation, your purchasing power is cut in half in around 24 years. At 4%, it's around 18 years. If you retire today with $1 million and you're not outpacing inflation, that million will only carry the purchasing power of $500,000 before you've finished your retirement. In my opinion, the two most effortless hedges other than earning more money are: one, a home with a fixed-rate mortgage, because home prices have historically risen with inflation over the long run. Meanwhile, your fixed payment doesn't change while your income grows. You've effectively locked one of your largest expenses out of the inflation equation for the life of the loan. Just don't expect it to replace the need for a liquid growing asset because it can't. Number 2, a broadly diversified equity portfolio. Stocks have returned approximately 10% per year on average since 1926. Inflation has averaged roughly 3%, so that is a 7% real return, which is more than enough to outpace not just general inflation, but faster-moving categories like healthcare. It's liquid, you can spend it when you need to, and it's powered by real companies run by real people going to work every day to grow earnings and reward shareholders at a rate that history consistently shows outpaces inflation over the long run. It's not easy to stay the course, but the math, if you let it work, is enormously in your favor. So, put together a fixed housing payment that shrinks in real terms every single year and an equity portfolio that compounds well above inflation can help form the foundation of a financially resilient retirement. And the only way to truly lose out to inflation is to not invest at all. So let's not do that.

00:38:11
That does it for today's episode. If you find the topics discussed in today's show actionable and insightful, do yourself a favor, subscribe to or follow the show on your podcast app. That way, you can get alerts each time a new episode drops. Also, be sure to check out our free Retired-ish newsletter to get more useful information and content on retirement planning, investments, taxes once a month straight to your inbox. The newsletter, we often dive deeper into the topics discussed on the show, as well as useful guides and charts available for download. As always, you can find the links to the resources we have provided in the episode description right there on your podcast app, or you can head over to RetiredishPodcast.com/94. Thanks again for tuning in and following along. See you next time on Retired-ish.

00:39:18 Disclosures
Cameron Valadez is a registered representative with, and securities and advisory services are offered through LPL Financial, a Registered Investment Advisor, Member FINRA/SIPC. Neither LPL Financial nor its registered representatives offer tax or legal advice. Always consult a qualified tax advisor for information as to how taxes may affect your particular situation. The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All investing involves risk, including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss. Dividend payments are not guaranteed and may be reduced or eliminated at any time by the company.​ This information is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized tax advice. We suggest that you discuss your specific tax issues with a qualified tax advisor. Tax and accounting-related services offered through Plan-It Business Services DBA Planable Wealth. Plan-It Business Services is a separate legal entity and not affiliated with LPL Financial. LPL Financial does not offer tax advice or tax and accounting-related services.