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How Can I Hedge Falling Housing Prices?


Chapters

0:0 Intro
5:43 Hedging the price of your home.
9:32 De-risking your portfolio.
13:29 The New Zealand housing market.
17:36 investing in international stocks.
23:12 Bear market allocations.

Transcript

Welcome back to Portfolio Rescue. Today's show is sponsored by Innovator ETFs. Innovator actually has some ETFs that might be appealing for the current market. So they have these buffer ETFs, Duncan. And what they do is they allow you to pick a downside protection, and then it comes with a cap on the upside.

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So it doesn't mean you know exactly what the return is going to be, because the market is still uncertain, but you can essentially put a range on your returns to know, "I'm protected to this amount, and I'm also capped to this amount on the upside." So they call them defined outcomes, so you actually know ahead of time.

Whatever the stock market does, you kind of have a sense of what your losses and gains could be. So to learn more, go to Innovator ETFs, or actually search through Animal Spirits Archive and listen to Michael and I discuss their strategies with their CEO and founder, Bruce Bond. Also, double promo there, they're also an official sponsor of Future Proof Festival.

Ah yeah, so it'll be out there in September, looking forward to that. So I'm coming to you live today from Chicago, and if we're basing a recession indicator on the number of beers people drink at a Cubs game, I still say no recession. But maybe the opposite is true, that people just drink more when things are getting bad.

What's a beer at a Cubs game, like $12, $14? Actually, inflation there was already really high. Like a normal New York City beer, basically. So this is a show where we allow the audience to dictate what we're going to talk about every week, right? And this week, people want to talk about the housing market.

So we have a collection of your questions, and they build up over time, but we also separate out what are the new questions every week. And this week, every single new question was about the housing market. So we're going to get into some questions on that, but I just want to talk about this a little bit before we get into it, because the housing market has just utterly fascinated me right now.

So coming into the year, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 3%, call it. Less than six months later, this week I saw it quoted by some sources 6.3%. This is just an insanely fast move, and probably one of the most important borrowing rates for the majority of people that are consuming debt.

So let's look at an example to show the impact of what this means, a more than doubling of rates. So I looked at some different housing prices here, from 300 up to 700,000, and I looked at the monthly payment at 3%, again, less than six months ago, and the monthly payment at 6.3%.

You can see it ranges from an increase of $500 to $1,200 a month, which is like a 47% increase. A year, we're talking like more than $6,000 at the low end, or $14,000 or $15,000 at the high end, in terms of an increase. So let's think about this another way.

The median existing home price in January 2021 was like $313,000, like median amount. The mortgage rate at that point was 2.7%. Let's say you do a 10% down payment. I kind of used that in the other example as well. That's like an $1,100 monthly payment. Now the median existing home price is closer to $400,000, the mortgage rate, again, 6.3%.

Put 10% down, we're talking $2,200. So in a little less than 18 months, the monthly payment has effectively doubled, and to make these monthly payments equal, with rates staying at 6.3%, that price would have to fall 45%. I mean, so let's say you bought a house for $500,000 three years ago, and you got a 3% mortgage, and you put, again, your 10% down.

Your monthly payment at that point would be like $1,900. You can do a chart off, John. I don't need this one anymore. Now let's say you're forced to move and get a new job, and you say, "You know what? I want to keep that same $1,900 payment. What can I afford at a 6.3% mortgage that goes from a $500,000 house at 3% to a $340,000 house?" So people didn't really have time to acclimate to this.

It wasn't like a slow, stair-step approach to go up. It just, it shot up. I guess there was someone talking, we talked about Animal Spirits this week, 60 basis points in two days for mortgage rates. This has basically never happened this fast, where mortgage rates have doubled. So I'm just going to be fascinated to see what happens.

Will people with 3% mortgages just simply never move? Will, like, buyers decide to say, "No, thank you"? Will the housing market, like, grind to a halt? I honestly don't know. I mean, obviously people still need to buy a home if they want to settle down and have a family and own their own place and move for a job or whatever the reason.

But I'm just fascinated to see what will happen here, because I don't think people thought through the ramifications, and Powell talked about it a little bit at his press conference yesterday for the Fed, and how we need to slow the housing market. But this is, to me, kind of a careful what you wish for situation.

I think this is going to be not great. Yeah, it's all relative to you, right? Because like you're saying, you know, rent is continuing to go up too, right? So yeah, I mean, housing has gone up and buying a house is more, you know, unaffordable than in a long time.

But yeah, if your rent is also skyrocketing, then yeah, I guess it's kind of a relative thing. Yeah. We've got a few questions on that. Remember, if you have a question, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. We're going to get into some questions like that. Someone in the chat asked where I am. I am in the West Loop in Chicago.

So got the L train behind me, right? It's a, by the way, one of the best summer cities in the country, easily, Chicago is just gorgeous. All right. Let's do first question. Yeah, I love the architecture there, especially the Hancock building. That's a cool building. Okay. Here's our first question, or yeah, here's our next question.

Is there a way to hedge the price of my home? It has appreciated a lot over the past couple of years. And my hunch is that its value will pull back in the coming months. I had a similar hunch about interest rates a year ago, and there are products, TBT, I don't know what that is, to bet on treasury selling off.

This year, the no-brainer trade is housing prices dropping. How do I play it? All right. So the TBT is you could do like an inverse treasuries. If you thought rates are going to rise, treasuries are going to go down, you could bet against them. There really aren't many products like this for housing.

And obviously, based on the examples that I just gave, maybe some people think, well, housing prices are going to have to fall. I still don't know if that's a foregone conclusion. It's certainly a possibility. I do think some people are just going to say, I'm not putting my house up for sale, and it's just going to be like this.

The supply is going to be really low. So maybe you could see some of the ones that sell go for lower prices. And I would be shocked if we didn't see a ton of price cuts in the months and weeks ahead from people saying, listen, it's got to be lower because my mortgage rates are higher.

But does that mean that nationwide housing prices have to fall 10% or 15%? I don't know. It's possible. But I still think people could just sit it out. Well, let's say you're right. Housing prices fall 5% or 10% from here. Let's say, again, the median existing home price is $400,000.

We're talking $20,000 to $40,000 loss, right? You want to protect that. I'm going to ignore the big short type of trades where you buy credit defaults like Steve Eisemann or whatever. I'm sure you could come up with a bunch of sector bets that would maybe benefit if the housing market fell.

But I think timing this stuff is just as hard as figuring out the direction of the trade. You could be directionally right, but timing is wrong. So here's some simple hedges you could do. Right now, you could just take out a home equity on a credit and pull some of that off the table, right?

You're taking cash out. You're lowering your exposure to the housing market. You could put that money elsewhere and diversify. Now, obviously, borrowing rates for HELOCs are going to be much higher now. That stuff is going up. But that seems like a good way to diversify your personal balance sheet.

You could sell your home, unfortunately, as the examples I already gave. Downsizing might not help. You could say, "I'm going to downsize," but with mortgage rates double, downsizing might give you the same monthly payment as a more expensive home right now, which is kind of crazy. And obviously, as you mentioned, Dunkin' rents are rising.

So I think you could also say, "I'm going to pay my mortgage off as slowly as possible. I'm not going to make any extra payments. There's no reason for me to pay it off if I have this low mortgage rate." And finally, you could just do nothing, right? You could ride it out.

You don't have to be a hedge fund manager with your house, right? Just live in your home for more than five to seven years. Guess what? In that time, the price is probably going to be higher than it is today, and you don't have to think through that. So I wish I had a sexy answer here for how to hedge the housing market, but I think your own personal house, there's really not much you can do besides just have a longer time horizon.

And if there are some fluctuations in the next year or 18 months or 24 months, it's not going to impact you anyway because you're living there, right? It's not like you have to sell. And it's not like you see the price fluctuate every day like you do in the stock market.

So this is the kind of thing where I don't think you have to have an answer for this kind of thing. >> It also, it kind of reminds me of our question from last week about hedging medical costs for the future. Someone was asking if they should buy health care stocks to hedge against rising health care costs.

It's like, think about if you'd bought Zillow and a bunch of housing-related stocks to try to hedge the housing market. It just wouldn't have worked out very well, I guess. And that was like the opposite, where the housing market was doing great and you bought Zillow and like, hand up, I'm an idiot over here who did that, and it didn't work out.

So yeah, so that's the thing. You could be directionally right about the housing market going down and still not get the hedge right because the market doesn't react in the way that you think it will. All right, let's do another one. >> Okay. Up next, we have my wife and I are six and a half.

>> By the way, good fugitive joke in the chat here. >> Good fugitive joke? >> Well, because he was in Chicago on the train. Not bad. >> Yeah, that's an old one. I haven't seen that in forever. >> Yeah, good one. >> Okay, my wife and I are 68 and have been retired for 15 years.

We have a net worth of $6 million, of which about $4.4 million is liquid, and the remainder is equity in our two homes. We are both on Social Security of $44,000 per year combined, have zero debt, and spent about 2% of our portfolio last year. We have had a diversified portfolio and 60/40 asset allocation since we retired.

We're moderately aggressive investors and are both in good health. I would like to think we have another 20 years in retirement. Our required minimum distributions will be quite large when we hit 72, but we are maximizing our Roth conversions based on tax brackets and remaining in the lowest Medicare premium bracket.

My question is regarding our 60/40 asset allocation. As we continue to age, does it make sense to de-risk our portfolio by decreasing equity exposure since we don't have the years to recover from serious market downturns? We've been buying in the current down market, doing early Roth conversions and tax-loss harvesting.

There's a lot there. There's a lot there. Yeah. Well, first off, again, this is our weekly nicely done, right? This person seems to have their finances in order. I think many investment advisors would be salivating at numbers like these. I think a lot of people would offer you a solution saying, "Yeah, yeah.

You need to put your portfolio into this fund and that fund and that product, and here's the allocation you need, and look at how smart I am." With information like this, I have one simple question like, "What's the end goal here?" It's like a squishy question, but that's the right place to start because it's really impossible to offer investment advice without attaching it to your goals.

It's like, "What do you want to get out of your money?" You already said you don't spend that much. You're spending 2% a year, but do you plan on spending it all before you die? Do you want to give it away to charity? Do you have kids that you're looking for and offer an inheritance so maybe you could even make your portfolio riskier?

It sounds cliche to say it's really difficult to offer portfolio management to someone without understanding their risk profile and time horizon, but you can't just enter this stuff into a spreadsheet and spit out an allocation. Also, how much do you want to de-risk? John, throw up this first chart here.

This shows the difference between ... I did a globally diversified 60/40, 50/50, and 40/60 portfolio this year, and these are the drawdowns as of yesterday. You can see it's 18%, 17%, 16% call it. There's not much difference because bonds are selling off too. Now, let's do the next one, John.

This is obviously a little bit of a crazy market because bonds are falling. This is actually during the corona crash in March 2020. You can see there's a little bit more of a difference, so a 40/60 portfolio fell 15%, or 50/50 fell almost 18%, and then a 60/40 fell more than 20%.

You can see a little difference there. I think figuring out what de-risking means, how much is that going to help you and how much of that change is really going to ... I think to really de-risk and see a huge change, you're going to have a 20/80 or 30/70 kind of portfolio.

If that makes sense, fine, or do you want to just hold more cash to see you through this stuff? You said you're still buying. They seem to be handling the bear market okay. I just think you have to think through what are you trying to do here, and when is this money going to be spent, and then you can figure out, okay, does it really make sense to do?

Obviously, a lot of the target date funds, they do a glide path where they slowly de-risk over time. That certainly makes sense, but I think you have to think through what change does it actually make if I go from 60/40 to 40/60, or what can actually have a big impact on that returns, and what are you trying to get out of it?

Are you trying to reduce drawdowns? Are you trying to reduce volatility? I'd think of it through that way. Yeah. It sounds like, like you said, it sounds like they've done pretty well to date. Yeah. They're doing something right, I guess. Let's do another one. Okay. Up next, we have a question from someone from New Zealand, which immediately makes me think of "Fly the Conchords," which is one of my all-time favorite shows.

I can see that. I can see you liking that show, Duncan. I love that show. Yeah. I recently started watching "What We Do in the Shadows," which has some of the same people. So, good show. I'm 30 years old, living in New Zealand. The New Zealand housing market has taken a rocket during the pandemic.

I guess that's like a New Zealand phrase, taken a rocket during the pandemic. I'm going to steal that one. Yeah. I like that. The New Zealand housing market has taken a rocket during the pandemic and has an average house price of over $1 million across the country. I live in Auckland, where this is even higher.

The median salary is $70,000. My partner and I pull in roughly $170,000 to $190,000 annually. We rent, have approximately $70,000 to $80,000 of savings and assets, and save about $400 a week between us. Do we enjoy our very first overseas experience, get away for a month and reset mentally?

Do we improve our living conditions and buy some nicer furniture, eat out, go to gigs, and just enjoy living while slowly adding to savings? Do we tighten everything up, invest everything we can, and focus on buying a home over the next two years? Another option is to try to move to a cheaper city in New Zealand to buy a home for $700,000 but finding a good job in smaller cities may be difficult.

All right. If you think housing prices are crazy here, John, let's do a chart on of this is real housing prices versus real disposable income in New Zealand, and now let's show the US. Housing prices are in blue. Income is in red. You can see housing prices are far above disposable income.

Now, let's show the next one, John, to show the US. All right. I'm going to flip back a couple of times. New Zealand is just off the charts. The United States is actually real disposable income and real housing prices are pretty close to each other. In New Zealand, it's just off the chart.

I definitely feel for our New Zealand person here. Sometimes we have to shorten these questions because they give so much information. I actually said their rent is about $650 a month, so they're not paying a ton. I actually like the way that they're thinking here. It's like, do I put my life on hold financially and experience-wise and save a ton just so we can afford a house?

Or do we just ignore that? We don't have to buy a house because we feel peer pressure, and we can just enjoy the flexibility of renting. We can get a nice Airbnb every once in a while. We can travel overseas. We can get some nice furniture. We can go out to eat more.

I actually think that's not a bad way to think about this. Not everyone has to buy a home. It's not for everyone. Maybe instead of buying an expensive home, you travel more and you treat yourself better and calculate the difference between what you're paying in rent each year versus mortgage, insurance, taxes, and think about which scenario would make you happier.

Some people will still feel like saving for two years and buying a home and penny-pinching makes sense. But I think a lot of this depends on how much you really want to buy a house versus how much you think you have to buy a house because that's the next step and everyone else is doing it.

Especially in a place like that that's so expensive, I don't know, maybe resetting mentally and traveling overseas for the first time is gonna be more enjoyable for you than settling down and buying a house. But I think, again, I think a lot of people assume they have to buy a house because it's the next step or because everyone else did it and because it's the biggest investment you make.

But you don't have to. It's not for everyone. - Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, there's obviously a lot of variables there, but to me, yeah, the idea of getting to travel the world, that's something that you're gonna remember the rest of your life. And so, yeah, to me, that's the thing that's appealing to me out of those options.

But yeah, you also don't want to live in a place where you're miserable and you have neighbors who are super loud, keeping you up every night. So it's definitely, it's a complicated kind of loaded-- - Yeah, trade-offs, as in most things. But I like the way they're thinking about this in terms of, well, what if I just enjoyed myself a little more and spent some of that money I would be saving for a house or on mortgage payments and property taxes and just enjoy myself in other ways?

I think that's not a bad way to think about it. - Right, yeah. - I mean, that's like in college. You live in a crappy dorm, but then you have all this other stuff around you that's kind of fun and you handle that living situation. Not saying that renting in New Zealand is gonna be that bad, but I think that makes a lot of sense.

All right, let's do another one. - Yeah. Yeah, I know. Good advice. Okay. "I'm constantly reading about how you don't need to invest in foreign or international stocks since S&P 500 companies do business abroad. On a past episode, you mentioned that it is important to hold foreign stocks. My question is, how much of your portfolio should be in foreign stocks?

Do you believe half, since that's closer to the global weight? How much do you personally have allocated to foreign stocks?" - Ooh, putting it on the table here, okay. Let's bring in some help here. I have Ben Coulthard again, who's gonna come on to help us think through this one.

- Many markets. - 'Cause these are questions that we have with our clients as well, like how much does it make sense to be allocated? So I actually had a conversation yesterday, and someone was saying, you know, "I read Ray Dalio's book, and he's making it sound like every empire eventually fails, and what happens if the US empire fails?" And I said, "Well, that would not be great, but also, diversify internationally.

That's your, because if the US does fail, boy, this has been a depressing week, hasn't it? We're talking about the fall of the economy." - Yeah, you're bumming me out. - But if we fell from grace, guess what? Some other country would probably benefit from that. So Ben, when you talk to clients and work them through this, how do you talk about the allocation in terms of investing overseas versus investing in the US, and how we think about that?

- Yeah, that's great stuff, and that's classic Dalio, by the way. I actually like to do this. I like to talk about real companies. I get the whole American companies do business overseas thing, and thus you have international exposure, but it works the other way, too. I mean, Apple, yeah, they sell phones to Korea, but Samsung sells phones here.

BMW, Mercedes, ever heard of them? I got Unilever all over my bathroom in the form of Dove, which makes great deodorant and soap, by the way. Let's see, what else? My girlfriend's 30th birthday is coming up. I'm probably going to have to hit Louis Vuitton because they know their fashion over in Paris.

Probably going to have to hit a Shell gas station on the way there. You get the point. We sell to them, they sell to us, and as far as the allocation goes, I mean, my 401(k) is basically VT, which is the Vanguard Global Stock Market Index. It's like 60% US, 40% international, but how well do you- - Yeah, that's the global weight as far as what the market itself is.

The US is like 60%, the international is 40%. I think that's not a bad place to start and figure out whether you want to shade more US or shade more internationally because you think the US has done so well. So I think that's a good starting point to figure out which way you want to go from.

- Yeah, yeah. The bulk of my accounts are in a world global stock market. Yeah, when I'm buying Google and Tesla and the gambling, the sidecar account that we talked about last time, that probably tilts me a little bit more US. But help me out here, Smarter Ben, 100 years ago, didn't the US make up 25% or 30% of the global stock market?

Maybe it was 120 years ago or something. - The United Kingdom was the biggest stock market in the world. And even 30 years ago, Japan was giving us a run for our money. Japan was, I've mentioned this before, was 45% of the total. So yeah, the US doesn't have to dominate like it has, and that doesn't mean we have to fall from...

Our empire has to crumble like Ray Dalio thinks. It can just be that US stocks don't perform quite as well. Also Ben, was that a humble brag saying that you're going to go to Louis Vuitton for your girlfriend's birthday? - Yeah. - I think so. - Is that even still in?

I actually would love some user feedback from the women in the chat, if that's the right move. - Am I doing like Balenciaga now? - Dude, you're losing me with Balenciaga, San Diegan. - All right. So someone in the chart asked me if I'm wearing a tie, must just be because I'm not wearing a tie.

It's probably the pandemic that I threw away all my ties and I'm never wearing one again. - I'm actually moving into Charlestown with my girlfriend and I just threw out all my ties. So why would I ever wear one again? - I mean, if your neck gets cold a lot, I guess it could be useful.

- Yeah. No, it's a noose, dude. So my approach is like, look, don't try to be a hero and make geographical calls. You're not Ray Dalio, neither am I. I actually, you know, I did own the India ETF like five or six years ago because, you know, I read like their middle class was going to grow into like China's or something.

Basically dead money for three years. I just dumped it only to see it then go higher. Like, I don't know, we should just do less. That's primarily global market weighting is just doing less. My last little comment is like, as far as whether to own the world through like one vehicle like a VT or, you know, whether you own like separate U.S.

funds and international funds and like do the rebalance thing, like, I don't know if you really want autopilot, which is what I prefer. Like I just let, I just own it in one vehicle. As Ben said, if the U.S. like grows and Europe shrinks, like it'll all be reflected.

I understand the case for rebalancing, but, you know, look, this all gets summed up in a one thing. What if the next NVIDIA is not domiciled in the United States? That is why, in a nutshell, I have, you know, a meaningful enough exposure internationally. Yeah. I agree. And people across all across the world get up every day trying to improve their station in life as well.

It doesn't mean that we're anything special here. So yeah. So to summarize, you're saying you basically just pick the country you think will surpass the U.S. and then bet on that one. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah, exactly. OK. So that question was from Angel, by the way. So last but not least, what type of allocation changes do you make to your portfolio during bear markets?

I'm in my early 40s, didn't have much to invest during the financial crisis and have only experienced V-shaped crashes and recoveries with real dollars at stake. I feel both paralyzed and compelled to take action. I have a feeling you're not alone. No, certainly not. And that could be people who this is their first bear market, real bear market, I guess, if you want to say, or you've been through a bunch of them.

It doesn't make it any easier. I will say, here's the way that I look at this. You build your portfolio and investment plan to withstand bear markets and recessions and inflation and deflation. The whole point is having a durable enough plan that you don't have to try to guess it in advance.

And I think the idea that you're going to change your portfolio in a bear market and make the right call and the right hedges and all these things, it sounds great in theory. It rarely works in practice, even for the people that do this for a living and they're hedge fund managers.

A lot of times those people can't. So Ben, let's say you have a younger client come to you and say, "This is my first experience with this. I had some savings. I'm seeing real dollars fall." That's one of the problems with growing your savings over time is that the bear gets, even for a lower percentage decline, it's a much bigger money.

It's the dollars and cents versus percentage. So people who have these real dollars at stake, how do you handle that with people who are going through this for the first time as someone who's on your level in that similar younger age group? Well, I say I feel you. This market has me both nauseous and giddy at the same time, too.

You'd actually have to be a sociopath from one of those true crime Netflix documentaries if you don't feel anything. We are still those same animals from 20,000 years ago running around the Serengeti. You hear a noise in the bushes, you're taken off. I didn't read the book Sapiens. I glanced at it.

I get the gist. By the way, you can't own crypto until you read it. Sorry. That's a rule. Yeah. That was also a little Don't Jump reference from Wedding Crashers. I glanced at it. But yeah, look, the noisy bushes, to continue the metaphor, are all around us, the TV, the phone.

I got group chats going off, wanting to go to cash. I can blow out of my entire portfolio right now, Ben, with a few clicks, whilst live on YouTube, I can go to 100% cash. So you have that, then you consider that losing money feels twice as bad as making money feels good.

When I was up 1,000% in Tesla last year, not a big deal. That was almost like, yeah, that's why I bought it. But now when it retraces 40% this year, it's like the Happy Gilmore, like here comes the putter throw. So I don't know, this mental civil war that's going on is even why the simplest investing is hard.

If it were easy, everyone would be rich, right? This is the price you pay for those long-term returns. And I think that the hard thing to wrap your head around, this is a very obvious statement, but if you look back historically over the last hundred years, the US stock market is up nine or 10% per year, right?

And that includes depressions and wars and inflation and deflation and nasty bear markets and crashes. It includes all of that. And so sticking with a plan and sticking with your investments through a bear market, that's just a requirement to earn those long-term returns. And it really stinks because this market just feels, it's just brutal, right?

It's almost soul sucking in a lot of ways, because it just feels like you feel like it's never going to get better. You feel like it never stops going down. There's barely reprieve and then it just goes down again. But it's always felt like that. And you look back historically and you go, oh, of course, that one was a great buying opportunity.

That was a great buying opportunity. And I should have held through that one. But it's a lot harder to do it in real time because we don't know the end date. We don't know when it's going to be over. And so I think the whole point is, everything in life revolves around trade-offs.

And I think just having some balance and understanding this is going to happen, and especially if you're 40 years old and this is retirement savings, you're not going to be touching it for three or four decades, potentially. I think you have to understand that you're going to have a lot of these in the years ahead.

And you either figure out an asset allocation that can see you through them, or just get better at dealing with the pain because it's not going away. Yeah, as you said, this century, frankly, is a kick-walk compared to last century. The Dow has still gone from 30,000 to 30,000 over the last 120 years, despite everything.

So I boiled all this down to two rules for literally anyone at any age when we're in a situation like this. Number one, cash feels like a nice, warm blanket right now. But in the long run, it is a coffin, all right? Quote that. That's like some Morgan Housel stuff right there.

I'm down for an emergency savings blanket, even a queen-size one if you have a family to provide for. As a strategic allocation, that's a no for me, dawg. Cash is a tool to acquire things, whether that be dinner tonight, whether that be five shares of SPY. But if you're sitting on a huge cash hoard, you better be about to buy a house or pay for a wedding or something.

If you're waiting for a real crash or waiting for the dust to settle, you need to lose your account password. All right? Or that Michael Jordan gif, the "Stop it. Get some help." I do think not looking at your 401(k) balance is about as good as you can do right now.

But yeah. I just love my 401(k) contributions, frankly. Yeah, I'm not trying to look at the balance, but yeah, that's a little thing you can do. Rule number two, this kind of gets to what you're talking about, Ben, like putting some math and sobriety behind it. It's actually from our own Nick Magiuli, which this is a very underrated clip of him on the Jim O'Shaughnessy podcast, Infinite Loops.

He's like to anyone who's panicking, he would ask this question, like, "Do you think markets will eventually recover? Do you think at some point ever again we'll be at all-time highs?" If the answer is no, don't invest then. Go buy a bunker and fill it with cans of Chef Boyardee.

Enjoy your life. If you do, okay, well then, you know, over what time frame? Maybe two years? Like, fine. We're in a 20%-ish drawdown right now. If it takes until the summer of 2024 to get back to new all-time highs, that's a 12% annualized return from here, regardless of the path, even if we go down another 10.

If you're telling me we're at new highs in the summer of 2024 from here, that's 12% from here on out, above market average. Let's say we end up falling 33%, like we did in 2020, and say it takes five years to get back. Summer of 2027, you're still getting a 9% return each year from here.

That's like market average. It's above average. So, like, it's hard, like I said, to keep that sober math in mind, but frankly, as simple as the leaner the recent returns, the fatter the future returns. Yeah, it's hard to think, but expect returns are going up as stocks are going down.

It's no fun. Duncan, I have one final question for you. This week on Slack, you shared a picture of you as an extra in a movie with Ben Stiller, and you said you were also on One Tree Hill. How did you become an extra in movie and TV shows?

Was this a film school thing? Yeah, yeah. So, I went to film school at UNC Wilmington, and so Wilmington had tons of productions filming there at the time, and so it was just like a part-time job. You just, like, you put in your headshot and stuff at a casting agency, and then anytime they just need extras, they call you up, and it, you know, it paid, oh, God.

It paid pretty well. It was like, you know, you got, like, a hundred bucks a day just for, like, coming and standing around in the background. This one was a little more. I'm going to need to see this headshot at some point, you know. Oh, God. I'm sorry. I think they literally, they took them all, like, on campus.

They just, like, they had, like, a booth, you know, and you, like, walked in. Oh, okay. So, you didn't get, like, a professional headshot with, like, a jacket slung over your shoulder or something like that? No, no. I never did that. No, I didn't really want to be an actor.

Yeah. All right. All right. Ben, thank you for your help, as always. Thank you, Ben. Duncan, appreciate it. Remember, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. Keep those questions and comments coming. Any other questions on bear markets for next week, we'd love to hear them. Again, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com, and we will talk to you next time.

Bye. Bye. Bye. (upbeat music)