You Just Lost Every Dime of Your Savings Growth This Year

Let’s review why using Wall Street as a savings plan is a bad idea.

As of this writing, the S&P 500 is down 9.4 percent in three weeks, with two separate six-day losing streaks. Wall Street just “lost” all their gains for the year on Wednesday, with the Dow losing 600 points (down 2.4 percent). Nasdaq, the techie version of the stock market, fell more than 4%. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Berkshire Hathaway and Facebook are all down sharply from their recent highs, and in a lot of mutual funds, these stocks were carrying most of their upside.

This is the third time this year there was a boo-boo. The first was in late January and early February when the S&P 500 lost 10 percent in just nine days. That was followed by a smaller loss in March.

What if you “lost” all the money that you made in your work this year because you had a hole in your wallet or purse? Would you be upset? Would you do something about it? Like, replace it? For most of you, whose savings are primarily in IRAs or a 401(k), this means another big haircut for your future.

What can you do to fix it? Nothing. This is the nature of passive investment, where you are only a helpless bystander to what happens. Even worse, unless you are someone who can stomach reading balance sheets and profit & loss statements, you have no idea even when to exit these investments. Even armed with that insight, one bad projection, publicly announced changes everything. Then you can stand in line behind the huge institutions trying to sell. But you don’t. Your money is trapped. Forget about trying to predict the performance of your mutual fund. Finance MBAs with supercomputers can’t even do that.

What can you do about? Try something different.

Try real savings, with guarantees of no loss, steady growth, and access to your savings to boot. You can still participate in an improving country by placing your money with those who actually use it to improve things. The real American recovery will not be funded or supported by the stock market and brokers buying more German cars. It can only be fostered by real investment in capital machinery, factories, and improvements to products from research and development.

This current buying frenzy and its resultant hangover is a sickening wheel that repeats time and again. It is caused by those who benefit: Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and their pals in the government. They could care less about your future. Add in a lot of deeply mistaken “investment” advisers doing the “prudent” thing.

Keep doing the same thing. See what happens. Unless you run out of time and you end up watching CNBC in horror as your retirement income gets erased.

(Pssst, Privatized Banking works)