The Bird’s Eye View:

The election is upon us, and that brings up a lot of financial questions. We want to dedicate today’s show to answering some of those common queries.

Your Guide:

With the election coming soon, clients have been reaching out to us with questions about how it could affect their finances. On this episode of Your Retirement Elevated podcast with Scott Dougan, we’ll answer some of the most common questions.

This election cycle seems to be crazier and more contentious – and that’s on top of a pandemic and shutdown. Some of that craziness is due to social media and confirmation bias that feeds people information they already agree with.

It’s important to make rational, fact-based, logical decisions and not use emotion, misunderstanding and misinformation. Don’t put that into your decision-making process. Remember that it’s not what happens in the markets. It’s how we react, and it’s how we’re positioned to absorb what’s happening to us.

Elections do matter, and they can impact generations to come. So we should approach voting with the gravity it deserves. But we need to be careful to not allow short-term political emotions to alter a sound, long-term financial planning process.

Are there Election Day implications for your investments? Yes, in the short term there often are implications. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and markets hate uncertainty. We always expect short-term declines, but they will eventually stabilize.

We believe the possibility of a larger-than-normal decline in the next 12 months exists due to so much uncertainty from the election results and the stimulus effects. But we aim to use the short-term emotion of other people to create the biggest advantage possible to generate solid, long-term gains in a portfolio.

So, in some ways we’re actually hoping for a quick decline to give us bargain prices. We want to buy things that are on sale, and we do have a shopping list of things we look at.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about bogus info online and how it impacts investments. Use the timestamps below to find specific segments.

1:18 – Confirmation bias

5:42 – What does the election really mean for investments?

6:34 – Are there Election Day implications for your investments?

10:09 – Should we be worried about delayed election results?

14:20 – Bogus info online

16:00 – The media

20:24 – Short-term versus long-term

22:58 – What if you’re taking money from investments?

24:58 – Final thoughts

Thanks for checking out the Your Retirement Elevated Podcast. We’ll talk to you again on the next show.

Your Guide:

Scott Dougan, RFC, Investment Advisor – Contact