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Not So Good News

• GDP contracted for the first time in three years—a clear warning sign the expansion could be losing steam.
• Two pillars of the economy are personal income and personal spending. Both slipped last month, a double‑whammy for future corporate profits.
• Inflation ticked up from 2.3 % to 2.6 %, suggesting tariffs may finally be pushing prices higher just as consumers have less to spend.
• Rising prices plus falling incomes can form a negative feedback loop that drags growth lower and sparks recession talk.
• Our mantra: plan for the worst, hope for the best. Good times are when you prepare for bad times not when you assume they’ll last.
• After 2½ years of solid gains, we are actively asking: “What if the next big, bad bear shows up?”
• Growth matters, but protection of principal matters more—especially in the 5 years before and after retirement (the “most important decade”).
• Our Invest and Protect Strategy—and the new “sanity checks” we added—aims to sidestep major declines, just as it did in 2008’s stock crash and 2022’s bond rout.
• Smoother portfolio swings mean retirees don’t have to “eat their seed corn” by selling extra shares for income when markets drop.
• Remember Han Solo’s advice: “Don’t get cocky, kid.” The longer it’s been since the last bear market, the closer we are to the next one.

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome to our Market Alert video for today, which is June 27, 2025 and as you can see, this Market Alert video is coming to you from the beautiful state of Colorado. And so we’re going to go inside and talk a little bit about what’s going on in the economy and how it affects our investments and all of that good stuff. But before we did that, I thought I’d give you a little Colorado Zen moment. You’re welcome.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. We’re going to get into all this boring financial stuff and how it affects you and what we’re going to do about it. But before we do that, I just want to say, I hope all you SCWPerS are out there SCWPering Your little tails off. I hope this video finds you healthy, wealthy and wise. I hope that those of you who are not retired yet, and we’re working towards it, we’re going to do everything we can to get you there. So very excited about everything. So thank you for watching. We, despite my enthusiasm, we did get some not so good news. And so because of that, it looks like we’re going to start hearing a lot of talk about recession coming. So let me go over with you what that not so good news, and some might even say bad news that we got this week that came in. So first of all, our Gross Domestic Product, GDP, which is the measure of all the goods and services that the United States produces, was down for the first time in three years. And so that’s not a good sign, right? In addition, we saw the most important part of our economy is our consumers. They represent 70% of our economy, and the way they behave drives the stock market and all other things from that standpoint. So two very important measures, personal income and personal spending, both went down, also surprising many so that was not good. In addition, inflation went up from 2.3% to 2.6% that’s not good either. If inflation is going up and the consumer is seeing their income go down and they’re spending less and prices are rising, that could create a virtual virtuous circle, or un virtuous circle, that could lead to a recession. So what does that mean for us? What do we do with that information? Well, our philosophy always is that you plan for the worst and you hope for the best, not the opposite. We also believe that during the good times, that’s when you should be planning for the bad times, and during the bad times, that’s when you should be planning for the good times. So the last two and a half years, we’ve had relatively good times. The economy has been doing well. Our investments have done very well also. And so, you could get into a space where you’re feeling really good about things, but actually what you should be doing is thinking about, when are the bad times coming, and what are we going to do about them, and let’s prepare for those because, after all, our philosophy is growth is important, but protection of principle is even more important. So if the bad times are coming. What are we going to do about it? Well, obviously, we have our invest and protect strategy in place to hopefully protect us from that, and we’ve made some recent changes to which, well, I which, I hope you are as excited about as we are during this last cycle, we saw that it with our sanity checks, that it helped improve our strategy significantly. Also, you know, we always look at protecting you from big, bad bear markets, and we haven’t had one since 2008 so don’t get cocky, kid, as Han Solo once said to Luke Skywalker, the fact that we haven’t had one in a while does not mean we’re not going to have another. The farther we get from the last one is the closer we get to the next one. So we always want to plan for that as well, and our strategy, we believe, is well designed to do that. And more recently, in 2022 you guys may remember that we avoided a good chunk of the downside in the stock market, but also we avoided a good chunk of the worst bear market in bonds, maybe in history. And so the combination of both of those helped us to do better than you know, many buy and hold types of investments that are similar to our philosophy. So because of all of that, I hope it gives you peace of mind. You know, we want your money to last as long as you do, and to do that, it’s very important that we have kind of a smooth ride, you know, because if we have big swings in your investments, then on those down swings, if you’re a SCWPer and you’re taking money out to live on, what’s going to happen is you have to sell more shares to get the same income. And if you do that, farmers call that eating your seed corn. And if you eat enough of your seed corn, guess what happens when gross season comes, you may not have anything left to plant. That’s a bad situation. And for those of you who are not taking any money out because you’re building towards your retirement, again, we want to protect against those big, bad bears, because that could delay your retirement by years, potentially. So all of that is what we’re about when we’re looking at all this for you, and you know, so now we’re starting to prepare for the bad times where we had not starting. We are preparing for the bad times always, because the good times have been good to us the last two and a half years, and we don’t want to take for granted. Okay? We all know that tomorrow is promised to no one, right? So I hope that you know the fact that we are forward looking, growth is important, but protection of principle is even more important. We hope that that philosophy and that you are in our family gives you this peace of mind with regard to the future and enables you to go out and enjoy your second childhood without parental supervision, without worry. And if it does, then we’ve done our job, and we’re thankful for that. So please share this video with your friends, your family, anybody that you think could benefit from it. We want to help as many people have that financial peace of mind and achieve SCWPerness as we can. So again, thanks for watching, and we’ll talk soon.

Please note: transcript has been modified after the time of recording. 

Economic indicators and stock market performance cannot be predicted. Opinions expressed regarding the economy and the stock market belong solely to Ken Moraif on behalf of Retirement Planners of America and may not accurately portray actual future performance of the economy or stock market outcomes. Opinions expressed in this video is intended to be for informational purposes only and is not intended to be used as investment advice for individuals who are not clients of Retirement Planners of America. All content provided is the opinion of Ken Moraif, CEO and Founder of RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”). ©Copyright 2023 

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RPOA Advisors, Inc. (d/b/a Retirement Planners of America ) (“Retirement Planners of America”, “RPOA”) is an SEC registered investment adviser with a primary business location in Plano, Texas. Registration as an investment adviser is not an endorsement by securities regulators and does not imply that Retirement Planners of America has attained a certain level of skill, training, or ability. The “Invest and Protect Strategy” (the “Strategy”) refers to a strategy that Retirement Planners of America fundamentally employs for its clients. Retirement Planners of America previously employed a similar strategy that it referred to as the “buy, hold, and sell” strategy or “buy hold, and protect” strategy. Past performance does not guarantee future results. 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