Who Cares?

Who Cares?

I have been trying to work on extracting myself from social media. In fact, I have deleted all my personal accounts. I only now keep up with my blog and podcast profiles. This is better. I can avoid much of the noise, political and personal, and enjoy reading my personal finance feeds and group chats. It’s all good! For the most part. I love all the great content put out by the financial independence community. But occasionally, I get the same negative feelings that I used to get from my personal feeds. Today, it was a link to an article decrying that Vanguard is predicting lower than usual stock returns over the next decade. I couldn’t help but saying out loud to myself: Who cares?

It’s not that the future of our stock market doesn’t concern me. I truly hope our economy goes well. But, it seams such fear mongering does nothing to advance the conversation. Fear mongering. Sensationalism.

That’s all it is.

Speculation Exhausts Me

Rank speculation exhausts me. Will the market have poor returns? Is it time to move all my money to real estate? Is their an index fund bubble? Will we all lose our financial independence status and have to go back to the grind?

I thought we have thoroughly covered this ground. Markets are unpredictable. Speculation is generally the quickest way to the poor house. The power of the financial freedom community is that we diversify. We hedge our bets with broad based market indexes, real estate, the business asset class, and so on.

Turbulent markets are exactly what we planned for. So why do we get ourselves all lathered up at the suggestion that our planning was warranted?

Social media is the perfect place to foment such lunacy. But I say…who cares?

Head In The Sand

I’m not putting my head in the sand nor ignoring the possibility of white swan or even black swan events. I’m sure some of those will occur. Instead I’m taking the long view.

The appropriate asset allocation with the appropriate risk mitigation strategies are the best we can do. It is what we preach on our blogs. In fact, it is the superpower of the financial independence retire early community.

We don’t have a crystal ball. Instead we have spread sheets and market theory. We have insurance and index funds. We have invested in skill sets as well as real estate.

Regardless of what Vanguard says, you have no idea what returns will be in the future. Who cares? You will have to be agile enough to manage whatever comes your way. You will have to be diversified enough to protect yourself.

It Will All be Okay, Or It Won’t

It will all be okay, or it won’t. Who cares? You can only do so much. Most likely your careful planning, your concentration on investing and not speculation, and your frugal ways will be just fine. And if they aren’t? If there is an apocalypse, or nuclear war?

We are all hosed then anyway.

What matters most is not the hot stock tips or the undervalued real estate that you missed, it is about the solidity of your long term plan.

Final Thoughts

I don’t care what Vanguard says. I’ll buy their index funds. But, I don’t believe for a minute that they have the power to read the tea leaves any better than some two bit mutual fund manager who loses money year after year.

We in the financial independence community have dedicated ourselves to smart, long term planning, that should be somewhat resilient to turbulent markets. If not, we need to go back to the drawing board and risk mitigate better.

I love using social media to keep up with what’s happening in the personal finance community. I am finding the same traps, however, that are present in my other social media feeds.

Meh, who cares?