Stop Watching the Market and Start Planning Your Retirement Income

And Ryan, one of the big ones out there is that stock market.

And we see the headlines all the time.

It's crazy how if the stock market is going up, everybody is going, I wonder when it's going to go down.

And when the stock market's going down, they went, I wonder how far it's going to go down.

It's like we're all fatalists when it comes to the stock market.

But there are some encouraging and some discouraging headlines out there right now.

Mark Zandi, who is a guy who's been watching the stock market for over 36 years.

He works for Moody Analytics, and he's one of those economists that talks about the future of the market and what's going on out there right now.

And he says that.

There's a big chance that we're going to go into recession.

There's a pretty good chance that this market is going to start moving backwards.

And about 62 percent of Americans have money in some way in the stock market.

Most of it is in 401k money.

But it's weird how the stock market can go up and up and up and up.

But yet there's a whole lot of people that are really suffering and experiencing layoffs.

And the economy just doesn't seem to fit with what's going on in the stock market.

So I want to ask you this.

Is the stock market a good gauge for the economy? Is the stock market a good gauge of how our retirement is going to go? And if it's not, what is a good metric as to our retirement is going to go well if it's not the stock market?

Well, I mean, it really depends on who you listen to, what news channel you listen to.

Certainly, Trump views the stock market as evidence of how well the overall economy is doing.

And it's interesting that Mark Zandi is just now saying this in 2026, when in 2020, it was very, very, very evident that the stock market and...

the overall economy became so severely disconnected because for years, there were certain underlying indicators that Mike and I looked at that really kind of, if you X, Y, Z happened, this would happen in the market.

And it pretty much happened.

It wasn't really market predicting or market prognosticating, if you will, but things you could look at that oftentimes something else would, if this happens, then this happens.

And, you know, so many times those things were happening in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 that those were happening, but the market wasn't reacting at all.