What is the biggest risk to your retirement right now? What if that risk? The biggest risk is not the stock market. What if it’s not inflation, not interest rates, not the Federal Reserve, not even a recession. What if the greatest threat to your retirement isn’t even something that’s dramatic or obvious at all?

Well, you might be thinking if it’s none of those, then what is it? Well, that’s the question that we’re gonna answer throughout today’s show. And I wanna welcome you. Thank you for tuning in to today’s Providence Financial Retirement Show. I’m your host, Anthony Saccaro. We are your retirement income source, and this is the place where retirees come for income.

Glad you’re here. We’re gonna spend our show talking about how to prepare for retirement risk before it ever shows up in your portfolio. And of course, we’re gonna answer your listener questions as well. If the biggest risks to your retirement are not any of the things that we just mentioned, what is it?

The Risk of Complacency

I’m gonna suggest that it’s probably complacency, probably comfort. Right now. I’m saying that a lot of retirees are just comfortable with where things are, and if you stay too comfortable for too long, something could sneak up on you and you could wind up being surprised down the road. And unfortunately, in retirement, surprises could cause your retirement to start to fail.

And in a market like this, when everything seems to be humming along, it’s very easy to get comfortable, very easy to just stay complacent and believe that everything is just gonna always stay the same as it always has before. And we’re in a pretty good market right now. The economy seems to be doing well.

It’s steady, it’s moderating a little bit. GDP growth last year was strong, well for the last couple of years even, but it’s predicted to be a little slower this year. Inflation has come down to a normal level, but the inflation that we had over the last few years, that’s here to stay. That’s not going anywhere.

Why Prices Still Feel High

One of the more frequent questions that we get here on the Providence Financial Retirement Show is why is inflation down? That’s what we’re being told. But it seems like prices are still up. It seems like everything’s still more expensive than it was before, and yet we’re being told that inflation is at a lower level.

Why is that? Well, it’s because of wage inflation. Over the last few years, the labor market has just been extremely strong and a lot of companies have had to pay more wages to hire good people. And in some situations they’ve had to give workers wage increases, pay raises, just to keep good workers from quitting. ’cause they know they could go somewhere else and get a better job or a different job at a higher rate of pay.

And when you raise wages across the board, that’s gotta be passed on to you the consumer. And unlike commodities where grocery stores can adjust the price of their goods, the price of the groceries up and down, depending on commodities, you can’t do that with wages.

Once you give someone a raise, you’re gonna have a really hard time taking that raise back. So that’s gonna be built in permanently. And a lot of the inflation that we have today is because of the wage increases that have occurred over the last few years. This is often referred to as sticky inflation.

It’s just not going anywhere.

Watching the Labor Market

Just this last week I did a live TV interview where the one question that was asked to me as I was giving a market update and just talking about the macro economics that are in play right now. The question that came to me is, what is the number one thing that I think you should be taking a look at or watching to see where the economy’s gonna go to see whether or not we’re gonna go into a recession or whether or not things are gonna continue to look strong and keep going as they have been.

And the answer to me was very obvious. It’s going to be the labor force. 70% of the United States GDP Gross domestic product is based on consumption. We’re not like China, that’s an industrial nation and their economy’s based on industry and manufacturing. We’re in a consumer or consumption based economy, and 70% of our GDP is based on you buying stuff.

And if you have jobs and you continue to buy things, then everything’s gonna be fine. And our economy continues to grow. But if the labor force starts to weaken, if the unemployment rate starts to go up, if people start to feel a little less secure in their jobs and they start to spend less money, that’s what’s gonna have the biggest impact on our economy going forward.

Signs the Economy Is Slowing

And some of that stuff’s already happening. The labor market was strong a couple years ago and still strong now, but it was overly strong a couple years ago. When I was doing live TV interviews a year and a half or two ago, there was roughly two jobs available for every worker.

That means a worker could leave one job and go get another job at a higher rate of pay, but now that’s normalized. Now there’s only about one job available for every worker, and that’s much more in the normal range. That just means that workers are feeling a little less confident about going out and getting a new job at a higher rate of pay.

They could do that a couple years ago, but they can’t do that now, and so they wind up being more conservative.

And although the consumer is still spending, what we’ve noticed is that savings rates are coming down, which means that people are starting to spend their savings and credit card debt is actually starting to go up. And that means that people are using credit more than they have in the last couple of years as well.

And that is just signs of the labor market getting weaker. Consumer spending is just starting to decline a little bit, and at some point in time it’s probably gonna cause the economy to slow down.

And we’ve already seen that happening because of the fact that GDP this year is expected to be about half of what it was last year.

So the economy’s starting to slow.

Market History and Predictable Trends

Your advisor may want you to believe that the stock market is just random and day by day it is. But over longer periods of time, it’s actually not.

There are predictable and repeatable trends that if you study these trends like we have here at Providence Financial, then you’ll actually get a good idea as to what could happen in the years to come with the economy and with the stock markets.

And of course then that all affects your portfolio.

Free Market History Video

If you wanna learn more about market history and what it tells us about where the economy could go. Well, we’ve got good news. I’ve put together a short animated video for you that talks exactly about that. You’re gonna learn what the trends are in the stock market, and you’re gonna learn where the stock market and the economy might go from here based on what’s happened in recent history.

I want to email you this animated video absolutely free of charge. It’s gonna be fun to watch because it is animated. It’s yours absolutely free. Just for the asking to get that video emailed to you, all you need to do is go to providencefinancialradio.com/video. Again, it’s providencefinancialradio.com/video, and we’ll send you that video out.

And in a seven or eight minute watch of a short animated video, you’ll learn where the economy could be going in the next couple of years because we’ve got it all laid out for you.

Late Cycle Bull Market Concerns

I’m Anthony Saccaro, Thank you for tuning into the Providence Financial Retirement Show right here on K Nex AM 10 70, where it truly is all about the income. We’re spending our time together today talking about how you can prepare for your retirement and for some of the problems that are gonna come before they actually come.

The markets and the economy seem to be doing really well, and a lot of you might be thinking that there’s just no reason to make any changes, but oftentimes this is exactly what happens before extreme periods of volatility.

And there are some chinks in the armor like we just talked about that indicate that there could be some problems ahead.

I almost feel like we’re in a late cycle of this current bull market. If you go back to 2009, that was the end of the financial crisis really, where the stock market hit a bottom.

And from 2009 to here we are, 2026, the stock market has just gone straight up.

And when you study market history, what you realize is that the longest bull market in history went from 1982 to the year 2000. It was 18 years.

That’s the longest bull market that this country has ever seen.

And we’re not far from hitting that level now, and we know that the market’s not gonna go up forever. At some point it’s going to turn around and you need to be prepared for that before it actually happens.

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Closing Thoughts

I am Anthony Saccaro. Thank you for taking time to join us. You’ve been listening to the Providence Financial Retirement Show, where we’ve been talking about how to prepare for retirement risks before they actually show up.

I certainly hope though, that you’ve learned something you didn’t know before, something that’s gonna help give you the peace of mind and stress-free retirement that you deserve.

Thank you for tuning into the Providence Financial Retirement Show. I certainly hope you’ve enjoyed. Have a great week everyone.

God bless.