Introduction

Madison: Hello everyone, and welcome to Not Just Numbers, Honest Conversations with a Financial Advisor and Lawyer. I am Madison Demora, and I’m here with Mike Garry. Mike is a financial advisor and a CFP practitioner and the founder and the CEO of Yardley Wealth Management. He is also an estate planning lawyer and his law firm is Yardley Estate Planning. Hi Mike.

Mike: Hey, Maddie. How are you?

Madison: Good, good, good. So today on Not Just Numbers, we are celebrating our April employee spotlight, Amy Garry. Amy is a financial planning associate here at Yardley Wealth Management, and she brings a remarkable blend of thoughtfulness, energy, and unwavering dedication to her work. Whether she’s supporting clients or collaborating with our team, Amy’s commitment and positive spirit never goes unnoticed. In this episode, we’ll get to know Amy a little better, hear about her journey, and maybe even uncover a few fun facts along the way. Hi, Amy.

Amy: Hi, Maddie. Hi Mike. It’s nice to see you both.

Mike: Hi, Amy. Hey, Amy, after the last couple weeks, you still, you sure you want to go into this line of work?

Amy: Yeah, you know, it’s been a bit interesting, but it’s all for the long run, so I definitely am here for the long run.

Mike: Yeah. Well, just like stocks for the long run. Right? I’m actually, I’m glad you’re getting this experience now. It happened to me when I started out. I started at Merrill in 98 but didn’t really become an advisor until the end of 99. And then the, all the markets hit their highest peaks of March 10th of 2000. So I was in the business for about five months and things got hard and it didn’t turn around until after the September 11th attacks. So it was October of 2022 when they bottomed it and started coming around. So that time it took a long time. It was pretty, pretty dreary. Before we let Maddie start her inquisition of you with these really hard questions, I want to take a moment for our listeners to talk about what’s going on the last month.

Financial Market Recap with Mike Garry

Mike: You know, I think it’s pretty important to address it and, you know, talk about everybody’s concerns. A couple big points I’m not going to drone on for an hour here. First, if you haven’t seen or heard it, our last podcast episode had Emily Koochel, Dr. Emily Koochel on. She is a psychologist who works for eMoney Advisors. And so she was really good at framing like the psychology of money. And she had good points and tips for how to handle situations like we’re going through. And she’s actually a trained psychologist. She’s not like me, a trained lawyer who goes through the psychological effects of the money. So if you haven’t seen it or heard it, I’d recommend that people take a look or take a listen. She was really, really good. Next, I wanted to point out a couple things and Dr. Koochel made me think about something differently that I never really put together. I guess I kind of knew it in the background. So, you know, when we talk about planning, we talk about like clients financial plans. You know, we built into the assumptions for the plans are that the market’s going to go down regularly and the market’s going to go down really bad. One of the things we talked about is sometimes we stress test plans for specific events that have happened in the past. So we could take somebody’s plan and stress test it against the 2008, 2009, like great financial crisis. Or we could see like what would happen if their pension went belly up and they only got the guarantee amount from the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. But one of the things is, well, we can’t stress test your plan for everything that may happen because, you know, life has an infinite variety. But we can stress test against really bad things. So when we do that, yeah, it’s not this specific thing like there’s no like tariffs on, tariffs off stress testing in MoneyGuide Pro, but in the last 30 years or 40 years where most of our clients have been investing and most people listening have been investing, a lot of bad stuff happened. A lot of it was unexpected. The September 11, totally unexpected. It was bad in the market. Like the markets when they reopened a week later. It was unrelenting three week sell off. It was an awful time to feel invested. But it got better. And 2008, 2009, that bare market happened way quicker. So whereas 2000 2022 is like two and a half years in this, in 08 09 it bottomed out in five months. But in five months S&P went down like 55%. Like it was worse, in a much faster period of time. Covid 2020, the pandemic, you know, it was not expected by everyone. And it turned around, right? And so like whatever, whatever is happening now will turn around. Like things will change and there’ll be something else to worry about in the future. One of the things we’ve heard is a lot of people have said like, oh, I thought this was going to happen. Like I, I could tell from this or that that I, I knew this was going to happen. And I think a lot of times people want to because of those feelings, like do some action that would alter their financial plan by like maybe not investing in stocks or not investing in bonds or just like putting money in CDs or something else. The thing is, couple things. So now, 26, 27 years into seeing how the global news affects the stock market, I would say it often, very often reacts differently than what you’d expect. I can’t tell you how many times you see some news headline, you think, oh, that’s going to be great for the market or that’s going to be