In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss a comprehensive market update 2025 recap and how lessons from last year can help investors confidently plan for retirement as we move into 2026. They reflect on policy changes, inflation trends, interest rate shifts, and how thoughtful portfolio risk management and managing market volatility can turn uncertainty into opportunity—especially for those focused on retiring comfortably and achieving true peace of mind.

Listen in to learn about how disciplined retirement investment strategies, including diversification, the three bucket strategy, and proactive tax planning, help create a resilient retirement portfolio. Radon and Murs break down how peace of mind investing isn’t about chasing returns, but about building systems that support income, growth, and stability—no matter what the markets bring—so you can confidently secure your retirement.

In this episode, find out:

• How the Market update 2025 sets the stage for smarter investment strategies in 2026
• Why managing market volatility matters more than chasing high returns in retirement
• How the three bucket strategy balances income, safety, and growth bucket investing
• The role of tax efficient investing, including direct indexing strategy, tax loss harvesting, and capital gains planning
• How alternative investments can reduce volatility and strengthen a long-term retirement portfolio

Tweetable Quotes:

• “If your portfolio is designed correctly, you don’t have to sweat market corrections—you can still sleep at night and enjoy retirement.” — Radon Stancil
• “Peace of mind investing comes from managing risk and taxes, not swinging for home runs.” — Murs Tariq

From retirement planning basics and a practical retirement checklist to advanced strategies like direct indexing strategy and alternative investments, this episode ties together everything needed for effective planning retirement. Whether you’re years away or already retired, these insights help you build confidence, reduce stress, and move closer to secure your retirement.

Resources:

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement!

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast.

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome, everyone, to 2026 for Secure Your Retirement Podcast.

 It’s amazing that we’re sitting here in 2026. It kind of blows us away

every time we say another year, doesn’t it? And certainly, this has been a close

out now in 2025. And as we go into 2026, there’s a lot of things for us to chat

about. As you know, this is the first Monday of the month. And really what we’ve

decided to do here on the podcast is on the first Monday of the month is really

kind of talk about the portfolios, talk a little bit of

that came out of 2025, I think that’s a really good thing for us to do also

because it helps us when you’re living through something, you think, man, is this

ever going to work out? And this year, 2025 was a year to really teach us

volatility can be there, and things can look bad and then ends up pretty good.

I also want to let you know that we are going to talk a little bit about how our

portfolios design. They are really, it is designed to deal with

what’s coming yet. We didn’t know what was going to come in 2025. The portfolios

worked really well in 2025. They’ve worked really well now for many, many years. How

is it that it’s designed? We want to kind of go through that a little bit. So,

Murs, I’m just going to turn it over to you at this point. And if you can kind

of start this conversation out around kind of what happened in 2025 and maybe,

you know, helping us remember, I guess, and to build our confidence that things do

work out. Right, yeah. I mean, we walked into 2025, I think, with a lot of

nervousness. We had an administration change and then a lot of policy changes that

were up in the air. And then they came into fruition and then which caused a lot

of volatility. So, there was a lot of promises around tax change. And then we got

the one big-beautiful bill act that needs the tax law that we’re still kind of

learning and understanding. But there’s been some opportunities there to take advantage

of as far as the,

half of 2025 as we start to see some of the inflation pressures come down,

which is a good thing, but still not totally under control, but things are headed

in the right direction there. But obviously that also was a point of uncertainty and

volatility created around that. Interest rates being a big deal,

mortgage rates are starting to come down a little bit, but not in the same, not in

lockstep with interest rate cuts. So hopefully we’ll see some more of that in 2026.

And the job market still, you know, they kept saying pretty strong, pretty strong.

But here in the back half of the year, starting to see some numbers around

unemployment going up and you’re hearing more and more about layoffs. So, you know,

a big year of uncertainty, a big year of transition that we have experienced. And,

you know, we talk about all these big, high -level items, but the markets actually

did okay for everything that we’re talking about. The markets did okay. Let’s talk a

little bit about that. Yeah, I think that if you look back and you were just, and

I think it’s good for us to reflect from time to time, because if you do go back

and you look at the way the year kind of started out and kind of how things were

going for a little bit there, it was looking rocky. And the markets did have a

pullback. And there was some nervousness in the air around a couple different issues

that we don’t need to rehash all of that. But then we started to see things come

together and actually start to be positive. And then the year just kind of really

kept going. We had, you know, we’ve had adjustments and interest rates. We were

starting off the year, pretty good high interest rates. We’ve seen those interest

rates come down. It did not blow the markets up like a lot of people thought it

was going to. A lot of people thought that the markets will, as the interest rates

go down.

overall big picture, we’ve seen that kind of come under control. We had a lot of

folks that were worried about the markets, and so they wanted to make some

adjustments. In fact, we believe that as you are entering into retirement in

particular or you’re transitioning toward retirement in retirement for a number of

years, don’t try to invest where you think that you’re going to get the necessarily

biggest return. That’s sometimes a big mistake. I think what we learned a lot of

you put those returns out there and say, hey, if we can make a good rate of

return, we’d say this all the time, make a good rate of return and lower my risk,

a couple things are going to happen. I’m going to have a very good retirement. I’m

going to have, be able to sleep at night, and I’m going to be able to have the

returns that I need. So, I think if we kind of just really reflect on the fact

that what we lived through this year was, I think, a lot, but when we look back

at it, it’s now not that big of a deal. But I think what I’d like to do, MERS,

is kind of talk a little bit about maybe some of the things that you see coming

that we know that are going to be big topics for 2026 and maybe, you know, just

kind of thinking about maybe we can even do a playoff of 2025 of what happened.

But really kind of what are some of the things that you think that we’re going to

see and we need to be ready for mentally for 2026. Right. And I think what you

said earlier about not trying to go hit those home runs. So, I think a lot of

people fell into 2025 being the big AI year and let me go invest in AI and all

these big AI stocks and you can quickly get yourself into a place where you’re very

over-concentrated in that area. So, I think going into 2026, that’s going to be

something to pay attention to. Some tech stocks, some AI stocks, you hear this word

of a bubble every now and then and there’s trains of thought as far as, are we in

the bubble or is just a place that’s going to

we are having just a few key areas of the market driving the results or are we

starting to broaden out? We saw that in 2025. Outside of AI, we did see, you know,

the smaller companies, the mid -sized companies picking up some of the slack that

they had back in the few years ago. We also saw international and European stocks

doing quite well because of a lot of stuff that was happening inside of the U.S.

people were going to outside investments. So, seeing that broadening out is a good

thing that speaks to the idea of having really good diversification in your portfolio

being very important. Valuations, you’ve got a lot of companies that are worth

billions and trillions and trillions of dollars right now that makes people nervous.

So, understanding where that heads, I think, is going to be important in 2026. And

we have, we’re going to be walking into an election year, so government policy,

politics, that could always create issues and turmoil and volatility in the markets.

and the big one.

and people got very nervous around the impact of tariffs. Well, I think we’re going

to start seeing truly from a dollar figure what those impacts are going to be in

2026 and how that affects the general economy in the U.S. But I think those are

the big things to look at for 2026. So, you know, I was thinking too, just that I

want to kind of have you hit on this a little bit. You know, I think as we have

been designing the portfolios, we put a lot of thought into how they are put

together and we talk about all the time our

doing a lot of tax strategy around a lot of different areas. But I think one of

those is how we’ve designed, in particular, just to give you context, this is for

accounts that are not IRAs. Okay, IRAs, it doesn’t really affect us.

But I have a non -IRA account, a brokerage account, and I’m growing that money, and

I had a big, nice year like we did this year, that can create problems. And the

problem could be if I’ve got a, you know, if I, let’s say I had a 20 % gain this

year on my portfolio, now I’ve got all this gain. Well, now why do I deal with

that gain and not be hit so hard on the tax side? And so, we’ve been talking

about, I know I invest in what we’re about to describe. I know that many of us

are, you know, using these type portfolios. We have a lot of our clients in it.

But could you talk a little bit about the importance of in the investment strategy,

if it’s a non -IRA, why we need to think about tax strategy? Yeah. So non -IRA,

 So, throughout the year, while some are leading the pack, there are

going to be some losers in there. Not all stocks in the S &P 500 go up at the

same time. And so, we can optimize and sell some of those losers while the winners

are winning and we keep things in balance. We keep we keep stocks from running away

from us on a growth pattern. And so, we’re able to keep those winners in check.

We’re able to stay keep our index in balance so that we’re never getting to a

place where we’ve got over concentration like your apples and your NVidias and Tesla

stocks and things like that. So long story short, it’s a really nice way to

optimize the taxation of this vehicle to where you’re building up some losses, you’re

managing capital gains. And in the perfect scenario, get some of those losses to

help out your tax return year over year. And what that generates is what we call

tax alpha. the big picture here is that it’s not about how much you make,

it’s about how much you keep. And a lot of times we lose a lot of those dollars

towards taxes if we’re not managing it properly. So, it’s a, it’s a very cool

strategy that we use. We’ve done a whole separate podcast on it that if this sounds

interesting, then you want to go back and look at that podcast as well. Yeah. And

I think another big thing to consider is in our three buckets, we’ve got the growth

bucket. There’s a lot that we have in the growth bucket that has worked really

well. We always talk about the fact that it’s got that. We’ve got the, the, uh,

the

invested looking out into where we think things are headed. And then we actually

have what we call alternative investments or private investments. Very,

very important to have those in the portfolio, we believe. And the reason why is

because we reduce the volatility in the portfolio. We get to be a part of things

that’s going to give us really good rates of return. And more easy easier today

than ever to get involved in private investments than it ever has been and the

rules around it had lightened a little bit too which opens it up for quite a few

individuals that couldn’t in the past get access to them, so we have just really

enjoyed being able to have that as a part of the portfolio when you put all those

things together you can have good growth lower volatility and that’s really

what our goal is. Now, we also need to just take a couple of minutes and talk

about that other bucket, which is our income safety bucket. And this one absolutely

key if I’m close to or in retirement. This one is the one that takes all the

pressure off and really kind of builds out this idea that I can live through some

volatility and it’s not going to affect my retirement. Why? Well, if I’ve got things

set up in that income bucket that is going to give me the income I need,

or it’s going to give me stable growth with no downside based like on what the

stock market is doing, I can rest. I don’t have to think about or worry about if

my growth buckets going through a little bit of volatility. Take the first of 2025.

If I’ve got my income safety bucket there, that volatility that’s happening over on

the stock market side, not a big deal. Now, what happens after you have a really

good year on the growth bucket? You rebalance and you take some of that growth

money that’s been over there that grew really nice, and you replenish your income

safety bucket where we’re taking income from. We did a lot of that in 2020 coming

out of 2024, probably going to have to do a little bit more out of it this year

the growth that has been, that has occurred, that we’re constantly looking at that

and saying, how do we position it? But I don’t know, Murs, do you have anything

you want to talk about on that or just kind of, I don’t know, add something to on

that? Yeah, I think when you, when you talk about the safety and the growth bucket,

I think the two major key things come out of having both of these in place.

One is, is that it puts us in a place of being able to really manage risk and

have predictable outcomes from a downside perspective. You know, a lot of the

families that we work with, they say, hey, you know, I survived 2008 and that 2008

was a significant decline, 30 to 50 percent loss depending on how you invested

during that period. And I survived that. I don’t want to live through that again,

especially as I get to a place where I need my money. So, a lot of our clients

don’t want to be down any more than 5 to 15 percent in a given year. And so

having this combination of principal protection on one side of our investment strategy

and then,

allows for volatility to happen and long -term growth to happen on the other side

because now if we are down on the other side, we’re not as worried about waiting

for it to come back because our income flow is coming from a completely different

side of the portfolio. So, it manages risk really well and it reduces stress,

which is a big thing when it comes to retirement planning for people. Where am I

going to get my money from? Is the market down? Do I need to swing for the

fences. It takes all those conversations out of your head and lets you really enjoy

your retirement. So, we know it works well for the families that we work with.

And if it’s something that you’d like to talk about, we’re happy to do that too.

So, let’s sum it up this way. How do we feel about 2026? I’m excited. I think it’s

going to, regardless of what this market brings towards us, we’ve got systems in

place to help our clients. If you are listening to this and you’re not a client,

you want to talk about those systems; it just really does put you in a position

where I don’t have to sit here and think, oh, man, this is going to be a

fantastic year from a stock market perspective. No, we’ve got everything in place

that no matter what this market brings us, we at least have, we have places to go and things to do to make sure that we’re going to navigate the year.