In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon and Murs discuss how ongoing Geopolitical Risk and global uncertainty are impacting today’s markets and what that means for your retirement financial plan. With rising tensions, inflation concerns, and unpredictable global events driving market volatility, they explore how investors can shift from reactive decisions to proactive smart money investments. This episode highlights how a well-structured retirement investment strategy can help you stay confident—even when headlines create fear.

Listen in to learn about how to build a resilient smart investment plan that helps protect your retirement during uncertain times. Radon and Murs break down key financial planning strategies for 2026, including how to reduce sequence of returns risk, incorporate alternative investments and private investments, and utilize tools like fixed index annuities to create stability. If you’re focused on planning retirement, creating a retirement checklist, and ultimately retiring comfortably, this episode will help you secure your retirement with confidence.

In this episode, find out:

• How Geopolitical Risk and global uncertainty contribute to market volatility and investor anxiety
• Why a balanced retirement investment strategy should include both growth and protection
• The importance of asset location and how it differs from traditional diversification
• How alternative investments and private investments can reduce overall portfolio risk
• How fixed index annuities can help manage sequence of returns risk and provide stable income

Tweetable Quotes:

“When your income is protected and not tied to the market, it becomes much easier to ride out volatility and stay confident in your retirement plan.” – Murs Tariq

“The goal isn’t to eliminate risk—it’s to design a smart investment plan where your money is working in different ways at different times.” – Radon Stancil

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:

Murs and I are very happy to have you here with us this week. And we’re going to talk about something I think that’s kind of serious. We always talk about that when the markets are doing good and everybody’s happy, I think everybody feels like, man, the stock market’s a great place to be because you can get fantastic returns. And some years it’s just unbelievably good. And then you enter into a world where things are uncertain. 

And you might think back in your mind to 2008 to 2009, major, major problems in the market. It was the financial crisis that was probably the largest of any of our lifetimes. The market dropped over 50%, even more than what was dropped going all the way back to 2000, 2001, and 2002. And then you truck along and you had other years where there were things that came up. 

Government shutdowns and problems that hit us here in the United States and across the world. And you get to 2000 and you get hit with a, I’m sorry, 2020, and you get hit with a pandemic. And none of us had ever lived through a pandemic. And now all of a sudden, the market drops by 30%, then it comes back and lots of anxiety in that period of time. Then comes 2022. 

And all of a sudden, we’re seeing inflation unlike we had ever seen for many, many years or whatever, as far as seeing that kind of volatility. That kind of got under control. And here we now set, as I’m talking to you right now, with the United States involved in a very heavy jail political scenario between what’s going on in Iran and the interactions there and what’s going on. 

What was going to be quick doesn’t seem like it’s going to be as quick. We’ve heard that kind of story before as well. And Murs and I are not bringing this up in this particular podcast to talk about any scenario about right or wrong. We’re just trying to talk a little bit about how you position yourself so that when you have these things that come up, all those different things I’ve talked about. 

Is how can you set yourself up so that you’re not so stressed, especially if you’re close to or in retirement and you’re not stressed that what is this going to do to my retirement? I talk about it all the time when I’m talking to somebody who’s not a client. I said, just listen, you could come in here on any given day whenever there’s craziness going on and you’re not going to hear our phones ringing off the hook. And it kind of comes down to the, well, why? 

Why is that the case? Because right now, when you have market volatility, we have a lot of people reaching out to us and saying, I need to talk. I’d like to have a conversation. So, Murs, I’m going to kind of start this off and kind of ask you, you know, when you when you’re trying to talk to somebody and maybe they’re not a client yet or we’re trying to help a client get allocated correctly. And we think about all these things that I just brought up that could create anxiety. How is it that. 

When you’re having these conversations, you’re saying, hey, here’s some things that we can set up so that when these things occur, you don’t have the anxiety, or the anxiety at least is under control. And we are in a very unique time right now. And I’ll reiterate what you said. I think the last five years has kind of skewed, I think, the investor’s mind as to how the markets work. You know, outside of 2022. 

The markets have been really, really good to us in the matter of double-digit returns. So, I think there’s a lot of belief in the resilience of the market and how it can just snap back. And if we have issues, everything’s going to be okay and things like that. But things worked out during the pandemic where there was the influx of cash into the system that kind of created the… 

One of the quickest rebounds we’ve ever seen off of a 30 percent drop so there was action taken by the government that kind of made things happen and the market recovered the way it did but that’s just not how usually it works and so we’re sitting here in this uh rather you know uncertain geopolitical this war that we’re in and where is it going to go how long is it going to last people are getting more and more nervous 

And the question that they ask is, well, how do we protect ourselves against this or how should we be investing right now? But we are still getting some people saying, well, I want to continue to be aggressive because we’ve started to really like seeing those double-digit returns. And I think that could have a fallacy to it at times of let’s continue to keep our foot on the pedal. 

Now, I think for a portion of money, I think that’s completely fine. I think for a portion of our money, we do want to be very growth oriented to where we can take some risk and very targeted types of risk. But at the end of the day, I think it comes to, you know, a lot of advisors would throw around this term of asset allocation. And as long as we’re well diversified in the stock market space, then if things happen, maybe we won’t experience it as badly as the stock market. That’s asset allocation. Go buy. 

The large cap companies, the mid cap companies, the smaller companies go buy some commodities, go buy some bonds. Bonds in 2022 had major issues. But if we spread out in the stock market, our risk is diversified away. And so, I think to us, that’s still valid. But I think to us, way more, it’s about asset location. 

As well as asset allocation so what does that even mean well where are we putting our money and what types of strategies are we putting it into and is it all stock market related or can we get some of our risk exposure away from the stock market and so when I talk to people I say well could you just imagine here for a second that um you know you’re pulling your social security and on top of your social security you need an additional i don’t know three thousand five thousand dollars a month 

And just imagine a world where we’ve got those assets, we’ve got that cash flow in a place where it’s not subject to stock market risk. It’s predictable. It’s going to make a decent rate of return, bond-like or better. And if the market falls out, this side is protected, which means your cash flow for a good period of time is protected, that $5,000 a month that you need to live the retirement life you want to live. 

And so, I imagine that for a second, if you got that covered, are we as stressed out or are we as worried if the market does have issues? Well, no one likes to lose money. But if I know my cash flow is covered for the next five to 10 to 15 years, you know, it makes the ability to ride out some of the storms that are going to come our way in the stock market. 

A little bit easier and so that’s where that asset allocation I mean asset location comes from, so we talk a lot about having an income and safety bucket and then having our growth 

bucket our growth bucket is various strategies inside of the stock market as well as in the world of private investments and then in the income and safety bucket we talk a lot about assets that are principle protected that are really there for two reasons and that’s why we call it income and safety it’s there to drive my income for a period of time 

so that I’m never worried about where that’s coming from. And also, it’s there for safety to offset the amount of risk that I’m taking in the growth bucket. When you blend those two together, those two buckets back together, now we’ve got a really reliable plan when it comes to how much risk we’re taking. And it’s really reliable in the sense of… 

this year it’s war and in 2020 it was the pandemic and you know a couple years from now it’ll be something else and so we’ve got a very nice plan in place that whatever comes our way we don’t have to necessarily react. 

too much because we’ve got this this plan kind of already in place for whatever could be coming our way so that’s a long-winded answer to say well how do we handle these conversations but that’s kind of what it is and so uh radon you want to talk a little bit about uh one of those two buckets and kind of help people understand what’s going on inside of them yeah I just had a couple in um yesterday actually and they 

when we what we do uh as a part of what when we’re getting to know somebody is we will take their current accounts and their current holdings and we put it into if you want to call it a simulator and in that simulator it basically says how would your portfolio have reacted in 2008 how would it have reacted in 2020 or in 2022 and then it scores it or gives it a score 

And that score, I always relate to like a speed limit sign. So, the faster or the higher the number, then the more speed it has to it. So that means it can make really big returns in an upside market, but it can actually drop off a lot in a downside market. To give you some context, the S&P 500 scores at a 71. 

Now, remember what I told you about the S&P. If I were to ask you or tell you what the max drawdown of the S&P 500 is, it’s what I just told you about in 2008. About 55% is what we saw at pullback. So, if I’m going to be in the S&P with no thresholds and I’m just going to do what the S&P does, I’m going to make really good on the upside years, but I’m going to go. 

I could have some pretty drastic return or fallbacks. And I always ask folks, I mean, how would you feel if your portfolio was down 55%? And I mean, I don’t care who you are. There are very few people I’ve ever met who said, yep, I’m good with that. Let’s just go with that risk. And so, what we talked about is like, look, we want to invest, and I’m going to talk about the growth bucket, but I mean, we want to invest to be able to make a good rate of return. And sometimes we get some folks in that says, no, I understand volatility. 

Don’t want 50% declines, but I am okay. I want to get good rates of return. And so what we talked about with them is like, look, what we can do is we can, what we do actually in our growth portfolio is we take a few different types of investments that really aren’t talking at the same speed, but they give us good rates of return. But because they’re not talking to each other or they don’t react at the same way that each other does, it lowers our volatility a lot. 

So, I’ll just describe it to you for a second in our growth portfolio. So, let’s just take it our most risky portfolio. Now, remember, I told you the S&P 500 has a score of 71. So, what if I would like to get returns similar to the S&P 500, but I’d like to lower my risk score? How can I do it? Well, what we would do is we would take three different elements and put a lot of diversity into it. But the number one is our core strategy. 

Now, our core strategy is going to be somewhere around 50 different stocks. And the purpose of those stocks and the reason why we’re using stocks is twofold. One, if I buy individual stocks, my costs are really low. I’m not buying a fund that has a cost on it. So, I keep my portfolio costs down. But now what I’m going to do is I can actually, I can. 

pretty much be what the market is. So if I want to be like the S&P 500 or if I want to be like the S&P 1500 or I want to be like the NASDAQ, we are really going to kind of probably be, you know, most of our portfolios are going to be that S&P 1500. So, but that part of the portfolio is just going to do what the market does. So, it has that kind of exposure. So, I’m going to do really good in the upsides and I’m going to have some volatility on the downsides, right? But that’s looking forward. 

But then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take another section of the portfolio and we call it our tactical part of the portfolio, which means it is designed to say, hey, I would like to make sure that I’m doing pretty good in up markets, but I want to hedge against downside markets. And so, it’s a little bit more conservative. It’s not going to see the significant downturns when the market drops. And so that offsets the risk quite a bit from my core strategy. 

and then what we do and this one is probably one of the biggest things that I think really makes this portfolio do really well but actually lowers the volatility a lot is we add another layer to it which is what we call alternative investments or private investments and in that private investment world we’re going to have things like private equity private debt 

We’re going to have different types of alternative investments that are not correlated to the stock market. So, if the stock market’s down 10%, my alternative part of the portfolio is not going to have that same volatility. It does have risk, but it’s a different type of risk. I always tell people a private investment, easiest one to think about is your home. Can your home lose value? Absolutely. 

But it’s not going to lose value like the stock market would. It’s much more stable. But if I buy right types of investments, I can do pretty good. In our alternative investments, it did really good in 2025, as an example. And it does pretty good in a lot of the years. But I just don’t have that volatility. So now imagine if I’ve got two sections of my portfolio that’s going to do pretty good. 

on the up markets, but it’s not going to have that downside exposure that I would have in the stock market. I’ve only got one part of my portfolio, the core part that could have that. So, what does it look like? Well, if I do that, what I just described to you, I’m going to take my score from 71 down into the 50s. Now, what that means is, is that I am going to do pretty good on the upside, but I’m going to significantly reduce my downside. 

That’s what we’re all trying to achieve. But that takes a lot of work. It takes a good team of people helping build all this out, watching it on a regular basis, making sure that it’s managed correctly. Now, that’s just my growth part of the portfolio. And that’s why our clients understand they are very well diversified, true diversification. 50 stocks are diversified, but that’s not diversified by itself. We have to diversify against different types of asset classes. 

with it not just being stock or bonds, right? On those things. Now, if you take that and you marry that. 

to our income safety bucket, man, do we have something that is going to do really well. So, Murs, if you want to talk a little bit about that income safety bucket and then how that marrying together really just makes a big impact. Yep. So, the income and safety bucket today is primarily driven by fixed index annuities. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk about the annuity space and how it works. 

At the end of the day, what we position it as is really something that’s going to build safety into our investment structure, which creates reliability, but also, it’s got to have the ability to make a decent rate of return. And the benefit or the scenario that we’re in right now that’s creating a good amount of benefit is the fact that interest rates are still relatively high. 

And, you know, there’s going to be a lot of conversations this year as to whether it’s possible to keep dropping them. Because there’s a report that I just, you know, read today that was around inflation being… 

and actually, going up again. And so that’s a concern to the Fed on their ability to drop rates. So, all that to say is that 

Interest rates are still in a really good place to lock in some longer-term investments that are going to provide reliability, safety, and a decent rate of return. When I say decent rate of return, the experience that we’ve been seeing is we would expect this bucket to be able to earn somewhere in that 5% to 7% average rate of return. None of that is guaranteed, but just based off of how it’s been rolling, that’s kind of the expectation. If you were to say, no, I’ll just put my money in bonds. 

If you look at the historical on bonds, bonds are not doing that five to seven. And they are subject to interest rate risk. They’re subject to downside risk. In the fixed index annuity, when I’m walking someone through it, I let them know, I help them understand the acronym of FIA. So, F stands for fixed. I tell people that it’s really principal protected. So, you can’t lose if the markets were to have issues. Your principal is protected. The I stand for indexed. 

But really, at the end of the day, it’s how you’re going to earn your interest. The index you’re linked to is how you’re going to earn your interest. And the A, I say jokingly, it’s an annuity. But really, at the end of the day, to us, it’s an account. While you may have had a family member that had a different type of annuity, a guaranteed income or something like that, while those have their own space, in most cases, all we want is an account in this structure that’s going to provide the guarantee of no loss and the ability to make a decent rate of return. When we have that vehicle, 

that cannot lose and it’s going to make money uh we’ve got a place where we can draw comfortably and we’re not it relieves this pressure and in our world it’s called a sequence of returns risk it relieves that pressure away from us which is just imagine for a second all of your money is in the stock market you got a million dollars you’re pulling five thousand dollars a month out of that bucket and all of a sudden you walk through a rating just described which is a 50 downturn and now your million is 500 000. 

The decision you have to make is; can I afford to still draw $5,000 a month when I have half as much as what I started with? And that’s a tough, tough decision to make and a decision you don’t want to make as you’re entering into the fun stuff when we talk about retirement, right? 

We want to take that scenario off the table, and we want to know where our income is coming from for a very long, specific period of time. And like Raiden said, when we blend these two back together, we can go be risky on one side and go get after the rates of return that everyone’s excited about and the 10s and the 20s percent rate of return that we’ve experienced here in the last five years. We can still go get that. 

But if there is issues in the market, if there are geopolitical, if there’s inside the U.S. issues, if there’s inflation, if there’s interest rate issues, you know, whatever is headed our way, well, we’ve got our money in different places doing different things for us. 

True diversification is or what we would call asset location or reduction of volatility through different sources, however you want to phrase it, the more we have our assets doing different things for us at different times, the easier it is to write out issues like we’re sitting in today here in 2026. So, everything we just talked about, by the way, is in our book. 

The Peace of Mind Pathway. By the way, number one, best-selling, Amazon best-selling book. And so, we’re super proud of that. And we go through this entire system. So, if you want that, you can go to Amazon. It’s called The Peace of Mind Pathway. Myself, Radon Stancil, and Murs Tariq wrote the book. Or you can call the office. And if you call the office, we’ll send you one for free. So however you’d like to do it, our goal is just to make sure that you’re educated. So, reach out to us. We’d be glad to send you out a copy. 

If you have any questions, always also feel free to reach out to us. You can simply go to our website, pomwealth.net. Go to the Contact Us page. We’re glad to have a conversation. As we say always, we look forward to talking to you again next Monday. Have a great week.