The novel coronavirus is two years on, so what’s the deal with “the return to normal”? Some historical context and a few reminders.
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covid-19
The Sun Will Come Out
March 13, 2020: The novel coronavirus COVID-19 is declared a national emergency in the U.S.
In the weeks that followed, schools and businesses closed across the country as one state after another issued stay-at-home policies to curb the spread of the virus. It has been rough since then, full of ups and downs.
It’s not the end of the road yet, but an end is closer all the time, nearly in view.
Many of the routine activities we once took for granted will come back: shopping, movies, sports, travel. Some of the changes we have gone through may stick around: perhaps people will be more inclined to get takeout than sit in a restaurant, and maybe folks will consider the occasional mask during flu season. But people will likely have fresh goals and new energy.
With this, we can expect a flurry of economic activity as people go out and do all the things they have been holding off on. After the shutdown started, many households responded by saving money and paying down lines of credit. There is plenty of pent-up demand waiting to be fulfilled.
We have written before about the Roaring Twenties that followed on the heels of the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic: if things line up, we may be poised for this century’s own version.
There are no guarantees. It is possible that the market has already priced in a robust recovery following the pandemic, leaving less potential for further gains.
Still, we have reason to be optimistic. Markets aside, we all have a lot to look forward to in our personal lives. Time with friends and relatives, at favorite restaurants and vacation spots. Many of us have suffered, and not everything we lost will come back.
But as the old song goes, the sun will come out—tomorrow.
If you would like to talk about your and planning, please call or email us.
The economic forecasts set forth in this material may not develop as predicted and there can be no guarantee that strategies promoted will be successful.
Want content like this in your inbox each week? Leave your email here.
Play the audio version of this post below:
The Sun Will Come Out – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://228main.com/.
The Sun Will Come Out
March 13, 2020: The novel coronavirus COVID-19 is declared a national emergency in the U.S.
In the weeks that followed, schools and businesses closed across the country as one state after another issued stay-at-home policies to curb the spread of the virus.
It has been a rough year since then, full of ups and downs. But now things may be on the final upswing. It won’t be long until we’ll reach 200 million administered vaccine doses, with many of our most vulnerable populations protected.
It’s not the end of the road yet. It will still be at least a few months until we have effective vaccine coverage in the general population, but the end of the road is closer all the time, nearly in view.
Many of the routine activities we once took for granted will come back: shopping, movies, sports, travel. Some of the changes we have gone through in the last year may stick around: perhaps people will be more inclined to get takeout than sit in a restaurant, and maybe folks will consider the occasional mask during flu season. But people will likely have fresh goals and new energy.
With this, we can expect a flurry of economic activity as people go out and do all the things they have been holding off on. After the shutdown started, many households responded by saving money and paying down lines of credit—we have not been spending the way we used to. Soon that is likely to change, and there is plenty of pent-up demand waiting to be fulfilled.
We have written before about the Roaring Twenties that followed on the heels of the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic: if things line up, we may be poised for this century’s own version of the Roaring Twenties.
There are no guarantees, of course. Even if we do see a massive rebound in spending, the market has a lot of expectations built into it. It is possible that the market has already priced in a robust recovery following the pandemic, leaving little potential for further gains.
Still, we have reason to be optimistic. Markets aside, we all have a lot to look forward to in our personal lives. Time with friends and relatives, at favorite restaurants and vacation spots. Many of us have suffered, and not everything we lost will come back.
But as the old song goes, the sun will come out—tomorrow.
If you would like to talk about your post-pandemic plans and planning, please call or email us.
The economic forecasts set forth in this material may not develop as predicted and there can be no guarantee that strategies promoted will be successful.
Want content like this in your inbox each week? Leave your email here.
Play the audio version of this post below:
The Sun Will Come Out – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services
This text is available at https://228main.com/.
The Surprising Benefits of Hanging Out in the Gray
In psychology, “black-and-white thinking” is a defense mechanism that helps the brain cope by pushing things to their extremes. If there is a crisp division between “right” and “wrong,” things are easier, yeah? It’s not so overwhelming to decide how to behave if we can boil a situation down to two basic options.
Like a lot of fairytales, it sure does sound nice on the surface.
But so few things in life are truly black-and-white, all-or-nothing, either/or. The problem with “black-and-white thinking” is that it’s almost always a logical fallacy.
And a logical fallacy is just that: it is false, illogical. You can‘t reason with a fallacy. You reject it and find a frame that suits the situation better.
So why do people avoid hanging out in all that gray between black and white? Because gray is blurry. There are way more decisions to make when we navigate the gray.
I’m sorry to say it, but life is already mostly in the gray in-between. And it is no time for us to splinter into camps when we all could stay on the same team. Nebraskans are suffering tremendously as COVID-19 continues to move through our communities and swamp our hospitals and care systems.
What if we didn’t splinter in the face of such challenges? It is easier to hang out in the gray when we accept that we are here together. The extremes get lonely: we’d rather face reality and work through it with each other.
Across the coming years, we will learn more about the science of this pandemic and the damage it will continue to inflict even on those who survive. In the meantime, we don’t need things to be totally “black-and-white” to move in the right direction.
Stay safe enough.
Avoid unnecessary risks.
Use our resources as wisely as we can.
What do we stand to gain when we hang out in this blurry space? We get share each other’s strength in this tough time. We get to hold out some hope for the road ahead, the other side.
Clients, we’re grateful to get to work with you, even in this tough time. Have questions about your own options? Let’s talk.
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Light at the End of the Tunnel: Good News toward a Vaccine
For up there is down; for day there is night. Sunrise, sunset. You’ve heard this from us before. It’s been challenging for many of us to apply this same awareness to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the earliest cases of the virus were detected this time last year, and many of us in the U.S. have been living much more restricted lifestyles since early spring of this year.
The changes we’ve made—limiting travel, exposure, contact, among others—have been a reasonable price to pay for the possibility of preserving the health and vitality of ourselves and those around us. And yet, it’s still been a long stretch. It’s had its tough moments.
But the sun keeps rising, we continue to count our blessings, and the latest scientific developments may help provide some hope.
Following a recently completed phase of a COVID-19 vaccine trial, the National Institutes of Health reported promising results, suggesting this latest “vaccine is safe and effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in adults.”
This isn’t a victory by itself, but it’s certainly an important milestone in the journey forward. Many partners are working together to figure out the logistics: how a vaccine would be produced, stored, transported, distributed; how its effects would be monitored; and how other areas might be affected as the vaccine takes priority. All that is to say… it’s complex.
But it’s not impossible. And it’s not forever. It may feel like we’ve been traveling through a long, dark tunnel. Here’s the thing about tunnels: they’ve got exits. It’s possible that things are dark and that we’re still on our way.
Let’s keep our heads up, toward that glimmer of light ahead.
Clients, when you’d like to talk about what all this means for you, your plans, and your planning, reach out.
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How to Live in Your Life
In the spring, we checked in with friends and family as work and school and much of life was in upheaval. Some folks were struggling more than others. We talked with one friend who sat through meetings in the office about how the switch to remote work was going to be handled when (not if) the team went that direction.
“I heard what they were saying, but I didn’t believe it,” our friend said. Within days, the team was out of the office. The friend was home three weeks before it finally sank in: work had gone remote.
Have you ever felt that way? Like your body has moved somewhere but your mind is refusing to catch up?
“It just feels like I’m waiting for Monday, like we’ll be back any day now,” the friend said.
The shock of change can have lots of effects on us, and we do not fault anyone going through this thought process. It made us wonder, though… What is the pandemic teaching us about time horizons?
You’ve heard this from us before: “long-term investing” is a little redundant. as we believe better chances for success lie in longer time horizons. It’s easy to outperform a strategy for short-term goals if you’re playing the long game.
2020 has been a months-long lesson in this perspective, hasn’t it? As spring turned to summer, a lot of folks had to come to grips with the idea that we could be in this situation for a while.
We are all about taking things one at a time, about taking life one day at a time—but how would our day-to-day change if we were geared toward the long term?
“I could be here a while…”
How could that phrase change your home life? Your retirement goals? Where you want to wake up each day? Your grocery and shopping routines?
Clients, what a time of change and reckoning we’re living through. But we’d like to help you do just that: live through it. Live in it.
When you’d like to talk about this or anything else, please write or call.
Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.
HOW TO RETIRE: PANDEMIC EDITION
What a year! The events of 2020 have reached into every facet of our lives. Many careers have been changed or upended.
People working happily at advanced ages have told us they are leery of workplace exposures, so many are on leave or have retired. Others have been displaced from jobs they would have preferred to keep. And some are helping descendants cope with “distance learning” or a loss of childcare options instead of working at jobs.
One friend retired just before the pandemic, planning an ambitious travel schedule. That isn’t happening. And another, who had planned to retire, now works from home: they figure they might as well keep working, since they cannot travel or engage in activities they had planned for retirement.
No matter what 2020 has thrown at you, the basics of retirement planning have not changed. It is a five-step process. We need to figure out…
- how much money it takes to run the life we prefer,
- monthly income amounts and timing from Social Security or pensions,
- lump sums required for one-time goals or needs, like a bucket list trip or boat,
- lump sums available from savings, investments, 401(k) plans, and other wealth, and
- the sustainable monthly cash flow that might be withdrawn from net long-term investments, after the lump sums are accounted for (we help people with this step).
There are nuances to each step—options to analyze, lifestyle decision to make. Retirement planning works out best when it is a process over time. We have noticed that people learn more about their objectives and their finances as time goes on, and things change. So your retirement plan adapts and changes over time, too.
If the pandemic has shaken things up for you as it has for others—or if it has just gotten to be that time—call or email us when you are ready to work on your plans and planning. Clients, if changes need to be incorporated in your plans, let’s keep talking.
We’re glad to help.
It’s a Whole New Ball Game
Millions of us are living through new experiences. The global pandemic has affected many aspects of daily life. Sportscasters and others have used the expression “It’s a whole new ball game” to describe suddenly changed circumstances.
It seems apt now. The rate of change—and the stakes—in this pandemic can feel overwhelming and disorienting. And yet we wonder…
We humans start out knowing nothing about anything, right? Babyhood was a whole new ball game, along with getting teeth, walking, going to kindergarten, making friends (and enemies), and all the other developments in our lives.
So how is it that we have each managed to adapt and deal with this lifetime of ever-changing circumstances, coped with each and every “whole new ball game”? What lessons are there as we each deal with our current set of changes?
Some of the answers might be found in our own pasts, the things that have taught us perspective. Maybe the answers are in our goals and priorities: they could guide the way through. No matter what we each face now, the overall challenge of change remains.
We might revise the old saying and conclude, “It’s always a whole new ball game.”
Clients, if you’d like to discuss this or anything else, write or call.
Masks
Work from Where?
Location, location, location—this real estate cliché is now dominating conversations about the changing world of work. Many businesses are learning a thing or two about the value of where work happens, and many leaders have said they intend to keep at least part of their workforce remote even after we’re through the limitations of COVID-19.
We’ve been thinking a lot about locale in recent years. I picked up a snowbird routine in 2010, and we launched our digital presence in earnest in 2015. Some of our “office” staff are rarely in the office—the one at 228 Main Street, at least.
From these experiences, we’ve learned a lesson that many business leaders are grappling with now: the fundamental question may not be where work needs to happen, but how it needs to happen. We’ve even shared with you about what we call the “URL–IRL connection,” the way our work online and our work in-person go together.
Yes, right now, the pandemic is putting some clear constraints on the question of location, but it would be a pity to come away from this challenging time with the wrong lesson. It’s not that WFH (“working from home”) is universally superior to working in a company office setting. It’s not that an office is superior to a WFH arrangement.
As Forbes contributor Laurel Farrer explained, what would happen if we focused on work as a thing we do and not a place we go? The short answer is that we make decisions based on the fundamentals. What do I need to get my work done?
Clients, we will continue to adapt—to changes in our lives, to changes in your needs, and to the world around us. Wherever life takes us, our work keeps us connected to you. And we are so grateful for that. Write or call anytime.
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