Ep 25: Recession Strategies For Your Retirement Account
The X's & O's
When the market goes down, many people panic and want to take their money out of the market. This is a common reaction, but it may not be the best decision. Brent, Matthew, and Josh discuss various strategies you can implement in your plan so you can make the most out of a down market.
Listen to the podcast episode...
The Hosts:
Brent Pasqua, Matthew Theal and Joshua Winterswyk
Transcript:
Brent Pasqua: Welcome to the Retirement Plan Playbook with Brent, Matthew, and Joshua. This is episode 25, and the topic is the best recession strategies for your retirement account, which we'll get to those in a minute. I heard you guys had played golf recently. How did that go?Matthew Theal: Well, Brent, it was incredible. I haven't been outside in a while. I haven't really done anything that fun. But to get out there on the golf course with a mask on, social distancing, the nice summer air, it was glorious.Brent Pasqua: How are they taking a social distancing measures at the courses?Matthew Theal: There's a lot of rules they have in place. You have to wear a mask when you play, which is kind of weird, but then after a while you realize you look cool on the course wearing the mask. You don't pick up your friends clubs anymore. You know how to used to help your friend out and pick their clubs up? You just leave them on the course.Brent Pasqua: Because it never hurt to pick up anybody else's clubs.Matthew Theal: Exactly. You can't touch the flag stick anymore.Brent Pasqua: The pin?Matthew Theal: The pin. Exactly. Then you can't go to the clubhouse.Brent Pasqua: Which is probably obviously the best way for them to keep any type of spread. I don't know if you had said this, but the golf carts.Matthew Theal: Oh, that's right. The golf carts. That's the best part. You know, what's awful, is playing golf with someone in your cart. You know what's great, is being by yourself playing because you just get to go right to your ball. You don't have to find your partner's ball.Brent Pasqua: Did you guys find yourself playing faster that way?Matthew Theal: Slower.Brent Pasqua: Oh.Joshua Winterswyk: It was a little slower and I think it was just nice to be outside so we were enjoying the comradery of it. But when you walked up, they had country club workers wiping down all of the carts as you're getting there. Sanitizing them, spaced apart for you to put your stuff in your cart. Their system seemed pretty good. Would you agree Matt, as far as keeping it safe and getting out there?Matthew Theal: Absolutely. It seemed incredible and I'd actually like to at least play twice a month for the rest of summer. Maybe even more. Once a week would be ideal because it was so much fun. It was a nice safe activity. I never felt like I was going to get the virus, because you're probably more susceptible to get the virus at the grocery store?Joshua Winterswyk: I agree.Matthew Theal: You are outside and on the golf course playing golf by yourself.Brent Pasqua: You know I remember hearing stories over the last like five to 10 years that usage of golf courses was just going down a lot. I have to imagine that this kind of gives it a resurgence right now.Matthew Theal: As soon as we finished, that's what I thought. I'm like, "Man, golf is about to boom." We should look at some golf stocks like Callaway or something.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, we were talking about it while we were on the course. This is what golf might have needed. We were looking at tee times for the next weekend, everything in the morning was already booked. I know LA is still not open up and it's mostly San Marino County and Riverside County, but this is exactly what golf might've needed.Brent Pasqua: Because I think of anything else right now that's sort of exercise and sports that's open right now.Joshua Winterswyk: No. I can't think of anything.Matthew Theal: Other than a Peloton bike, right?Brent Pasqua: Yeah. I guess if you're listening and you play golf, if you haven't started getting out there, I guess one of the recommendations is get out there and get some fresh air and go play.Brent Pasqua: One of the things, staying on sports, did you guys watch the Michael Jordan documentary up to this point yet?Joshua Winterswyk: I'm not all the way caught up so don't spoil it for me. No spoiler alerts on this podcast.Matthew Theal: You just ruined my recommends, man.Brent Pasqua: Sorry. You know it is just so fascinating to watch somebody who's just so dynamic and who's just so into his craft. I just wonder, I don't know really what the backstory is. Do you know what the backstory is, Matt or Josh? How they came up with or why they took so long to release it?Joshua Winterswyk: I think that he had the footage. Somehow he had the rights to all of the footage and it wasn't until I think 2016 when LeBron won that championship that he said, "I'm ready to release this now. "I don't know if it was more of a competition thing. I know he's talks about him being so competitive, but the world kind of thinking that LeBron is one of the best maybe motivated him. What I read is during that parade is when he called the producers and said, "I'm ready to release this footage" was during that 2016 championship parade for LeBron.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. I think one of the most captivating things about the whole documentary to this point is just listening to him talk and talk about recapping what some of those conversations that he had or some of those games were.Brent Pasqua: It's amazing to me. Athletes just have this memory of so many specifics of every game. They play how many games and they just remember the fine detail of each game. It's incredible.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, I agree.Matthew Theal: Absolutely.Brent Pasqua: How do you guys think that people are going to really take summer vacations? Are you planning on taking a vacation? How are you going to take a vacation? There's not a lot of flights going out. You're not going many places. How are you going to decompress this summer?Matthew Theal: I haven't thought that far, man. For me personally, I just, I don't see travel as being worth it. We're out here in Southern California, so maybe a trip to the beach, trip to Palm Springs, but right now when I drive out from LA to my parents' house or my wife's parent's house, it feels like a vacation.Joshua Winterswyk: We haven't really discussed too many future plans. One thing that's coming up for me is my one year wedding anniversary, so we both kind of agreed that it's not going to be a really long distance vacation or somewhere we're getting on a plane for. I guess it's more about trying to think of some creative ideas for future vacations, but nothing really set or nothing really that we've talked about that we've planned.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, I think people are at the point where they want something to look forward to and schools are getting close to wrapping up. You want to put some vacations on the calendar for the summer, but it just seems impossible to plan too far ahead.Brent Pasqua: I feel like you can only plan a week or two at a time right now. Just nobody knows what's going to go on in the future. It just seems like it's impossible. Getting on a flight and going to a hotel right now just seems nearly like it's not going to happen obviously.Joshua Winterswyk: Right.Brent Pasqua: Quick other question. Would you actually trust the vaccine that would be potentially coming out or would you just wait until herd immunity happens? I feel like if they get a vaccine and then by that time it's going to take enough time and there's enough people that caught Covid and gotten through it.Brent Pasqua: If enough people get vaccine and you still stay safe and enough people have gotten it, then you kind of get to that herd immunity spot. Obviously I'm not a doctor or scientist, I regret. I don't know that to be factually true, but would there be reservations on taking a vaccine? I know you guys aren't big flu shot guys.Matthew Theal: I don't think I would take it to be honest. Not a lot of upside.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. I feel like you get to the herd immunity stage, right?Matthew Theal: Yeah. Also everyone's talking about a vaccine. Don't really know if there's going to be one. I think that's kind of wishful thinking. Most likely the virus will just die out with time.Joshua Winterswyk: I think though being young and depending on your health situation, like what would be the rush if you're young and healthy? I wouldn't be in a huge rush to be the first one to try a vaccine. It's kind of like a waiting for the iPhone to fix its glitches before you buy it. I'm not in a rush to go do that. So I would definitely be on the side of waiting.Matthew Theal: That's a good point.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, I get my flu shot every year. It's something that I really need to do, but once this comes out, it does give me much reservation that... My kids are vaccinated, but just sticking a vaccine into my kids or myself that's just so new. That just gives me a massive amount of reservation. But again, we can only plan so far.Brent Pasqua: Let's move on to some hot takes in the news right now. Staying on Covid, should the US start to ease social distancing requirements, Matt?Matthew Theal: Hot takes. This sounds like a new segment. Yeah, I do. I think the US needs to really start easing up the social distancing requirements right now, especially in some of those States where there's not a lot of cases.Matthew Theal: The biggest statistic that people need to start looking at is percent of positive tests and that's been rapidly declining in the US since April and in certain states it's extremely low, one to two percent. We're at a point where the longer the economy stays closed, the more long-term damage you're going to do. You're going to end up impacting more people from a poor economy than you are from actually getting the virus.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. I feel the country is very divided on their feelings about this. You're starting to see protests that are becoming more dense. You're having more of a political divide for whatever reason, this has become so political now almost. It's either, there's all these people that are like, "No, we need to stay in longer. Let's follow the science. Let's take care of our health", and then all these other people that are like, "Get this economy back going and get it back fast." It seems like we're very divided.Matthew Theal: Yeah. I mean I say let those people do it though, right? I'm personally, if they opened the economy, not going to go out to a restaurant and die. To me, it's not worth the risk. To someone else though, it might be.Matthew Theal: I'm not going to go to a gym. Did you see that New York Times article out the other day about places where coronavirus will spread the most?Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah.Matthew Theal: Gym's like the highest one on there. I'll just work out in my house or go for a run. I don't need to go to a gym.Joshua Winterswyk: But I think there's been enough time for us to actually be smart about the easing, right? We kind of see, like Matt said, there's the research now about where it spreads fastest, all of our precautionary measures, we're now comfortable with them how-to's. I think that with a lot of the time that's passed and starting to ease is going to be beneficial.Joshua Winterswyk: Especially for a lot of these small businesses. Even Mother's Day weekend's such a big weekend for small businesses and they're going to struggle. They wait for this weekend and who's to say now we don't have the tools and the knowledge to do curbside pickup for small businesses that are selling products or services or anything like that. I'm definitely on the side of we should definitely smartly start to ease the social distancing requirements.Brent Pasqua: My feeling is that every business, business owner, CEO has had the last two and a half months to really start thinking about and planning about once they start reopening how to do it safely and comfortably. It's not like it's just being thrown on every business. Even us, for our business we've thought of many ideas of what we need to implement to get our business back, get people back in the doors and just different ways that we could do it.Brent Pasqua: I think there's been enough time that each business should take the right measures and they can open. Michigan was very strict on the measures that they put. They shut down parts of their stores where people couldn't go to. Why don't you just limit the amount of people that go in the stores and leave all of that open? I think just some people got so extreme. Companies are smart, America's smart, our country is smart, we have smart people running businesses. If we're just smart about it, if every company is smart about it, most businesses should be able to open in some capacity.Matthew Theal: Right.Joshua Winterswyk: I agree.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, and I was even thinking about all the different suites in our building. If you're a company that can telecommute, you don't have to work in the office, let the people in your building who need to be there, let them work. If you can work at home, the other businesses can stay home. You could almost spread it out very carefully. Minimize, actually how you are social distancing in business in a sense. I think we are ready to get back to those things.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, agreed.Matthew Theal: Absolutely.Brent Pasqua: Another hot topic, oil traded negative a few weeks ago. It was the first time it's ever traded negative in our history. I'm curious to see what you guys would think about how this will actually impact people's everyday life and is buying oil a good investment?Matthew Theal: That's a crazy story, huh? People that are mystified like, "How could it trade negative?" Essentially what that means is if you're buying a commodity like oil you have to take delivery of it at the end of the month. That means someone will come to your house and they'll literally drop a big old barrel of oil off, right?Matthew Theal: There's no more storage for oil because there's literally no demand for oil in the month of March and early April so all the storage facilities were filled up, right? What that's essentially saying with the negative prices is it means that someone who owns the oil is willing to pay you to store it. If you can figure out how to store it, they'll pay you.Brent Pasqua: Right, because literally this pandemic has wiped out what, a third of global demand right now? When all that demand stops and you're still pumping or you still have all that excess oil, literally there's nowhere for them to put it.Matthew Theal: Right. Then the answer to your next question is buying it a good investment. You see a lot of people who have that kind of investor mentality, they see something at negative or low prices and they think it's automatically a smart investment or a good buy. "I want to buy this, it's negative. It has to go back up. I put oil or gasoline in my F-150." To me that answer's no unless you're a commodities trader and you have experience trading oil. What do you doing man? You're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.Joshua Winterswyk: That's a lot of who's buying. We're talking about Robinhood released the information that it's mostly retail clients that are buying the ETF that tracks the oil prices. What does that say? Just because the price went low, they'll buy. What if the fund just collapses?Matthew Theal: That's a possibility.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah. If you're saying, "What's the worst that could happen? It'll eventually go up", well, if you're buying a exchange traded fund that's tracking the price, well what if the fund's not there anymore? What happens to your money?Brent Pasqua: My feeling is, what happens if the demand for oil never comes back? What happens if demand is so low for so long because so many less people are driving. Our earth has become more healthy, essentially, during this time. What happens really if we never really get that much more dependent on it again, where we become that much more energy efficient during this time? That demand could essentially never go back to where it was.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah. Or stay this low for a long time, which is even lower than when oil actually was first produced and sold, which is crazy.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. You could see this trickling effect having a three, five, seven year process and if companies advance and continue to advance in energy efficiency, we never may depend on it at these levels ever again.Matthew Theal: Right. Yeah, absolutely.Brent Pasqua: So to your thought, oil may not be the best investment I guess.Joshua Winterswyk: I have to cosign on that.Brent Pasqua: Airbnb announced it laid off 25% of its workforce. Tell us a little bit about what's happening with Airbnb. I think it's absolutely fascinating. It's such a newer market over the last five years. What's happening with their company?Matthew Theal: Yeah, Josh and I went back and forth about this on the last podcast, but Airbnb is really, really struggling right now. Some areas are not allowing people to book Airbnb, some cities and local government. That mixed with the fact that people are staying at home because they're social distancing is killing the hosts.Matthew Theal: The people who rent out properties to you are called hosts and a lot of those hosts, what they ended up doing is they did the rental real estate tactic, right? They took the cashflow property from one house and used that to buy another then another. Before they knew it they had portfolios, five to 20 different Airbnb rentals that when vacations are happy and rental season's good, they're making a ton of money. Well now the rental season is not good and they're getting crushed because they got to make a mortgage payment on however many Airbnb homes they have.Matthew Theal: So Airbnb the company itself though is now hurting because they have zero revenue and they just announced that they're laying off at least 25% of their workforce, which is truly sad because the company was planning an initial public offering for this year and that's been delayed now. All of these employees who thought they were going to cash out their stock options now are not, and they don't have a job. It's probably one of the saddest stories that's coming out of this recession that's not death.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, that's got to be a major blow to employees who have been there since the beginning who had their stock options that they can't cash these in now.Matthew Theal: Yeah really sad.Brent Pasqua: I know that Airbnb set up a $250 million fund to compensate for lost revenue for the hosts, these people who have these houses that are the hosts. They seem to be trying to do all the right things. The founder took a salary cut, execs took pay cuts, they postpone their hiring. They seem to be taking the right measures, but it seems like they're just having to make some really tough choices on how do we get this side of the market going again.Brent Pasqua: Although as we sort of talked about and Josh, you made a point too on the last podcast, I feel like Airbnb would be the preferred method of travel once everyone gets a little bit more comfortable, possibly in the next month or two versus going to a hotel and being surrounded by a bunch of people.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, and having your own space. You can have the right sanitation steps taken in inside the home as a guest and for the host to take and you're not in this facility with a bunch of recycled air with hundreds of other people like a hotel or something similar.Joshua Winterswyk: I think there's definitely opportunity for them and you can see, like you said Brent, they're taking a lot of right steps. They're trying to raise funding to get them through this period. But it's definitely sad. Matt, I agree with you. I feel sad for the employees through this time because never in a million years I think that they would have thought this would happen.Matthew Theal: Yeah. It's actually so sad and bad that I actually looked up where they have their main offices at because I figured real estate in those economies could be depressed, especially San Francisco where it looks like the majority of their employees are housed. So it's just awful.Brent Pasqua: It sounds like the area of rentals that will come back the soonest though are the rural properties. Properties that have fresh air, maybe in the mountains or spaced out areas. You're not in densely populated areas. It sounds like those are the areas that are going to be the most desirable.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, that makes sense.Matthew Theal: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.Joshua Winterswyk: I was reading today, CNBC wrote an article though that they're feeling the crunch even more because some of the short term rental a hosts are collaborating to just launch their own service to connect to guests. It was something that a lot of the hosts were collaborating for a while. A lot of the bigger hosts with multiple properties and stuff like that.Joshua Winterswyk: That's an interesting story to keep track of. Is there even more opportunity that sees through this time now that Airbnb's struggling? Are they going to be hurting somewhere else as well in the fact of losing hosts to a different platform?Matthew Theal: All I would say to those people is good luck, man, because Airbnb is a perk. It's like how Zoom is. "Oh, we're going to jump on a Zoom or Google that. Let's grab the Airbnb for the weekend." They have way too much brand equity, but I do wish those people great luck in that strategy.Brent Pasqua: All right, let's go onto the retirement corner. It's one of my favorite corners of this show. What are some strategies people can do when their retirement accounts are down right now? Josh, maybe let's start with you on this one. What can people do right now?Joshua Winterswyk: I think just take advantage. Have the mindset of take advantage of what the market's giving you. We talked about it on a couple of previous podcasts too, but take advantage of investing maybe some cash that you have that's excess of your emergency fund. Take advantage and contribute even more into your retirement accounts and take advantage of the low stock prices and maybe even rebalance in your account to get more aggressive.Joshua Winterswyk: If you have that mindset of, "What opportunities can I take through this period?" There's a lot of different strategies that are out there right now that are going to help you in the future if you do have that mindset to take advantage of what the market's given you.Brent Pasqua: Tell the listeners again what rebalance means.Joshua Winterswyk: Rebalancing in a portfolio, to give you an example of the time right now, it can be done for a couple of different reasons, but right now the stock market's down, so your stock percentages might have changed.Joshua Winterswyk: Rebalancing, what it would be doing is selling one of the allocations. Let's take, if you have a stock and bond portfolio, you'd be selling some of the bonds and purchasing more of stocks to getting back to whatever your target rate allocation was originally.Joshua Winterswyk: The best example that I like to use too, you buy a car, you drive it, and eventually it gets out of balance. You need to realign it. That's what rebalancing really is for a portfolio and it can help with rates of return long-term if you continue to practice that strategy.Joshua Winterswyk: With that rebalance too, you can get more aggressive than what your target original allocation was as well. Take an example, if you had 40% stock in a portfolio and 60% bonds, now you can actually rebalance that portfolio to 60% stocks and 40% bonds with that transaction. Getting more aggressive in a time that stock prices are down, which could also help to lead to higher expected returns.Brent Pasqua: You know what's funny too is because a lot of these conversations I've had with a lot of people and clients on rebalancing right now, they're almost of the opposite mindset, "I don't want to buy any more stocks right now", but right now is actually the time. If you are going to rebalance where things are a lot cheaper than they were three months ago or four months ago to actually be buying more stock.Brent Pasqua: It kind of takes you to make an emotional decision that may not seem sensible right now just because of where the market is and the uncertainty. That's what really helps catapult you to better times.Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah, a hundred percent.Matthew Theal: That's human nature, man. Nobody wants to buy that brand new golf driver when it's full price, but when it's on sale, people run to the golf store to buy that driver, right?Joshua Winterswyk: Right.Matthew Theal: Same thing with stocks.Joshua Winterswyk: I always think of the time though, and I ask this question a lot to my clients, would you sell your house if it declined 30%? Most people that I've asked that question to say no. Why is it human nature to say, "Okay, well the stock prices went down but I'm going to now sell my stocks", even though you wouldn't do it with an asset like your home. Why is that different?Brent Pasqua: Yeah, stocks for whatever reason, just make people do the opposite of what they normally do in life, which is kind of interesting.Matthew Theal: Another cool strategy to look at for a certain segment of potential retirees is Roth conversions. What I mean by that is, if you're super high income, you've got a couple million in your 401k, you know you're making mid six figures, 250 or more and you most likely are going to end up with high retirement income through your RMDs, it could make sense now to do some Roth conversions.Matthew Theal: If you don't quite meet those metrics, most studies have shown that a Roth conversion really isn't going to help you. Your tax rate in retirement going to be a lot lower, especially if you just have social security coming to you and maybe a couple of thousand a month coming out of your 401k or IRA, probably a Roth conversion doesn't make a lot of sense. If you're in the upper echelon, you're that high net worth clientele, a couple million dollars in retirement accounts plus a high income in retirement coming to you Roth conversion can make a lot of sense right now.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, I have some pushback on that. I do think it does make sense for people even in lower tax brackets this year to do either Roth conversions or just take money out. Let's say you're over 72 and you have a required minimum distribution that was supposed to be done this year and you're not forced to take it.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, you don't have to take, let's just say, the 15 thousand distribution, but if you're know you're going to be in a lower tax bracket this year than you're going to be next year, why not take the five or 10 thousand out by choice and pay 15%, let's say, in a tax bracket versus taking it out next year when you could be in a 20% tax bracket because income will be higher.Brent Pasqua: That can be true for people who are just turning 60, they're not working right now, they expect to go back to work next year, their income's going to be less this year. If you can get money out of your IRA right now, and it doesn't have to be by conversion, it could just be getting it out. If you get money out your IRA at a lower tax rate right now, it may make sense to do it because you pay 15 cents on every dollar versus 20 cents on every dollar.Matthew Theal: That's a good point. Yeah. If you can look at bracket splitting and stuff, that makes a lot of sense.Brent Pasqua: One of the things that I think a strategy for people to implement that I've always felt very strong in a time like something similar to what we're in or stock prices or down is if you are contributing to a 401k plan, my feeling is every contribution that you're making out of your paycheck, whether it's biweekly, weekly or monthly, all that money should really be put into stocks.Brent Pasqua: Why buy bonds right now? Who wants to buy bonds? Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of prices when you're making ongoing contributions? You're dollar cost averaging in stocks, you really want to dollar cost average into bonds right now?Joshua Winterswyk: You can make the guess that bonds can be even more risky than they've been going forward. I guess it's hard to make an argument to buy bonds right now, in my opinion, but a lot of people in 401ks have target date funds or balanced funds and those are good tools. A lot of times they are more heavily to stocks if you're definitely younger and not reaching right to retirement, but I agree. Definitely look at where your allocations are going because stocks are or the good idea right now.Brent Pasqua: Let me make sure I clarify that specifically. I'm not talking about for listeners changing your allocations in your 401k to a hundred percent stock. That's not smart. I'm talking about just the new money that you're adding in, that first gets put into stocks.Brent Pasqua: All your new contribution money, there's a separate section when you're making your contributions that that money all goes to stocks. That should be all into stocks in my opinion because you're buying things on sale. Maybe in your 401k plan you can go change the rebalancing method in there to rebalance every six months or once a year or on a different timing because you're doing this. All of those are some, I believe, tactical strategies that can help take advantage of lower prices right now.Matthew Theal: That's a great strategy, Brent. I didn't think of that way. Good clarification because I was going to tell you, "Well hold on. Pump the brakes. Some clients should think about their risk tolerance if they rebalance all other bonds", but yeah, it makes sense. Send those contributions to stocks. Buy when they're on sale.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. Would you agree, because now we have this extension of not having to put it into traditional IRAs or Roth IRAs until July 15th that if people are making their contributions to IRAs and they still haven't done it, that they should take that same strategy, just dump that money in a majority of stocks for right now?Matthew Theal: Yeah, absolutely. It just depends though. We're almost back to where we kind of started falling back in February, right? The clients who got aggressive in March and April are really being rewarded right now and the ones who didn't, who took the conservative approach and stood are slowly getting back there as well.Joshua Winterswyk: I think looking at for you and if you're married, you and your spouse you haven't already looked for contributing last year and for this year now just getting both contributions for both years out of the way and for both parties if you are married and then using that strategy that you talked about, Brent, for all stocks and you're really maximizing that principle all in one shot instead of waiting until next year to get another contribution or anything like that. It's just a good time where you can get even more money into those IRA accounts and take advantage of the low stock prices.Brent Pasqua: I can't think of a better time for people to really be spending time doing full financial planning and doing portfolio changes because right now people should possibly be rebuilding their portfolio. Now's as good as any if your portfolio's allocations aren't right or you don't know if your portfolio is built for your timing with retirement or your financial plan. You want to hold things that you're going to hold for a long-term. Right now's a great time, in my opinion, to start rebuilding your portfolio so that it looks the way you want it to look in the long-term.Matthew Theal: I couldn't agree more. I've been doing that on my personal portfolio. I've been moving a lot of cash into stocks, I've rebuilt some of my common stock positions and then wife and I are looking for a house right now, so we've definitely been working on our plan. We're taking advantage of what's happening in the economy and really using it to our advantage, which is what people should do instead of being complacent.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. If you had a stock that you didn't want to own, you've just held it either because the tax ramifications of selling it or just the stock isn't as good of a stock as when you purchased it, right now's a good time to consider it, right? Making the change?Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah.Matthew Theal: Yeah, I have a client I'm doing that right now. We've been diversifying out of a stock that he's held for a very long time, that he got stock options through his employer and we've been diversifying it into a all stock portfolio to keep the growth and the risk level where it's at. He's getting out of it with zero taxes paid, which is really, really nice.Joshua Winterswyk: I think it's easier right now too, to actually gauge how well your portfolio is performing. It's easier to see the difference of what you should be making against what you are making in a down market than it is in an up market. When it's going up, the mindset is it's going up, everything's good.Joshua Winterswyk: In a down market, it gives kind of even more initiative to say, "Am I really doing a good job on this portfolio and should I be making changes?", because it's going to show more in the down market than it is in the upmarket in my opinion. I don't know how you guys feel but it's just a really good time to look under the microscope right now because you're going to see those flaws. They're going to show in a market like this.Brent Pasqua: Any other strategies that are on the forefront of your mind?Matthew Theal: Not really for me. The one thing I'll just keep hammering my final strategy, I know Josh hit on it as well, get aggressive when the market gets down. Let's just tattoo that on your body somewhere. Stock market down a lot, time to buy. Warren buffet always says buy America. That's the one of the greatest sayings in business or the stock market.Joshua Winterswyk: I like that saying.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. Have your money in savings. Keep money in savings for your rainy day. Build your nine months rainy day fund, but if you have the ability to buy stocks, prices are low. Things are on sale.Brent Pasqua: As we kind of round out the show and finish up right now is as good as any to do a RPA recommends. We have more time than ever. So Matthew, what do you have for RPA Recommend?Matthew Theal: I was going to go with the last dance because I think that's probably one of the better things that's on TV right now. It's such a well done show. I love the back and forth, but I'm actually, I don't know if Josh has used this on a previous pod, but Josh told me to watch Ozark on Netflix. That's a great show. Great.Matthew Theal: I didn't listen to him for a long time. I was like, "Nah, it's kind of boring" and I didn't like the first episode and I ended up finally getting through that first episode. Gosh what a great show that is. It's probably one of my top five favorite shows right now. Ozark on Netflix.Brent Pasqua: Josh what do you have for us?Joshua Winterswyk: You're welcome for the Ozark recommendation, Matt. You finally listened to me. It makes me happy. I'm smiling here now. Ozark, great show. My recommends today, since the quarantine, a few weeks after it got started, one thing that me and my wife like to do is take our dogs to our local brewery to have a beer.Joshua Winterswyk: One of the local breweries that are here in Rancho Cucamonga built a drive through to go pick up your favorite beer from them through this time. We definitely wanted to go support them, so they built a really cool drive through with a menu when you drive up. Everything's contactless, they'll even place the beer when you buy it in your truck. I just recommend supporting your local brewery through this time as well. If you are a beer drinker like I am.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, absolutely. I love supporting all small businesses right now. Everybody needs the business if you can afford to go support them. My RPA Recommended is FlavCity, Bobby Parrish. Have you guys heard of him?Joshua Winterswyk: Oh, FlavCity.Brent Pasqua: I've never been a good cook my entire life. It's just not my strong point. I just don't have the patience for cooking. But Bobby Parrish is a guy that's on YouTube, he's on social media, he's on Instagram, Facebook, and he has taught me so much about what ingredients to use, what not to use, how to create really healthy eating habits.Brent Pasqua: In this quarantine, I've just fell in love with cooking and making food with my wife and kids and it has completely rejuvenated. It's hard for me to look at a cookbook and just follow the instructions, very daunting. For whatever reason, watching a four minute video on how to do something that's short and easy, it's just been completely helpful for me to make healthy and quality foods. I recommend everybody checking them out. Would you guys agree?Joshua Winterswyk: Yeah. Yeah. FlavCity. Big fan of his too. He brings a lot of energy to his videos and his Instagram posts. You'll have to put the FlavCity link in the show notes, Brent, so clients can check him out because he's good.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, it's completely changed the way that I shop at the grocery store. When I go to the grocery store now it's completely different, which changes your eating habits. I have ingredients that I've never even bought in my whole life. I've had pans that I've never used for 10 years that we're using now.Joshua Winterswyk: Is it surprising though, some of the stuff that he tells you not to buy? There's a lot more stuff he tells you to stay away from than actually purchase as far as from a health standpoint.Brent Pasqua: Yeah, and I still find myself making mistakes at the store, but you know what? It's, it's a learning process and you just get better at it.Matthew Theal: I remember when you used to bring those white bread turkey sandwiches to the office. The transition's been incredible. This guy, this guy FlavCity, completely changed your life. He's good, check him out.Brent Pasqua: Yeah. It's been a great transition. It's been a benefit that's come out of this thing. Thanks for listening to the Retirement Plan Playbook. If you'd like to learn more about us or read our show notes, please go to retirementplanplaybook.com. Thank you for listening.Matthew Theal: Thank you.Joshua Winterswyk: Thank you.Announcer: RPA Wealth Management is a state registered investment advisor located in Rancho Cucamonga. California. 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