First, let me give you the bad news. Whatever calculation that a financial professional did for you a few years back, probably needs to be redone.
The Fed has printed (well, they actually just added it digitally) a massive amount of money. In 2020 alone, the Fed added over $3 trillion dollars (source: CNBC). That amount of capital is going to cause inflation. Lately, I started to see it in food prices. How much has your grocery bill gone up in the past year?
Here are a couple of things that I see people doing wrong.
First, most people are woefully under-invested for retirement. The average person at retirement has $165k in their 401k. That’s not going to cut it if you need to pull a 4-5% withdrawal rate from your IRA account.
Second, people are still holding a lot of cash. As I said in one of my first seminars last November, cash is a bad investment with what the Fed is doing with the dollar. It’s the law of supply and demand.
Third, realize that you have to get some return on your money. If you’re really scared, explore with a financial professional to see what products are available that can provide a risk adjusted return. For example, there are products available that allow you to benefit if the market goes up but do not go below what you invested if the market retreats.