The Retirement Trap: Why Your 401k Won't Save You After 2026

You know, it seems like your instinct is always to tell people to go on offense, right? To keep buying. That's kind of your mantra as I kind of gathered it. Is that accurate? Always be buying. A-B-B. Right. Why is offense still the right call for someone who's basically done accumulating and just can't afford to lose? Well, it depends on what your investing strategy is. I like to invest for cash flow. And if you're investing for cash flow, the way that you get paid is not by selling your investments, it's by owning more investments. The more investments you own, the more you get paid. And so it depends on the game that you're playing. If you build your wealth, then your strategy is different than if you're building your wealth. When you're building your wealth, always be buying. The way you build wealth is by buying investments. But if you've built your wealth and you're in retirement, it's a very different game now. For example, in Briefs Finance, we're a company. We publish research and we have tools. And everything that we have is built around three types of investors. There are growth investors. The person that just wants to see their portfolio go from $100 to say $200 or $1,000. The income investor who wants, I invest $100 and I'm making $5 in cash flow every year from that. And then there's the wealth preservation person. The person who's 62 or 75 who does not want the huge growth. They just want to not lose their money, which you're calling defensive. So you got to know the game that you're playing. That's very true. So I always kind of default to depends how old you are, right? Is a big factor. And then I guess secondarily is how far you've come along in your life. So yeah, I'll start thinking more than the agency, what you want and where you are. What if the Colonel Sanders started KFC when he was 65? 100% totally. Yeah, I mean, if you're 63 and you're like, you know what? I never took my finances seriously. I want to start investing. Go for it. Who says you're old now? I mean, go for it. People are living until 100, 110 now. You got decades ahead of you still. I guess I am. But you got to know you. I'm a little more sensitive. I guess I'm not as risk adverse as I think my audience is. So I'm sensitive to that. I'm empathetic about that. And I don't want them to take a giant leap or take this giant risk based on something that I said or nudged them towards. So I'm always kind of searching for just the diplomatic way to say it and also actually be helpful. So if someone's 62 years old, between 50, 60, and they're a little bit behind, they haven't accomplished what they wanted to accomplish financially yet. Is it just age is nothing but a number and you just invest? Well, you got to be real with where you are. If you're 55, you want to stop working at 65. How much money do you need to stop working? And there's two ways to determine what the number is. Option number one is you could say, I need $10,000 a month, hypothetically. Option number two is you could say, I need $2 million. Which one is it? Is it I need a certain amount of income? Or do I need a certain amount of assets? If you need $2 million, now the question is, how long will these $2 million last you? And what many people say is follow the 4% rule, which is you can pull out, sell essentially 4% of your assets every year. So if you have $2 million, you get $80,000 a year. That's the general rule of thumb. So figure out how much money you need and now how far away are you? If you need $10,000 a month in income and you have $8,000 a month in income right now and you have 10 years to get it, you're not that far away. If you are needing $10,000 a month in income and right now you have $44 a month in income, you better get more aggressive. You have to take on more risk. You have to figure out how you're going to bridge that gap. I think a lot of people, they want the, it's okay, it's going to be just fine. Well, sometimes you know what you need to kick in the butt and realize, math and dollars are not emotional. It doesn't care how old you are. It doesn't care how hard you worked. It doesn't care how whatever you feel. It is what it is. And so there are many ways to now figure out where you need to go. You can go to any calculator on the internet and figure out what your wealth number is and now figure out how far you are away. And if it's, you need more, you got to be willing to take on more risk. I mean, there's three things that will determine how wealthy you become, how much money you invest, how much time your money has to grow and the rate of return on your money, period. There's nothing else that will determine how much wealth you have. And so either you can invest more money, you can give your money more time to grow, or you can get a better rate of return. And now you determine what are you going to do in order for people to grow your wealth. There's so many people sitting on the 3%, 4% mortgages. And now that I know that Rich Dad Poor Dad was the big pivotal book for you, I imagine we're probably come from the same school that there is good debt out there. And based on that type of long-term fixed debt at these low rates that we have and inflation doing what it's doing, we know the long-term math is going to work in our favor by holding onto that debt. Where do you draw the line there for someone that is kind of thinking, invest extra money and pay off the house, or should I hold onto the mortgage and invest the extra money? Yeah, so actually I've met with Robert Kiyosaki multiple times about this, and who's the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. Him and I actually kind of disagree on this. I think all debt is bad debt. People misinterpret what I say when I say that, but let me clarify. I don't say you shouldn't use debt. But if you don't treat your debt as bad debt, what you think is quote-unquote good debt, if you don't nurture it, it's going to turn around and bite you in the butt. And it's going to turn nasty really fast if you don't know how to use it. And so this is where it's very clear like you're talking about good debt versus bad debt. What people say is they're talking about consumer debt versus business debt, asset debt. Now, I am not a fan of any sort of consumer debt. I don't like financing cars. I don't like the idea of financing vacations, financing sofas. I think that's all stupid. If you have credit card debt, the first thing you need to do is pay that off. And the reason why is let me give you a simple scenario. If I give you $8,000 right now, and you were to invest the $8,000 today, and you never touched the $8,000 ever again, and you never invested another penny, and your money grew by 20% a year, your $8,000 is going to grow over the next 40 years, not to $100,000, not to half a million dollars, not to a million dollars, not to $5 million, not even to $10 million, but to $11 million. Now, you're going to hear that and say, OK, Jaspreet, that sounds great. I can find $8,000 somewhere. Where do I get those 20% returns? And the reality is you are not probably going to get those returns. But do you know who is? Amex, Visa, MasterCard, Discover. And you're the one that's paying it. The first thing is you got to pay off the credit card debt, because that's the money that you're putting in their pocket. You're working hard to make them rich instead of making yourself rich. Now, as you start to allocate your money towards your investments, you got to make that decision. Well, what am I going to do with my money? Am I going to invest in stocks? Am I going to invest in real estate? Am I going to invest in gold, cryptocurrencies, private equity? Or am I going to pay off my debt? And the first thing is you want to take a look at, well, what type of debt do you have? How high is the interest rate? And the first thing I talk about is if it's a double interest rate, debt 10% or higher, pay that off first. But now when we talk about a mortgage at 4%, when the stock market has averaged 10% a year, the question starts to become a little bit different. Or if it's a car loan at 6%, while the stock market has grown by 10% a year, it's a little bit different. Now, I don't like consumer debt, but you have to make that decision now of what's right for you depending on where you are in today's economy. Because the stock market has averaged 10% a year, which means sometimes it goes up by 20% a year. But sometimes it goes up by 3% a year. Sometimes it goes down by 20% in a year. And you don't know what's going to happen over the next year. But when you pay off the car, it's a guaranteed 6% return. When you pay off the house, guaranteed 4% return this year. So it goes back to knowing where you are on your financial journey. If you're somebody who says, I just want to, I don't want to worry about money anymore. I'm done stressing about money. I hate worrying about my bills. Well, then paying off that debt is going to give you a lot of that relief. If you're somebody that says, you know what, I want to be rich. I want to fly first class. I want to stay at the nice hotels. Well, now you got to be willing to take on some more risk. And that's where now you can start to make that decision for yourself. Then you can also take a look at, well, what is your experience level? And how, you know, how involved are you with your investments? Now, if you say, uh, I've never, I don't even know what the stock market is. Well, the simplest place to start investing is just pay off some of that debt. As you start to learn, there's no one size fits all. I say personal finance is personal because what's right for you is not right for me. So I get that and it all totally logical. And I don't disagree with anything that you said. Now, when you go and take into account what our dollar is doing, what the Fed is doing, what the inflation is doing, how do you factor that in or do you at all? I mean, at the end of the day, that's why you want to invest. Now, again, let's do the math first. Then we'll talk emotion because you have to understand both. I buy a half a million dollar house today with a 6% mortgage. Well, that 6% mortgage or 7% mortgage is locked in inflation. I don't know what that is right now. It's 4.2 or whatever percent. Is it going to go up to 5, 6, 7%? Or is it going to go down to 2%? We don't know. We know the government's going to keep printing money. We know the dollar is going to keep losing value. The house will hopefully go up in value. And if you can get a mortgage on it, that principle, the added equity is all yours. But that debt comes with risk. And so now you have to value in that risk with whatever it is that you do. The way you beat inflation is by investing your money, period. Debt amplifies whatever you do. So if you're right with your debt, if you finance real estate, you get to make more money. And it has helped some people become incredibly wealthy. Donald Trump is one clear example of that. If you are bad with your debt, you don't know how to invest your money, you make bad investments, well, screw inflation. Not only did you lose your money, but you have to pay that money back plus interest. So now you get screwed with inflation, you lost the investment, and you lose the interest. So debt amplifies risk. Risk can help you make money. If you don't know how to do it, you're going to lose even more money. You have to know yourself. And that's where, you know, starting off, avoid that debt. Once you know what you're doing, if you know how to invest in real estate, you can see what you're doing, use debt to amplify what you're doing. If, you know, it's knowing where you are, starting a business, and if you take on a big loan as soon as you start and you don't know what you're doing, well, most businesses fail. And if you don't know how to go about it, you might lose even more. I remember years ago, I walked into the bank. I needed to, whatever, do some business there. I was talking to the bank manager, and he was telling me he was having this tough time because a lady came in and she wanted to buy this, like, dog grooming business for $65,000 or something like that. He was like, you know, the problem is the business is losing money. There's no IP. They don't own any real estate. She just wants to buy the business. Well, the owner could go and open up a business, the same dog grooming business, right on the other side of the street. There's nothing stopping him. There's no special protection. All she's doing is selling some random dog grooming stuff, and she's paying $65,000 for it that she doesn't have. Well, the bank, they get paid as soon as you sign the paperwork. They don't care if you can turn the business into a profitable franchise or not. They are not business advisors. It's up to you to decide if it's a good business, and if you have no experience doing it, you got to understand that life is the best experience, and life can be painful. So avoid debt until you know what you're doing. Yeah, a good point. It's really in the education of the operator, whatever you're using the debt for, right? So if you're going to real estate, for an example, and people have expressed many headaches and loads and loads of comments under my videos over the years, you know, tenants are a headache, and they tear the place up, and da-da-da-da. It was like, well, you got the wrong tenants in there, right? There's plenty of people that have done very, very well with real estate, and just because you had one bad experience, maybe it was the operator and not the actual investment class. And you could draw that same thing to wherever you're going to use the debt. You want to be an educated operator. Yeah. And I know you've said something like that. I have some notes over here about being the educated investor. You always say that the system rewards the financially educated, and it punishes everyone else. So can you kind of maybe articulate a little bit more on that and get some specifics? Like, what are the legal, boring, totally available moves the wealthy use that the average person just hasn't been told about? Well, there's three laws of money, three rules of money that we should have all learned before we graduated school. Number one, the spending benefits the investor. When you go into Chipotle and you spend money, who gets rich? It's not the workers at Chipotle. It's the owners of Chipotle. But who owns Chipotle? It's the investors of Chipotle. Because the workers get the salary, but all the additional dollars of profit go into the hands of the investors. Rule number two, inflation benefits the investor. What happens with inflation? Well, now your extra guac and your extra meat and your Chipotle bowls just got more expensive. So now you go to Chipotle, you don't get that bowl for $5.25 anymore, you're paying $12 for that same bowl. And so now when you pay those extra dollars, a little bit goes to the workers because people have seen some raises over the last five years, but most people's raises, the average person's income has not kept up with inflation. So where do all the extra dollars go? Oh, they go into the hands of the owners, the investors of Chipotle. So inflation makes the investor richer. Rule number three is our economic system is designed to make the investor richer. How do I know? Well, I told you I'm an attorney, spent a lot of time studying the tax law. And what the tax law tells you is that everybody's income is not taxed the same. If you work a job, you were getting what's called earned income. And that earned income comes with the highest tax rates and the lowest tax breaks. If I go and become a doctor and I make a million dollars a year because I'm a top surgeon, I've worked my butt off, my top federal tax rate is almost 40%, plus state taxes and all that other stuff. But if you add in FICA taxes, we're looking at how about 50% of my money is going straight to taxes as a doctor. If I go and earn the same million dollars as an investor in the stock market, my top tax rate, the top tax rate is 20%. If I go and make the same million dollars in real estate, I might pay 0% of the money in taxes because of depreciation deductions, because of the 1031 exchange deduction. So it's not how much money you make, it's how much money you keep. But the investor is the one that gets to keep more of their money, not the employee. Why are we never taught that? Things that make you go, hmm, right? The system, it doesn't work without the people that don't do it, right? The system is designed to keep people poor. It's very unfortunate. That's the way it works. Banks profit when you're financially stupid because they get to keep you in debt. Banks profit when you are in debt. Corporations profit when you spend your money. The more money you spend, the richer they get. You spend money with debt, they get richer. The government profits when you're financially stupid because now you pay the highest taxes. The people who pay the highest tax rates are employees, not investors. You profit when you're financially educated. The expression, don't fight the Fed. Do you agree with it? And if you do, how are you aligning yourself with the Fed these days? Well, I follow a simple strategy. We talked about this earlier. A, B, B, always be buying. Here's the reality. Markets go up, markets go down. Markets can be manipulated, period. When people say don't fight the Fed, what that means is the Fed can open up the money printer and pump up the markets. We've seen that happen. Take a look at 2020. 2020, the market was going through the fastest stock market crash that we have seen since the Great Depression. Then the Fed opens up the money printer and we saw the fastest stock market boom in the history of time. So think about that. In the same year, we went from the fastest stock market crash in the history of time to the fastest stock market boom in the history of time in a matter of months. So this is where people say don't fight the Fed. My philosophy is very simple. Always be buying because we don't know what the Federal Reserve Bank is going to do. And people can predict and try to guess it. And when they say don't fight the Fed, that means just keep buying investments. And generally, yeah, always be buying. That's what I mean. But sometimes the Fed also screws things up. And so when people just try to follow what the Fed does, sometimes the Fed can be wrong. And they've been wrong many times. And so I don't try to follow what the Fed does or try to just chase what the Fed does. That's trading. I'm just buying investments. Take a look at what the Fed did in the 1970s, in the early 1970s. 1971, President Richard Nixon takes a dollar off of the gold standard. Money starts to be printed. Inflation is at 4-ish percent. 1972, Richard Nixon's up for re-election. And all the election stuff is happening. And he says, we need to do lower interest rates. We need to put a lot of pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates, despite the fact that there was a lot of money printing happening. Inflation fell to around 3-ish percent in 1972. But the Fed listened. Arthur Burns, he was the chairman of the Fed then, cut interest rates, stimulated the economy. Then what happened? Well, fast forward towards the end of the year. And now inflation went from around 3 or 4 percent to 12 percent. It tripled. And now the Fed had to come in, the new Fed under a new chairman by the name of Paul Volcker, he jacked up interest rates, not to 5 percent, not to 10 percent, not to 15 percent, to about 20 percent, causing pain in the economy, pain in the stock market, pain in unemployment as a way to save the dollar, as a way to save the economy against inflation. So yeah, I mean, you can follow the Fed and do all that. But at the end of the day, I follow a very simple philosophy. ABB, always be buying. So always be buying. I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that you lean a little bit more towards the stock market. I lean a little bit more towards real estate. What's a good balance there, do you think? I wouldn't say I lean more one or the other. In fact, I think I own more real estate than I do stocks. You know, I'm pretty sure I own more real estate than stocks. OK. Stocks are more accessible. Real estate is a lot more hands-on. Now, I don't manage my real estate. I have a manager that does it. But buying a property is a lot of work. Even though I have a great team. It took me years to build a good team. But still, buying a property is a lot of work. I got to look through properties. I got to walk through the property. I got to go through the legal process and do all that work. It's a lot of work versus buying a stock. It's a few pushes of a button. And now with AI, it's become even easier. I'm going to release something to you that we've been working on in the back. And I've never told anybody about this publicly. But guess what? We have built and are building tools to make investing a lot more automatic with our AI. Because our AI understands our investing methodology. And then you can understand your investing methodology, what it is you want to invest in. Then you can just set the rules. Now your money can be invested automatically. It's so much more accessible with the stock market. I believe in diversification because I want to protect myself against myself. And that's why I diversify. Now for me, diversification is investing across different asset classes. So I invest in my own business, briefs, finance, real estate, stocks, speculative investments, that's startups and crypto. And then gold, 2% gold, 18% speculative, 30% stocks, 50% real estate. So that's what I do. I don't recommend what I do to anybody else. But you got to find what works for you. Start with one first. The mistake that people make is, I bought one stock, I'm going to buy one real estate. Start with one thing. You go to one thing first and then you can look at what's next. Got it. I was asking my next question was, gold, how does that fit into your mix? So you said 2%. Yeah, I don't look at gold as an investment. Me neither. I look at gold as a way of saving hard money. I don't care about what the price of gold is. It's just an insurance. And he doesn't care about predictions or concern about the value of our dollar. I think there's obviously risks to the dollar. Like what Ray Dalio says, every empire has a start date and an end date. Every human has a born date and an end date. It's a matter of when. And so, yeah, there's obviously risks to the dollar. But we can't control what's happening outside. All we can control is, well, how do we invest our money? And how do we find opportunity with it? So you don't really have an opinion, not preparing for that or hedging against that or just in case type movements you're making? My investments are built in a way that I want to be able to win no matter what happens. And anytime something bad happens, I think there's opportunity. I own international investments. I own real estate. I own some gold. When bad things happen to the dollar, those can benefit. When I also believe, I'm a strong believer in the American economy. The American economy is booming. So, you know, it's just bulls. There's a saying, bulls make money, bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered, which means there's the people that get greedy. They're the ones that lose. So, you know, there's ways to make money if you believe the American economy is going to boom. There's ways to make money if you believe the American economy is about to collapse. It's just the people that get greedy and don't really manage what they're doing. They're the ones that lose. People that get very emotional. Investing in money is hard. And on this channel, I teach how you can start investing your money yourself. But for some of you, working with a financial advisor, somebody who is a professional, will be a better option because now it's more hands-off and you can work with a professional who will manage and invest your money for you. And that's why I partnered with my sponsor, Money Pickle. The reason why I like Money Pickle is because first they get to know you and what your needs are. And then they match you with a vetted financial advisor who would be best suited for your needs. And then they give you a free consultation call with the financial advisor. That way you can get a feel of the financial advisor and see if they're right for you or not. That way you don't have to go through a high-pressure sales process with somebody who might not even be a good fit for you. If you're interested in learning more and you have over $100,000 in assets, the process is pretty simple. All you have to do is complete a short form. I have that link for you down in the description. It takes a few minutes to complete. And once you do that, Money Pickle will review your answers and then pair you with a vetted financial advisor who they believe is best suited for you. It's a completely free process. That initial consultation, again, is free. And then if you decide to move forward, then you can negotiate and discuss what your rates and terms look like with that financial advisor directly. So if you want help managing your money and you wanna work with a vetted financial advisor, my sponsor, Money Pickle, can help get you paired up with a financial advisor at no additional cost. So if you wanna learn more, I have that link for you down in the description. So when it comes to always be buying, what are you excited about right now? What are you buying more of than you normally would have or have been in the past? I've already kind of went over the different things that I'm buying, the different asset classes, but I like to look for shifts because I think there's three big shifts happening right now. Shift number one is de-dollarization, like you've been talking about. Shift number two is economic concerns with our national debt, with AI changing the economy, with inflation. And shift number three is about how our economy is going to respond with the changes at the Federal Reserve Bank. Each one of these changes, shifts, mean money is going to move. They all create opportunities. I mean, with de-dollarization, understanding now which countries are looking to rapidly grow their economies and looking to rapidly compete against the United States, how can you find opportunities there? When you start to think about concerns about the American economy, what are ways that you can find opportunities there? And so it's all about now understanding where the shift is happening and how this can create movements of money. Right now, everybody's talking about SpaceX, space investments. I call that investing based off of news. What we did at our firm was last year, President Trump signed an executive order in August of 2025 about allocating more money towards space and exploration. Then he signed the one big beautiful bill act, the tax bill that also allocated more money towards space. So we were publishing research to our investors about how we believe that this is going to create an investment in space. So we were buying space investments in August of 2025. Everybody's talking about it in June and July of 2026 after SpaceX went public. So it's investing based off of research, which is what I like to do, as opposed to investing based off of the news. You know, I've asked you certain things. I'm kind of noticing a pattern and maybe you just kind of disrupted my question here. But we talked about inflation. We don't know what that's going to do. We talked about the stock market. We don't know what that return is going to give us. Talk about the dollar. We don't know what that's going to do. At what point are you actually making your decisions? But you kind of maybe just answered it there. But what other types of research do you do where you find that it's valid enough to where you're not really guessing that you're actually making a solid, educated investment or decision? Well, we find where the money is moving. I mean, you want to go where the money is moving, not where it was. Right. So that's where I'm getting at. Are you just kind of like, you wake up every day and you're like, okay, where's the money moving today? Or do you think in a year out, two years out, like this is where the trend is going? When does the actual decision get made for you? When do you feel comfortable making that? Well, I don't think there is like a black or white. Everything is kind of a different shade of gray. You know, it's something that we do all the time. We have a team of analysts. This is what they do all the time. So it's not like a, oh, today I'm going to invest $50 here or $50 here. Again, I follow ABB, where money is always being allocated towards investments. But then when I believe, oh, okay, there's a shift happening that we believe is going to create a long-term investment, then we will invest there. I'm not a trader. I'm an investor. So you want to find a shift and then you want to find an investment within that shift that you believe is a good investment. And then you want to see when that investment comes a good price. You know, there's three stages to that. So you find a shift, you find the company, and you find the price. I like it. Yeah, I was really looking, hoping you had a crystal ball over there, but I guess... The dead end. I don't have that. When you find one, let me know. Every stock market analyst on Wall Street says that the stock market should be crashing. We have a full-blown war going on. Oil prices are skyrocketing. The job market is down and tariffs are coming back strong. But despite all of these things, the stock market keeps breaking brand new record highs.