The Stress-Free
Portfolio
Seven investments that will protect your
savings, boost your wealth, and help you
sleep at night BY TOM NAWROCKI
It’s easy enough for Warren
Buffett to tell investors
that “over the long term,
the stock market news
will be good”; his kids are
already through college.
The rest of us may not
be as sanguine about the
almost 30 percent decline in our
retirement savings, the plummeting
values of our houses, and the fear that
we might go to work tomorrow to
find that our entire department has
been sacked. In fact, the riposte from
British economist (and advocate of
government stimulus) John Maynard
Keynes is starting to seem more
appropriate: “In the long run, we
are all dead.” It’s understandable
if the only investment option that
seems attractive to you right now is
the one made by Sealy. But there’s a
problem with stuffing your cash in
the mattress: It’s too risky.
No, you won’t lose your life
savings by sleeping on it, but it
will shrink—relentlessly—year by
year. Despite the wild swings in
inflation expectations recently, the
long-term trend is that prices have
climbed by around 3 percent a year.
And even though there’s some fear
of deflation in the short term, with
the government pumping money
into the economy at a dizzying (even
Keynesian) rate, your purchasing
power will erode over time. By the
time you retire, or even by the time
today’s tweens head to college, you
will have lost significant ground.
Plus, as hard as it might be to
imagine right now, the fact is that
when bear markets end, they tend to
do so violently, with surges of 30 to
40 percent. So although the recent
ON THE MONEY
Your path to
enlightened
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