I’m really excited about today’s episode because I want to speak directly to the anxiety that so many of you are feeling — and that you’ve been sharing with me lately.
The title of today’s show is “Is a Market Crash Coming?”
It’s a question I hear often, and I completely understand why. The headlines can be overwhelming, the markets feel unpredictable, and it’s easy to wonder what’s next.
In today’s episode, I want to talk about what you can do when you start to worry about how the market is going to perform — and, more importantly, what actions you can take to protect your peace of mind and your financial future.
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Articles, Links & Resources:
S&P 500 Earnings Beat Expectations
Retirement Budget Calculator – Your Retirement Recipe
Cardboard Box Demand Is Slumping -WSJ
Cardboard Box Demand Slips – Seeking Alpha
Homeowners Refinance with Rate Cuts – WSJ
Transcript:
462 Is A Market Crash Coming?
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Announcer: Welcome back America to Sound Retirement Radio, where we bring you concepts, ideas, and strategies designed to help you achieve clarity, confidence, and freedom as you prepare for and transition through retirement. And now here is your host, Jason Parker,
Jason Parker: America. So glad to have you tuning into this episode number 462, the title.
Is a market crash coming. And I’m really excited about today’s episode because I wanna speak directly to the anxiety that so many of you’re feeling and that you’ve been sharing with me lately. And so this topic, you know, is a market crash coming. It’s a question I hear often and I completely understand why the headlines can be overwhelming.
The market feels unpredictable. And it’s easy to wonder what’s next. In today’s episode, I wanna talk about what you can do when you start to worry about how the market is gonna perform, and more importantly, what actions you can take to protect your peace of mind and your financial future. But before we get into this episode, I like to start the day by renewing our minds, and I’ve got this verse to us.
This one really caught my attention this last week. It’s from Acts chapter two, verses 14. Then Peter stood up with the 11. Raised his voice and addressed the crowd, fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem. Let me explain this to you. Listen carefully to what I say. The thing about that verse that really stood out to me was that he stood up and he raised his voice, and sometimes that’s necessary.
I’m grateful for the people in our society that believe strongly in what’s right and that they’re willing to share their opinions, that they’re willing to stand up and when necessary, raise their voice. And then of course, here’s something fun for the grandkids. What does a Jack of Lantern wear after getting poked in the eye?
A pumpkin patch. You know, the thing I love about this time of year, I got home from work the other night. My daughter had, um, pumpkin candles lit on the counter. She was making pumpkin, um, muffins with chocolate chips in them. And so my question is, what’s the best thing to put into pumpkin muffins? Teeth.
Remember articles, links, and resources, and the transcript for today’s show can be found@soundretirementplanning.com. Just click on episode number 462. So everywhere you look, the headlines are painting a gloomy picture. And here are a few of the headlines that caught my attention the last couple of weeks.
Money markets are sitting on $7.7 trillion in cash. International paper. A key player in cardboard and packaging says demand is down. And that can’t be good. I mean, I would think just by the number of packages showing up to our house from Amazon that they would be printing like crazy. But apparently demand is down gold and Bitcoin are both at all time highs.
The Fed has started cutting interest rates. The cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio. The Cape ratio is at 40, which which is near its.com peak of 44. That was back in 1999. Unemployment is rising. AI threatens to replace millions of jobs. Real estate looks overpriced in many markets and Congress can’t pass a budget, and so the government is facing another shutdown.
On a personal note, if a government shutdown forces hundreds of thousands of people to lose paychecks, the first people who should feel that consequence are our elected leaders who caused it. They should have to live with the same disruption that they’re imposing on ordinary families. And unfortunately, the way things are currently set up is that our elected leaders continue to get their paychecks.
They as if nothing happened. If we put them in the same boat, I bet we’d have a lot fewer of these government shutdowns. Now, some of those headlines create a scary narrative, one that many people believe points to an inevitable crash. But if we zoom out for a second and look at the other side of the story, here’s the case for optimism.
The US economy grew at 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025. Inflation has cooled from 9% in 2022 to around 3.4% is what they’re projecting for next year, and the Fed is expecting 3% over the next five years in August. Personal income to 95.7 billion and disposable income increased by 86.1 billion. Interest rates are falling.
That’s a double-edged sword. You know, in one instance, you know, you could say, well, it points to a slowing economy. But the good news is that it helps small businesses with financing. It helps people buy houses, and people that recently purchased a house at a higher rate now can refinance and get a lower rate.
Recent earnings for the s and p 500 companies are coming in stronger than expected. The new tax law that was signed on July 4th is going to ease the burden for both individuals and corporations, which puts more money in our pockets. AI and robotics is something I’ve been very excited about. As you know, we were one of the first movers in introducing AI into the retirement budget calculator.
We created FIN who’s trained specifically on retirement issues, things like Medicare and Social Security and IRS tax law. What those technologies are gonna do is it’s gonna replace. Unsafe and monotonous jobs, it’s not going replace purpose. It’s not gonna replace creativity in the long term. I think AI is gonna boost efficiency and profits, and I’m especially excited about humanoid robots that are gonna help us all live in our own homes that much longer without having to transition into an assisted living our nursing home.
In fact, I could see a future where Humanoid robotics completely replace this current mode of, uh, providing care for people. And these nursing homes and assisted living facilities just won’t need to exist anymore. I’m excited about cars that drive themselves, and I want to thank innovators. People like Elon Musk who had a vision and determination to work on that for 10 years.
And the engineers at Tesla and the, and the engineers at Waymo and Google. I mean, it’s incredible. It’s, it’s like magic when you’re in one of these self-driving cars. The s and p 500 is up over 14% year to date, following 25 and 26% gains in the prior two years. And new US investments are pouring in Apple 600 billion.
The new project, Stargate, which is a collaboration with SoftBank Open ai and Oracle $500 billion. Nvidia $500 billion Micron, 200 billion IBM 150 billion. Taiwan semiconductor 100 billion, Amazon 20 billion. And there’s so many more. America is being rebuilt from the inside out. And all this investment’s gonna lead to more jobs for Americans, more prosperity for Americans.
And you know, as Americans we do a lot of good around the world. When we’re prosperous it, it reflects around the globe. And I, I’m excited to see what we’re able to bring to the rest of the world as a, as a result of that prosperity. So a natural question is why are the headlines so negative? And here’s the truth.
Bad news, sell the internet. TV, radio, it’s all driven by ad revenue, and studies show that negative headlines are more likely to get clicks. In fact, one study that I read online said it was as much as 60% more clicks for negative headlines than positive ones. Fear and outrage, they keep us engaged. When there’s a car accident, we slow down to see what happened and to see frankly if we know the person that was in the accident.
Unfortunately, we’re just hardwired for drama. But zoom out over the last a hundred years and the world has improved on nearly every front life expectancy, poverty, literacy, and even global conflict. The real challenge isn’t the news. It’s how we react to it. Our brains are wired for survival to spot patterns and detect threats.
That’s why fear stories are so engaging. But as investors, this instinct for survival works against us. So a market crash is coming eventually. There’s always another one coming. That’s the price we pay for higher expected returns. Risk and reward are two sides of the same coin, but here’s the part that brings peace of mind.
While I have no idea when the next crash will come, I’m confident. About what happens over the long term. The longer your time horizon 10, 20, 30 years, the higher your odds of success. And that’s why I feel so strongly about the retirement planning we do and the investment strategies that we implement for the people that we serve and the education that we provide on this podcast.
It’s logical, it works, and it helps bring clarity and confidence in the face of tomorrow’s uncertainty. I found that there are two primary types of investors. You’ve got number one, the academics. These investors treat investing as an exercise in economics, finance, and history. They see investing for what it is, which is ownership and businesses that make our lives better.
When businesses succeed, society prospers. You can own one business like your own business. Or many through the stock market owning all the companies. A globally diversified portfolio means you benefit from the innovation of all humanity. You’re no longer betting on one idea, one CEO, or one country.
You’re betting on progress itself, and it’s hard for me to imagine a future that does not include progress. It just seems like we’re hardwired to try and make things better. This kind of academic and informed investing brings peace of mind. You’re not chasing the headlines. There’s no fear of missing out.
You’re investing for decades, not days, and that allows you to live freely with less noise, more focus on what really matters. The second type of investor are the speculators. They’re emotional, they’re momentum driven. They’re constantly buying and selling, and RA reacting to every post on X, every fed comment, every gold spike, every news headline.
It feels exciting until it doesn’t. The get in and get out game turns into endless regret because either you sell too soon and you say, boy, if I just would’ve held on a little bit longer, look how much I would’ve made. Or you hold it too long and it goes down and you say, darn it, if I, if I just would’ve sold one, it was up.
Look how much money I’d have. You’re always missing out on the next big thing, and it’s a cycle of fomo and frustration. And often if you just zoom out and you really analyze the data, you’re gonna come to realize that simply owning a globally diversified portfolio, all the companies would have likely achieved the results that you need and done so with a lot less cost and a lot less stress.
So what should you do? Number one, create a plan, then build an investment strategy that supports it. One that’s data driven, not emotion driven. You wanna keep costs low. Stay broadly diversified, and we like using ETFs to create the portfolios. Don’t bet on a single company or fads, tilt towards factors that have historically delivered higher returns, like values, small size and profitability, rebalance regularly, which really is just a simple way to force yourself to buy low and sell high.
And in retirement structure your portfolio by time horizon based on when you’re gonna need the withdrawal. So money you need in the next three to five years, you’re gonna keep that money. Low risk money you don’t need for 10 plus years. You’re gonna invest it for growth when markets are high, it’s a great time to fill your short term buckets.
Pay for travel, make upgrades to the house and enjoy the fruits of your labor, and you wanna do this before the next correction. We’ve been encouraging clients to spend a little more right now because it’s easier to spend when things are good than when things are not going as well. There’s always gonna be another market crash.
There always is. Short-term volatility isn’t the enemy. It’s the cost of admission. The expectation that things could be bad is the price we pay for the returns that have historically been greater than inflation. It’s not a bug. It’s not broken. It’s a feature. It’s how the market works. The money does not disappear with market volatility.
The market transfers money from those who are fearful to those who are patient and disciplined. As a Christian, I look to the Bible for wisdom, and one of the stories that speaks perfectly to this topic is the parable of the talents. In that story, the master gives his servants different amounts of money to manage, and when he returns, the first two servants have invested in what they were given.
They multiplied it and they hear well done, good and faithful servant, but the one who received the least. He acted out of fear. He buried what he had to keep it safe, and when the master returned, he took the little that the fearful servant had and gave it to the one who had been faithful with much.
That’s what fear does. It takes from those who live by fear and gives to those who act with faith and wisdom, those who are good stewards of what they’ve been entrusted with. So the question isn’t whether a crash is coming, it’s whether you’ll be ready mentally, financially, spiritually to stay the course.
So create a plan. Diversify across time. Invest wisely, keep costs low rebalance. And remember, a market crash is always coming. So is the recovery.
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Ready to kickstart your retirement planning head over to retirement budget calculator.com. Need assistance with an. Investment management explore our services@parkerfinancial.net. Information and opinions expressed here are believed to be accurate and complete for general information only and should not be construed as specific tax, legal, or financial advice for any individual and does not constitute a solicitation for any securities or insurance products.
Please consult with your financial professional before taking action on anything discussed in this program. Parker Financial, its representatives or its affiliates have no liability for investment decisions or other actions taken or made by you based on the information provided in this program. All insurance related discussions are subject to the claims paying ability of the company.
Investing involves risk. Jason Parker is the president of Parker Financial LLC, an independent fee-based wealth management firm. Located at 9 2 3 0 Bayshore Drive Northwest Suite 2 0 1, Silverdale, Washington. For additional information, call 3 6 0 3 3 7 2 7 0 1 or visit us online@soundretirementplanning.com.
