Got Questions About the War in Iran?

0:00This is Natalie Pace and today is March 12th, 2026. Today is just a Q&A. We have a war raging, oil prices are soaring. We have stocks sinking, the Dow is down 4,000 points from February, just one month ago. And of course, people have a lot of questions. Some people are like, how do I protect myself? Other people are like, should I invest in oil or electric vehicles? So we'll get to all this and more today in this special Q&A. Just whatever questions you have, I'm happy to answer them. Again, this is Natalie Pace. You can always watch these back at youtube.com forward slash Natalie Pace. And you can listen to them as a podcast on substack at Natalie Pace there. It's a really good idea to subscribe so that you are always receiving a notification when I do post something new. It's going to be if there's something happening that you need to know about and at least once a month as well.

1:00All right, we'll get started in just a moment. Okay, so the first question was emailed in and honestly, I think it's one that everybody has on their mind. The first thing was, and I'm going to go ahead and read it as it came in, this is anonymous. One thing I've been thinking about is the war with a run and how oil prices are continuing to increase. This person doesn't invest in oil and gas because it doesn't really align with how they want to use their money, but they're conflicted about making money related to a war and how it might be affecting the market as a whole. I think this is a question that all of us have realistically. And I just did a blog that answers this pretty comprehensively. So I am going to be referring to that blog and I would like for you guys to check it out. So first of all, we'll let's start with just the basics. The markets are already down 4,000 points in the doubts and that's in one month. Most of that is since the war, but it's still on the one year it's trading high, on the

2:05five year it's still trading very high and obviously on the max, it's still very high. So we still have extremely high equity prices and the price earnings ratio, the average price earnings ratio was very high. So that's why this is moving so fast is that if the war ends rapidly, then the markets should stabilize as it gets more prolonged. War is pretty negative for stocks in general and it's not even great for oil companies and gasoline companies. And the reason for that is that when prices get too high, it punches us into a recession. So I want you to take a look at this chart. So this is the blog I would encourage you to read oil prices, source, stocks, things, the war ridges on, but this is the chart I want you to look at. So this is crude oil prices. This is the US oil price, not the Brent, which is the world oil price.

3:07I'm clicking on max and what you see here is that the gray areas are recessions. So when oil prices hit all time highs, we have a recession because people just cannot, when they cannot afford to drive or when they have to go to work to drive and all their money is going on putting gasoline in their car, then they don't have money for all of the other stuff. And our economy, 70% of the US economy, very close to 70% is consumer consumption, consumer spending. So when we cut back in other areas, that's that could that has the potential to throw us into a recession. Now, even before the war, AI and it's not just AI had already predicted that we could potentially hit rough times. Now, I want to show you, pull this down.

4:07They said there was a 70% chance of a correction. Correction means down 10% in equities. Recession would be or a bear market would be when it hits, what recession is slightly different. Bear market down 20% recession to quarters of negative growth. So basically, the reason that AI was saying, and this is Google AI that was saying that the reason that they were saying there's a 70% chance of a correction down 10% this year is that this is a midterm election year. And midterm election years haven't done well, especially recently, 2016 was a down year. And I'm sorry, 2018 was a down year and 2022 was a really down year. So stocks dropped 20% 19.44 in the S&P 500. And bonds dropped even further, by the way, long term bonds dropped 26%. That's why we saw all those bank failures in 2023. So it's really already, it was, you know, had some headwinds in the equation and war,

5:15even though you might think, oh, well, if oil prices are all the time high, maybe I should just invest in oil just to add some buoyancy at least, right? But the truth is that these are companies that are trading very close to all time highs. Some of them have very high price earnings ratio like Chevron. Now before the war, our oil prices were actually lower than they were the year prior. That's why we saw a lot of oil companies having negative year over your sales growth, right? And their profit margins are pretty slim. Our profit margins are still going to have some headwinds on them because of the straight of hormones and all of the crazy problems that are going on. So there's, it's not, it's not even great. Even though the oil companies can sell more oil in the short term, in the midterm and certainly longer term, it's not great for oil companies because it could spark a recession.

6:17With regard to electric vehicles, I'm going to show you guys oil companies and I just showed you the oil companies. So the, a lot of people already have bought it and that's why those prices have already shot up and that's why their price earnings ratios have shot up. But I also want to show you the auto manufacturers because even though you might think, oh, well, this is going to spark people to buy electric vehicles. And if they need to buy a car, they definitely are going to be looking more at electric vehicles or at least hybrids, but because oil prices are so high, because consumer debt is so high, because the belt of middle-class America has been tightened, so it squeezed so tightly, a lot of people can't buy another, a new car. And recessions are terrible for auto manufacturers. Corrections are as well. So we already saw weakness in the auto manufacturing sector.

7:17You might not have gotten this headline, but I'm going to go ahead and show you the auto one. So Ford Motor Company, all the US ones are doing the worst. There's a reason for that. Ford lost $8 billion in 2025. Stellantis also had a big hit, $26 billion hit. Both of those companies are at the lowest rung of investment grade with a negative outlook. That's both Ford and Stellantis. GM doesn't have a much better credit rating. Tesla is going to do slightly better than both of those, but all of the auto manufacturers are having headwinds due to the Chinese marketplace, because China is the biggest market for electric vehicles. And they have literally hundreds of electric vehicle manufacturers there that they can choose from, many of which are priced lower than our companies here.

8:20And in order to compete, our companies have been lowering their prices. So you've seen that both Ford and Stellantis are shifting away from electric vehicles, even though that's going to be probably a move that's going to bite them hard because they couldn't do it profitably. And if they want to stay investment grade with their credit rating, they had to do that, right? They had to tell their bond holders and their shareholders that they're going to try to make money again. They're not going to keep losing money, especially with such a low credit rating. So it's really kind of a bind for the auto manufacturers too. So let me see if I can show you another one. Obviously cruise ships, airlines are going to be in trouble because they already weren't great. Many of them are at the lowest rank of investment grades. Some of them are speculative. They're junk bonds. There's United as a junk bond, Alaska Air, American Airlines, JetBlue, all junk bonds, right?

9:21And these are companies that high oil prices is going to definitely take them into negative earnings. They're going to lose money on that. They haven't been hedging their bets. So there's a lot of danger here in that stocks are very high. If the war is prolonged, it definitely could spark a recession. Oil prices at this level are good in the short term for oil companies, but terrible in the midterm because if they do make us hit a recession, oil companies are the worst. You might even remember that in the pandemic, oil companies were, we had over 100 bankruptcies in the oil and the gas sector as a result of that. So there was more to this question, so I'm going to go back to that one. But I do want to just remind you guys that this is a blog, well worth reading. It was just posted a few days ago, oil prices store, stock sync, the war rages on.

10:24What should you do about it? I would just encourage you to check that out. So let's go back to the question. Okay, conflicted about money, okay. Is there another investment that makes sense right now? What's going on in the world? There's the EV question. I'll add this that this is part of my yearly rebalancing as I was looking for a new hot slice. And you have clean energy as a hot slice still. So clean energy was a super performer last year. I did have a blog that talked about this as well, right? So I would strongly encourage you guys to look at, at the end of each blog, I have a list of the most recent ones. So I do have our A plus 2025 performance report card. I think that's worth looking at because as you can see, silver actually tripled. It's pulled back a little bit, but it's still more than doubled.

11:24Cop our Peruvian one actually doubled. So that was a play on copper. In a recession, copper tends not to do well because we stop, you know, having all these projects going on. So what I would say right now is probably the most important thing is to make sure that your age appropriate and properly diversified. I would definitely overweight safe. We're overweighting 20% safe in our sample pie charts. You have to know what's safe because not only do you have problems with private credit, but reaching for yield could mean paper losses, which are far more problematic than people realize. You can earn 3.5% safely, but it's a bit tricky. So that's why we spend one full day on it at our retreats. I think that's an important note. In terms of the hot slices, what should you do there? So in the beginning, safe havens like gold and silver, they can get drugged down. You're seeing that right now, but there will come a time if we actually hit a recession.

12:27They can get a drug way down, by the way, not just down a little bit. There will come a time that people will say, I'm so sick of all my losses and stocks. I'm moving over into gold and silver. Silver has been the super performer far, far higher than gold. Silver tripled last year, gold was up about 60%. Also on crypto, crypto tends to go ahead and go down. So in 2022, so I wouldn't consider that to be a safe haven. In 2022, when stocks dropped 20%, silver dropped, I mean, Bitcoin dropped 67%. Silver actually held strong in 2022. It went up a little bit and gold was flat. So I think that having a slice or even two of a silver, I'm still leaning into silver rather than gold. They're very married in terms of what their performance typically does. Silver had been forgotten prior to 2025.

13:27And that's one of the reasons that we loved it is it was such a good price. But I think there are other reasons to like it going forward. So I would say a slice of safe haven would be a really good hot slice. I think that we have to be a little concerned about copper because they do call it doctor copper in a recession. That will be one of the first things to go down. When we hit the bottom, that's going to be one of the first things to shoot out of the gates. So in the great recession, we were telling people at that time you could do it in Chile. They hadn't yet nationalized all their copper minds. It was still more of, you know, that we had private companies doing it. This time around, that's why we're leaning into Peru because Chile is nationalized. So I'd say there's a risk of keeping Peru as your hot slice. We were looking at things like we've seen trouble in even utilities. This has to do with natural disasters that they get sued for. So it's a different scenario and normally if you wanted to get safe from a recession

14:33or were worried about a recession or even a correction, you would just do utilities and or consumer staples. And utilities, I think, have more risk to them basically because of all the lawsuits and the fact that they carry so much debt anyway. They certainly are charging a lot more right now, but they're also paying a lot more for their fuel. And so what we came up with instead of, if you wanted buoyancy, instead of going for utilities, maybe consider cyber security. So let's take a quick look at cyber security as a hot slice that would actually also be a case made for buoyancy. So there is a cyber security ETF. It's called IHAC. And as you can see, you know, it's, this is the max. Let's do the five year. It's not trading at an all time high.

15:33It certainly went higher, right? So you know, you could have had it at like eight or maybe even higher, close to $54, about 10 bucks higher just a few months ago. So, but I would still what I'm saying to people is if you don't have a hot slice of something and if it's trading at very close to an all time high, maybe dollar cost average over a two year period. So whatever your slice is supposed to be, you know, cut that in half and then cut that if you're going to, you know, do your dollar cost averaging or rebalancing more than once a year, cut that again by however many times. So if it's $10,000, it would be $5,000 over the first 12 months and then another $5,000 over the second 12 month period. If like with IHAC, if you think, well, it could be buoyant and also it's not trading at an all time high. You could shorten that time frame. You could say, oh, it's a $10,000 slice. Maybe what I'll do is I'll do it this year,

16:34but I'll do it in three times just to make sure. Like maybe I'll do, you know, 1750 right now and I'll wait till the end of September because September is historically the worst performing month and I'll look at it again at the end of December. And you know, if it went up, then maybe it filled up my size for me and if it went down, then I'm buying more at a lower price instead of just filling up the slice and if it goes down, then you would feel like you lost money. So, you know, I'll obviously be going a little bit more in depth over the next few weeks on what we could have as our hots. I'm also going to reexamine the countries and be talking to you guys about that. But I would say, you know, a safe haven like silver wouldn't be a bad choice. Boy and sea cybersecurity may be consumer staples might not be bad choices as well. There is risk with Peru because of its play on copper

17:36and it's also trading at an all-time high. So, you know, most people should be able to take their gains on this one. It's still trading very close to its all-time high but obviously it was up a little bit higher than it was. Okay, so before I go into the next question that was emailed in, I'm going to stop it here and if you guys have a question, you can feel free to ask it. Okay, so this question was what about Indonesia because it was one of the hot countries that we liked and I am going to go in depth and update all of the hot countries that we have. So, you can look for that blog over the next week or two specifically. But I do want to remind everybody that when you're talking about stocks and funds, that is at risk, right? It doesn't matter whether it's the US or an oil industry or an Indonesia fund or cybersecurity. All of it is at risk and the reason that we do it

18:37is we take on higher risk because it's so much higher gain. So, the S&P 500 has been above 20% gains for three years running. That's a lot of money that you're missing out on if you didn't do it, right? So, that's why we take on extra risk. But the best hedge against something not working out the way you want on the at-risk side is making sure that you have enough safe. So, if you're worried about your at-risk, it's not, should I get rid of that? Will this do better? Well, honestly, in a recession, great companies, great industries, great sectors can all get drugged down. I talked about even a safe haven like Golden Silver in the beginning, drugged down, right? So, the most important thing is, do I have enough safe at age appropriate and do I want to overweight safe because of the amount of challenges that the economy could experience?

19:37This is a midterm year, headwind. We're in a war, headwind, high oil prices highly correlated with recessions, headwind, right? So, all of those things would be telling me, okay, maybe I should just overweight safe. Remember, if you are 50 years old and you're overweighting 20% safe, you have 30% at risk. So, if the stock market goes down, and let's say in the great recession, stocks went down 55% in the Dow Jones industrial average. So, let's say that stocks drop by half. If you only have exposure of 30% of your portfolio, right, then your exposure is gonna be less than 15%. And you're still gonna have all that money that you didn't lose, that's safe, maybe overweighted safe, that's earning 3.5% safely without paper losses. We have no paper losses on our fixed income side portfolio that we've been talking to people about.

20:38So, you're gonna be in a great position, not because you picked something that didn't lose money, but because you overweighted safe, which means that you had more that wasn't gonna lose any money. All right, so I'm talking to somebody about dollar cost averaging, and this person just started their dollar cost averaging journey. But let's say, and I'm just using random numbers. Remember, I just used the $10,000 slice. So, let's say for instance, that she was taking a two years to do it and 5,000 this year, 5,000 next year, and she was even cutting that even closer, right? So, maybe it was, that's $1,500 or $2,000. The first step in of a $10,000 slice. The reason that we did that, again, I just said this, but I'm gonna say it again, is that we don't know if stocks are gonna go up or go down, but we also know that there's a lot of headwinds, right? Stocks are high, this is a midterm year,

21:39and now we have a war. But we had already built all that in. This person is also overweight, it's safe. So, all of that has already been built in, and the reason that the psychological thing is now important. If you invested, it's not, oh, I picked the worst time. No, you already did everything right before this moment, right? Because the reason that you didn't go ahead and put $10,000 in, is that you thought there was a risk that the markets could go down. Now, if the markets go down, and if they keep going down at the next time when you're gonna dollar cost average in, you're gonna be buying lower, right? Now, nobody ever knows the exact high or the exact low, and that's why it's important to just dollar cost average in there, but your plan was already designed for volatility, for stocks to go down. And so, instead of saying, and it's important to reframe the language

22:40that we talked to ourselves about our investing, so that we are, that's part of pushing ourselves up the path to wisdom, because if we say, ah, I picked the worst time, because there's a war. No, actually, you did it right. You didn't know there was a war coming, but you knew there was a lot of things that could happen wrong, and that's why you overweighted safe, and that's why you dollar cost average and didn't just fill up the slice. All right, I'm gonna stop it there. So, copper, with regard to Peru, copper in general, there is still a greater demand than there is supply. So, that supports high prices. So, copper in general is in favor for investors, and as long as copper prices are high, that's good for Peru. If there is a recession, then copper prices could go down, because a lot of projects that require that copper,

23:44those could get canceled. So, they call it Dr. Copper for that reason, but again, if the war is over quickly, oil prices could actually go down, and we might not have a recession. Nobody predicted a recession before this happened. AI did predict a correction of 10%, but not a recession. So, this is a general rule of thumb, and obviously your situation can be different, and you're the boss of your money, so you could do whatever you want. But what I would say is the general rule of thumb is always, if your employer is gonna give you free money, if you match it, so if you say, if they say, hey, if you contribute to whatever it is, 401K, 457, whatever it is, if you contribute, I'll match it. Go for the match, that's free money. The problem with putting all your money in any employer-sponsored plan, unless it's self-directed, is that it is really restricted

24:45in terms of what you can invest in. You aren't gonna get hot there, and even sometimes it's hard to get safe there. So, go for the match for the free money, and that could end up being your large cap growth, or even your small cap growth, we'll see what the best choices are, and that can be there. If it's a pension plan, and you don't get to choose, and all you get to choose is whether or not you're going for aggressive or fixed income, then we can talk about what's the best strategy for you. But you should be trying to do 10% of your income into tax-protected retirement accounts. Why is that? I'll just give you one example that hopefully explains this easily. Peter Thiel has over $5 billion according to ProPublica in his Roth IRA. He doesn't put it in just an account, he puts it in a Roth IRA, not even just any IRA, a Roth IRA, right? Why is that? Well, on one hand, you don't pay capital gains taxes, A, and B, you can invest in anything you want pretty much,

25:45C, when you pull the money out, you don't pay income taxes. So a lot of times your employer and or insurance salesman and or HR person is going to be saying, hey, you should be putting money in here, it's pre-tax, pre-tax. But when you go to withdraw it, you do pay income tax on it. So what I would say is this, you do the match for the free money, then you max out your Roth IRA because that's freedom of choice, capital gains protection, and no income tax when you withdraw it. And then for a lot of people, I don't know if this is the case with you, you know, the process is question. You also want to look at a health savings account because most people are spending more on health insurance than they know. It's coming out of their paycheck. So if you didn't do a forensic examination of your W2, stub, you may not be aware of how much you're doing that. You're still going to have health insurance. It's just that it's like, I think it's a quadruple thing. First of all, you get to put money into it.

26:47And if you need to withdraw it, there's no penalty, no taxes, no anything like that. Secondly, it's a tax deduction. Thirdly, it's the best long-term capital gains plan. Fourthly, that is the way that most people in retirement end up declaring bankruptcy is they don't have enough money for their health insurance or their health coverage because believe it or not, even if you go on Medicare, they charge you for a lot of things, especially middle-class folks. If you're really, really challenged economically, that may be okay for you to be on Medicare because you're also going to be on another kind of, you know, medical support plan. But if you're middle-class, you can get killed with all the extra fees that you got to pay. So again, especially if you're young, please, please, please, consider that health savings account because every year and don't pull the money out unless you absolutely have to. Keep building it up and keep thinking of that as another retirement account that's specifically going to help you

27:49with the biggest expense in retirement, which is medical costs and your best long-term medical plan. All right, I'm stopping there for a moment. Okay, so the question now was on the safe side, right? And this person was like, I got a little overwhelmed when I was looking at the bond on their particular brokerage, the bond options. One thing I want to tell you is the most important thing keep the term short and the credit worthiness high. So that's something it's the rule right now. What's safe and what's hot can change every single year. So we will be, again, you know, the spring retreat, we're going to be talking about this. I'm going to be doing blogs about what's hot. I'm going to be doing blogs about the countries and I already have a 2026 bond and fixed income blog which you're welcome to check out. Let me show you that real quickly. That one is, I believe here.

28:51No, that one you should know for things you shouldn't do on the fixed income side. Top dividend income strategies for 2026 is there. Now, I'm going to be putting links to the blogs that I mentioned here in the description on YouTube. So if you guys are listening to this as a podcast, just go to youtube.com forward slash Natalie Pace and you can find all the links there. Or you can always email info at NataliePace.com as well. So this is the question of the other person. They want to invest on the safe side corporate bonds. They were looking at the magnificent seven in particular. This person could only find a 12 month Microsoft and they wanted to have, they were just concerned, like should I put all of my stuff in Microsoft? Should I have some 12 months? Should I have a two year and 18 month? Forget about Microsoft, et cetera. The first thing that I want to tell you is, you're not buying a bond from Microsoft.

29:52It's a bond that Microsoft's going to pay you the money back on. It is a Microsoft bond, but you are buying it from somebody who already bought the bond from Microsoft and is reselling it. So why is that important for you to know? Every single time that you go on that bond page, it's going to be different things that are available because they're all being resold, right? So it may be that that particular day there wasn't anything you wanted and today there is. So there are some restrictions there on the bond. So let's take a look first at that, at what's going on here. And well, actually before that, other people were saying, well, what about like even like defense? Should you go for a defense bond? Well, if we're talking about keeping the terms short and the credit worthiness high, we're seeing Boeing, Huntington, Ingalls, Techtron, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Ashkosh, all with the lowest rung

30:53of investment grade. So that means not the credit quality is not high. So even though you might say, oh, maybe I should loan money to a defense contractor because we have a war going on, if you're going by our rule was term short, credit worthiness high, you don't have a lot to choose from in the defense sector. In the oil sector right now, you do have better choices in general. Let's take a look at the oil report card. I think I've got it right here. You'd want to avoid cheneer. Exxon looks like it would be great, right? I probably, that's probably not the right yield, sorry. I'm guessing that that's an error there. So they don't look bad in terms of credit quality, except for sonovas. But the thing is that the industry was a little bit in decline before this war. And if we hit a recession, then they're going to go into decline.

31:54It's not that a short term bond that somewhat high credit quality isn't a bad idea, but there's one extra layer that I'm putting in. Keep the term short, keep the credit worthiness high, and those of you who have attended the retreat know that I am always more interested in companies that were founded recently, versus companies that were founded 50 years ago or a century ago. And the reason for that is that even if they have a high credit rating, they have lower year-over-year sales growth, they have lower profit margins, and they have much, much higher debt, even if they have a good credit rating, because they could have higher debt and still have the same credit rating as Microsoft, which has a treasure trove of capital, massive year-over-year sales growth, massive profit margins, you know, the oil companies we're seeing here, it isn't quite as good like Exxon model, isn't quite as good because Microsoft is triple A,

32:55but not bad. And this is a company that really, you know, was losing year-over-year revenue, has much lower profit margins, and actually if you looked at the amount of debt, leverage, et cetera, other post-employment benefits that they have, it's gonna be a lot more than a Magnificent 7 Company, quite frankly. So that's another scrim that I would be using, is I would not necessarily be going for any company or any industry, just because, you know, there's a war and it's oil and defense, I would definitely be then looking at, okay, even if it has, like as an example, we might even see this, I'll go ahead and move over real quickly to, I'm gonna just take you to Schwab's bond page, hopefully it's still open. So if we go to corporate's triple A, right, and I'm gonna go ahead and go to two-year, so you don't have any options except for Johnson and Johnson,

34:00today, right, on the two-year. Now, again, if I'm looking at my scrim and I cram, we can even spot check it on Microsoft so that you, on MSN.Money, so that you can see what I'm talking about. Johnson and Johnson is a Centrioled Company. So it's also in, you know, biotech, which has been kind of really volatile lately. So I'm not, I'm personally not gonna be interested in it, but let me show you a couple of the reasons why. Also, I know that this is a company that, I believe it's on a negative watch, so it might get a downgrade too. Now, I just know that. You might not know that, right? But let's go ahead and take a quick look at Johnson and Johnson. So the company is, I'm gonna click over to Analysis, so it does have year-over-year sales growth, but low, like if we were to compare this to, and I will, in just a moment,

35:00something like Microsoft, it's gonna be a much higher year-over-year sales growth. The profit margin isn't bad, but look at the debt to equity is about 59%. Let me go ahead and take a look at right next to it. Microsoft, because that one is rated triple-A, as well. So this one has 17% year-over-year sales growth, and that is compared to nine, so it's about double, right? Let's look at the profitability. 47% net profit margin, versus the profit margin, and the profit margin, and the profit margin, and the profit margin, versus 21. And if you look at the leverage of Microsoft, it does, it did borrow a lot,

36:00because it's investing in AI, so this was much lower just a few months ago, so it's got a 27% debt equity, versus the 59%. So I just wanted to go a little forensic on you so that you would see, when we're talking about century-old company, versus newer company, with the same credit rating, you can see the difference that I'm talking about. That's what I wanted you to see. So on this one, this particular bond, the two-year, that I'm only being offered at Johnson and Johnson, so I would look different, but there's other things that we can look at. So let's go back. What if we go to double-A, and click on two-year? What we've got here now, Amazon, Walmart, Johnson, and Johnson, Apple, Apple, right? So yeah, would I rob an Apple, by the way, has a lot of debt,

37:01a lot more than Amazon does, but which one of these would I be leaning into? I would go for probably Amazon or Apple, not Walmart or Johnson and Johnson. So that's the kind of thing that you can be looking at, but remember, we're gonna be doing this for a full day on in April. I mean, that's a few months away. We have that blog that you should be looking at as well, and I did a bond master class recently. If you're an all-access passholder, watch it back. Do it back with me, because you guys do have, there is a lot of, okay, now you try this in there, right? So that's what I would suggest with you, for you on the bond side of it, is that there's a lot of free resources. Obviously, if you have coaching sessions and you want me to do it with you, I'm happy too as well. But in terms of hers, I like rolling maturity dates that are based on when I need the money.

38:03So the reason for going for two years is because if we have rate cuts, the next six months or a year, then you could be looking at a lower interest rate. So if you have a bunch of money that you, 95% certain you don't need for two years, then it might be a good idea to try to find a two-year bond, Apple, Amazon. I just bought one that was a Google bond. Alphabet is their name. And those were all in the double-A category, not the triple-A. Then you can always look at, okay, what do I need for my dollar cost averaging? I might need some money over this year. So maybe I'm gonna do a six-month for that amount of money that I'm using for dollar cost averaging. And maybe that money that I need for dollar cost averaging next year, I'm gonna do an 18-month or something like that. So that's what I recommend is that you look at that.

39:03I'm not going out too far. Why is that? Well, because we could have other opportunities. Remember I said, what's hot and what's safe can change every year. Now, in 2009 at the bottom of the great recession, when people were coming to the retreat, the interest rates were zero. And so they were like, I'm not getting paid to take on risk. And some of them wanted to go for a junk bond that would give them 3% interest. And I said, that is crazy, right? Because only way you got any amount of interest at all or income at all was to go into junk territory. So what we were saying is go buy a house. Go buy a house and rent it out. Go buy a house for your kids and you be the landlord instead of them making the landlord rich. Just buy real estate. Now real estate, as you now know, has doubled, right? So anytime between 2009 and 20, I would say 2015, maybe up to 2016,

40:05depending on the circumstance, as we got closer in 2015, 2016, they went back to the same high that they were in 2006. So we were a little reticent on it. But between that period, we were saying the safest thing to do right now when you're not getting paid to take on the risk is buy real estate. We called it safe income producing. So we wanted you to be able to earn income on it. Hard asset, house probably, or an apartment building, something like that, that you purchase for a good price, the prices were great. Now, why didn't more people do that? A lot of people did and they're super happy they did. But other people didn't do that. Why? Because most people don't buy low because they can't. They lose too much in the recession. So if you're acting your age and potentially overweighting safe, when a recession hits, and sadly, everyone around you is gonna lose a lot more than you.

41:07And what happens is there aren't any buyers because nobody has the money to buy anything. There are people that have to sell. So people are desperate to sell. They have to lower the prices. And the only people that can buy are those people with liquidity and cash. So just don't be too concerned that there's never gonna be an opportunity to buy a house again or there's never gonna be an opportunity to buy real estate again or that all these other things. Like people are getting sold into very risky or long term and they're saying, and also do not fall for that paper losses thing. I know somebody who is in their 70s and he was sold into an 85 year junk bond. And immediately when he purchased it, he lost 25% of it and he became illiquid. What does that mean? Nobody wants to buy it from you. And if they do, then you're gonna have to lock in those paper losses.

42:07So I would say get safe protected, hot, diversified, age appropriate, potentially overweighting safe. Do you rebalancing now and recap if you're thinking about if you wanna change out your hot industries or your hot countries, I will be updating blogs on that. But the best safety against all things going down is overweighting safe. And consider maybe the cybersecurity for buoyancy and or consumer staples for buoyancy. But I wouldn't consider utilities which typically are considered buoyant as my buoyant. So thank you again for joining me. And again, this is free. So you can share it with your friends. I am encouraging you to join us for our spring financial freedom retreat. It really pays for itself. A lot of people aren't aware of the fact that you, if you haven't managed plan, it's being, you are being charged for it.

43:09So it's about usually anywhere from five to $15,000 per year per million. Obviously, if you have less than that, it's less than that. So our financial freedom retreat is an investment that is much, much more cost effective is far lower than that. And it's an investment in you learning the life math that we all should have received in high school. So even if you still have someone managing it, you need to be the boss of your money because most managed plans do what the markets do. So if the markets go down 55%, your plan could be losing that much money. And again, getting mad at somebody for losing when the markets lose, that's not going to help you to get your money back. And using the bull market to earn back losses, when you lose that much money, your FICO score goes down, I mean, everything is harder. So I would just say right now, as the markets are still very high, you can basically batten down the hatches

44:11and keep most of your wealth and invest properly, age appropriate, properly diversified. So here's additional information on the retreat. If you go to NataliePace.com, you can just click on it right there and it'll take you over. It's gonna be online. You can attend, we have people attend from all over the world, literally. We do record it too. So we don't record like it's all day long for three full days. We record just the curriculum part, but the rest of the time, you're practicing in breakout rooms with other people, many of them are experienced volunteers. So you're actually really pushing yourself to learn it. It's not just listening for eight hours. It's gonna be, I tell you something and you practice it. I tell you, I give you more wisdom, you practice it. And that's why we're really trying to make you autonomous. We want you to know the life math that we all should have received in high school so that you can be the boss of your money. So I would just say email info at NataliePace.com.

45:14You can access the 15 or more things you're gonna learn. Lots of testimonials, the pricing, when it's the timing of it, et cetera, all of this and more in the retreat flyer. So thank you again for joining me. Also join me on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok and all of the social media platforms because I do daily money tips there. And email info at NataliePace.com if you have a question because it's been answered already or if it hasn't, maybe we'll use that as our next blog or video conference. So Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, email, that's probably going to be sub-stack and then YouTube and TikTok. Right there on the homepage, follow me. And thank you so much for being part of our village of enlightened investors who are not just supporting themselves by keeping their wells properly diversified money while you sleep,

46:15but also leading a rich and green life. You can join us at this adventure for Spring E. Cronox 2027. If you like, it's starting to really get booked up now. All right, thanks again. Bye-bye.