The Scott Lask Wealth Management Group

Here we share excerpts from an interview with Scott Lask for an KNEE RADIO 1 and The Bee’s Knees Podcast. The interview was conducted by PJ Ewing.

What we have found over almost four decades is that a long-term strategy is a really terrific way to make money. And it’s a much bandied about term. Here at our company we have four basic pieces that we put together to help our clients manage their money and retirement.

Lose Less

Number one, the obvious. If we lose less, we do better than everyone else. And when the economy turns back up, we’ll regain all losses quicker and get back to growing once again. And believe me when I tell, you this can be done. It’s not rocket science, but you have to plan it. And we have a lot of terrific tools that we have come to use over the years. And we’re always looking for additional tools. That’s one element but in-and-of-itself will not get you from point A to point B.

Save Cash

The second is we literally force our clients to save cash. The reason we do it is every one of us has had a moment where a few things came at us that were expensive, and we didn’t have the ready surplus cash. And it’s an agonizing feeling. It makes you feel so terrible and so helpless. And it’s an awful feeling that can be avoided by simply taking a small piece of your paycheck, every check, automatic. As a matter of fact, we don’t want our clients to hold that money with us. We want it far away, far enough away from them that it’s difficult for them to access it until they really need it.

I want to stress these points is that us systematically every pay period, whether it’s weekly every two weeks, however, you’re growing your net worth because you are saving cash that’s not at risk. You have your investment money, which is your risk money. And then you have other components to your financial picture. So you are growing. Here’s the benefit: Life comes up. You need some things done on your house. You need a new car, whatever the contingency is, you got the cash, you don’t sweat it.

Think about this. In 20 years of this young century, we’ve had three major stock market crashes. When I got into business, the rule of thumb was you’d have one bear market once every decade. Three in two decades. So what happens is now when you see the signs that the selling is over, that things are going to start to turn back up, you have a reserve of cash that you can then put in. I am preparing to publish my first book on investing and in the book I say “When everything looks the worst. It’s time to go shopping on Wall Street.”

One Example

Look back in April 2020 and our analytics put out alerts. We felt that the market was starting to turn around. It was like buying the stock market on sale. When you talk to people now who were too scared back then to say, “Hey, if I can take you back to April and give you money to put in the market, which you’ve invested in the S&P 500, and Apple?” They all go, “yes.” So that’s very important to have that cash building at all times. It allows you to maintain a long-term, preference and keep going.

You Will Retire Someday

The third thing is everyone eventually is going to retire. And there’s only one of two situations that each of us encounter as we approach retirement. We either have a real pension like the police officers, the hospital, you know, municipal workers, the train and bus drivers, or you have been putting away money in a 401k.

A pension is a lifetime payment. So you leave work, instead of getting a paycheck from Acme incorporated, you’re not getting a paycheck from the Acme incorporated. Pensions plan for benefit of you. And most of these pension plans have a facility that allows the surviving spouse to keep collected. If you don’t have that, and most of us out there do not, we’ll get somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000 a year from social security depending on when you retire and all of those factors. Where’s the other money coming from? We know there are certain parts of the country that people can live nicely, real, nicely on $45,000 – $50,000, but where we live in the Northeast, it’s not going to happen if you live in California, not going to happen.

Your Own Personal Pension

So where’s the rest of the money coming from. So you have to create your own personal pension. We try very hard to educate everyone on every lifetime income solution set that’s out there and work very hard with all clients to figure out which one is going to serve them best. Once you have those three things in place, you’ve got a good long-term plan. That’s managing risk. It’s designed to lose less in bad times. You’ll have a reasonable rate of return and grow. You have cash building all the time, and now you have a pension.

Enjoy the Ride

Our fourth pillar, which to us is most important is that we want to deliver an experience to our clients that is truly enjoyable and exceeds the expectations they have of our relationship. If we do those four things, we’re going to be successful and our clients are going to be very happy and sleep good at night.