Inflation is your enemy: The increase in prices over time eventually erodes the buying power of money you have saved.
Although the inflation rate fluctuates, short-term changes are not the issue. The real issue is the effect of inflation over the long term. Over time your accumulated savings buys less and less.
This is why we take a Plan First, Then Invest approach to managing your money. As part of the planning process, we determine your short-term liquidity needs and invest short-term cash with the goal of maintaining its buying power. Then we know how much of your assets can be invested to support long-term goals, and select a blend of investments whose potential return exceeds the inflation rate. While this involves risk of volatility and the potential for loss if you have to sell investments at an inopportune time, investing in a diversified portfolio can help blunt the impact of inflation.
If you’d like to take a creative approach at fighting inflation, consider a couple of rewards credit cards from our account custodians, Schwab and Fidelity.
The Fidelity Visa card provides you with 2 percent cash back on every purchase. There’s no annual spending cap and the card can be set up to automatically transfer the cash to a brokerage, retirement or education savings plan each month. You can learn more about the card here.
The Schwab American Express allows you to get 1.5 percent cash back on purchases, and the card can be set up to automatically deposit the cash to a selected Schwab investment account every month. Details are available here.
We don’t receive any compensation from Fidelity or Schwab, but we thought we’d share this reward information with you because it’s a good way to automatically save what amounts to free money. While we like working with Schwab and Fidelity, we are truly independent and can work with any custodian.
If you have any questions, please contact your advisor.