Dear Reader,

Millennials residing in the European Union are considered the lost generation, while less than 40% of Americans have enough saved for a $1,000 emergency.

Thanks to unpegging from gold and unlimited printing, it’s safe to say the general population isn’t as wealthy as it was fifty years ago despite an increased number of zeroes on balance sheets!

The average lifestyle a baby boomer once enjoyed in the West is considerably harder to maintain in 2019. With inflation, paper currencies, and the lack of financial education, even those with high-paying salaries are fighting an uphill battle and are likely working and paying more while retaining less.

Surveys are showing that workers below the age of forty are saving much less than they should… I would tend to agree with the Fidelity suggestion that a typical saver should accumulate one year’s worth of salary by the age of thirty and savers in their mid-twenties should have anywhere between a quarter to half of their annual salary.

Much of what the conventional wisdom misses out on are the ever-eroding inflationary components that eat away at purchasing power.

What’s even worse is that seven out of ten millennials aren’t saving a dime!
A quarter of all Americans have zero savings at all for retirement. Some have a paycheck or two saved for the next video game or shopping trip to Nordstrom, but nothing towards deferred gratification that will grow.

For those who have put aside money for their savings, the next question would be what they are saving in, especially in this everything bubble…

Fiat currencies have already lost over 90% of their purchasing power in less than a century! I hope they aren’t only looking at paper currencies that have historically all gone to zero. 

If you’re depending on the government, that might be a crisis event waiting to happen. The government will not be able to assist every single person when millennials are too old to work… Here’s how the trend is looking for social security programs around the globe:

A pension crisis is very real. Governments around the globe are NOT going to be able to cover the cost in decades to come. Many countries are also raising the retirement age, leaving millennials with little hope or incentive to save for a pension!

It’s the age-old game where the wealthy do things that compound their savings and the poor do things that deplete them…

Total household debt and financial burdens are also draining the population dry. The ultra-rich take advantage of debt to acquire assets that compound their wealth and create multiple cash flows that grow exponentially.

It makes sense as to why most aren’t saving when you look at the sort of debt most people have:

Deferring gratification in a way that still allows you to live your life isn’t easy. Saying no to things like cable, vacations, dinners, and movies is hard when you are trying to enjoy your life. 

Trying to decide what to buy and what not to spend to optimize your life is like playing 3D chess – it’s not easy…

Like all problems, the solution starts at home. Financially educating oneself is critical, understanding sound money and hard assets. Gold, silver, property, and even contrarian investments such as cryptocurrencies will offer you LONG-TERM protection against the rampant effects of inflation and provide opportunities to gain purchasing power against rising living costs and allow you to acquire further wealth-yielding assets.

Other methods to tackling the dollar’s slow demise could come in the form of dividend payouts. Stable dividend-yielding stocks recover strongly after market downtrends and can preserve your portfolio from long-term inflation. Plus you own a company that makes money and ideally can charge more as inflation continues.

This is the Buffett Playbook and his results speaks for itself.

Look for a new dividend play to add to our mix plus a list of my dividend plays currently in my “buy range” later this week.

For the broke generation out there, action trumps IQ any day of the week...

There are no guarantees in life, but when you stack the odds in your favor, there are times when things can go your way…

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.“

Thomas Jefferson

Ace Bauer
Chief Editor, SmartMoneyResults.com