Fear of the markets will make millennials financially miserable when they’re old
Tony Robbins, the larger-than-life motivational speaker, has a new gig. The millionaire self-help guru (who stands six feet seven inches tall) joined a financial advisory firm, Creative Planning, where he’s on the board and serves as ”chief of investor psychology.” He was so upset about the devastation that the 2008 financial crisis wrought, leaving young people with unserviceable college debts and their parents with devastated retirement accounts, that he wrote a book to help people become more financially secure.
Tony Robbins, the larger-than-life motivational speaker, has a new gig. The millionaire self-help guru (who stands six feet seven inches tall) joined a financial advisory firm, Creative Planning, where he’s on the board and serves as ”chief of investor psychology.” He was so upset about the devastation that the 2008 financial crisis wrought, leaving young people with unserviceable college debts and their parents with devastated retirement accounts, that he wrote a book to help people become more financially secure.
The result is Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook, a book that is readable in about four hours. It contains a lot of the standard advice: Buy index funds, diversify assets and, unsurprisingly, find a good financial adviser. (Perhaps you should consider the fine folks at Creative Planning.) The book was co-authored with Peter Mallouk, the founder of Creative Planning, which caters to people with portfolios worth $500,000 and up. Robbins talked him into creating a division that sells over the phone and web to the not-so-rich—people with investable assets of $100,000.
Cynicism aside, Robbins makes some good points in Unshakeable. Most people don’t understand the high fees that asset managers charge, which suck returns from retirement savings and other investments. Nor do they follow the advice of billionaires such as Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett and Paul Tudor Jones, who believe that ordinary investors can’t time the stock market—the best option is to stick with it through good and bad, rebalancing money between stocks and bonds at regular intervals.
The S&P 500 returned an average of around 10% in the 30 years to 2015, so someone who invested $50,000 in 1985 would have almost $1 million by 2015, if they weren’t drained dry by brokerage commissions and management fees, Robbins writes.
Between radio interviews and an appearance on Good Morning America, Robbins chatted with Quartz. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
But in the last year and a half, I have seen so much fear. We all know a crash is coming—the market is up 13% since the election—but you don’t lose unless you sell, 80% of those corrections don’t become bear markets and every single bear market has been followed by a bull market. Most millennials have a tremendous amount of education debt. I wanted to show them than the next crash is one of the first chances they have to leapfrog. You’ve got to understand the patterns of the markets that are long term. I wanted to empower the reader not to live in fear, to get into the game. Trying to time the market is a disaster.