I’ve always been pretty focused on my staying healthy as an avid tennis player. My determination to stay fit and live as long as possible was heightened when I became a parent and then again when the pandemic hit. I’m sure a lot of you have similar priorities and want to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

A big part of staying healthy starts with eating well. So it’s no surprise that consumer demand for healthy foods has been on the rise across the U.S. If you are looking for ways to invest in the rising demand for healthy foods, one avenue is through farmland.

Below are some insights by FarmTogether, a leading farmland real estate investing platform and Financial Samurai sponsor. They discuss some reasons behind the increased demand in healthy foods, growth of permanent crops, and which US farmland regions are thriving.

A bear market is a part of investing. The last bear market happened in March 2020, when the S&P 500 tanked by 32% in just a month. Thankfully, the bear market recovered and a bull market ensued until the end of 2021.

In 2022, another bear market has taken hold. Inflation is running rampant. The Fed is hiking rates and corporate earnings and consumer spending will likely slow.

The worst bear market in our lifetimes was from October 9, 2007 through March 9, 2009, when the S&P 500 fell by 57%. It took roughly five years after the beginning of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis to get back to even. The average bear market declines about 37% over 380 days.

Losing time due to financial loss is the worst. Ask yourself how much you’d be willing to sacrifice to live five years longer. Or what would you give to be able to spend five years raising your child before never seeing then again. For many, that time is priceless.

This post will provide a bear market checklist to thriving in a downturn. The more prepared you are, the higher the chance of surviving in a downturn and coming out stronger.

One of the peculiar things about being an investor is that in order to make money, the other side needs to lose money or not make as much money. Over time, the results of your decision to buy or sell get amplified for better or worse.

Unless you have a ton of capital, it’s hard to be a vulture investor in public equities. The stock market is incredibly efficient and retail investors don’t have much sway over a particular stock’s performance.

Of course, you can gang up on hedge funds to create short squeezes like Redditors have done with Melvin Capital and Gamestop and others. However, for the most part, you and I are more like minnow investors with no influence.

Where you can really be a vulture investor is in real estate, my favorite asset class to build wealth. Due to a much more inefficient market, you have a much greater ability to take advantage of mispricing, inopportune timing, and ignorance.

As a result, since I graduated college in 1999, I’ve focused more of my capital towards real estate versus stocks. And so far, the plan has for the most part worked.

It’s been a year since I last published about farmland investing. Therefore, I thought it would be good to revisit how farmland investing has done during the heart of the pandemic and new opportunities ahead.

I’m a fan of owning various types of real assets to build and preserve wealth. With stubbornly high food prices, my investing mind naturally thought about farmland.

In a nutshell, the investment case for farmland investing has strengthened. Here are some insights by FarmTogether, a leading farmland real estate investing platform and Financial Samurai sponsor.

It’s safe to assume the vast majority of you reading Financial Samurai want to be rich. I trust those of you who’ve been reading this site between 2009 and 2012, when I was writing heavily about investment strategies, have indeed become much richer. The compounding forces since then have been enormous.

We are probably one of the richest communities on the internet today based on all the surveys I’ve conducted. For example, 35% of you have a net worth of between $300,000 – $1 million. While 25% of you have a net worth over $1 million. Not bad compared to the median net worth figures.

Despite our good fortune, it’s worth discussing the two levels of rich. Because since I started this site, it’s clear one level of rich has pulled far ahead. And that one level of rich didn’t do so by investing in index funds.

Index Funds And The Rich

I know we all love index funds. They are the personal finance community’s #1 recommendation for where to invest our money in stocks. However, it’s hard to get really rich off index funds alone.

In addition, if you want to achieve financial independence well before the traditional retirement age of 65, investing only in index funds is probably not going to cut it.

The only way to get rich sooner off index funds is to consistently invest large sums of money. But that’s kind of like saying to get richer, start with a lot of money.

The reality is, there’s a whole other level of rich that has little to do with investing in index funds. As one centi-millionaire once told me, “Investing in index funds is what middle-class people do who don’t know what to do.”

On March 16, 2022, the Federal Reserve approved its first rate hike since December 2018. The Federal Reserve was a little more aggressive than expected, indicating it plans to hike rates at each of the six remaining meetings in 2022. The assumption now is that by the end of 2022, the Fed Funds Rate will be in the range of 1.75% – 2%.

The committee sees three more hikes in 2023 then none the following year. Could the Fed Funds Rate really be at 2.5% – 2.75% by the end of 2023? If inflation stays over 6% in 2022 and over 4% in 2023, the probability is likely. But a lot can change over the next two years to make the Fed slow down.

If the Fed follows a gradual 0.25% hike at each meeting, then the impact to borrowing costs won’t be that great. Consumers on variable rates will have plenty of time to refinance to a fixed rate. Further, Treasury bond yields won’t necessarily follow the Fed Funds Rate higher in lockstep. Therefore, mortgage rates may not go up as much.

In this article, let’s discuss how the stock market has historically performed during Fed-rate-hike cycles. We’ll also look at how specific sectors have performed when interest rates are rising.

Well folks, the bad times are clearly back again. There’s a growing chance of a recession. What’s worse, there might actually be stagflation, where inflation remains high while economic output declines.

For those of you who’ve been consistently investing since 2009 or earlier, experiencing a recession is just a part of the economic cycle. Bad times follow good times. Bad times create innovation and efficiency, which leads to good times again.

But if you’ve only been working and investing since 2009 or later, then experiencing a recession may be more jolting. We actually experienced a mini-recession in 2020 during the start of COVID-19. However, that recession lasted only two months.

The next recession will more than likely be longer. The impact of a recession on your livelihood will depend on your risk exposure, job stability, number of income streams, age, and cash balance.

All of us are patriots to some degree. However, it’s good to beware of home country bias to protect ourselves from unexpected risk. Home country bias refers to investors’ tendency to favor companies from their own country over those from other countries or regions.

After all, it’s usually better to invest in what we know rather than invest in what we don’t. The more insights we have into an industry or company, the more we feel comfortable investing. Sometimes, with our superior knowledge, we might even outperform.

Home country bias investing is a worldwide phenomenon. No matter where you are from, the chances are high that you will overweight investing in the country where you currently reside. Consequently, a lot of your investment performance might actually result largely from luck.

Due to the war in Ukraine, a lot of people have been asking me whether to buy gold now. Therefore, I thought I’d revisit this post that I write a while ago and have updated today.

Before you buy gold, make sure you understand the basics of commodities. A commodity is typically a resource that the market treats as equivalent or pretty close to it regardless of who produced it. In other words, commodities are highly fungible.