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The average American who turns 50 this year has $251,000 in their 401k to retire comfortably at 65, not lavishly, you will need about $1.5 million. That's a $1.25 million gap you have to fill in the next 15 years. And this is where a lot of people say, "Just priy social security." Unfortunately, social security is drying up. So the money you're paying into social security every time you get paid is not paying for your retirement. It's paying for somebody else to retire. The math doesn't lie. This is a problem and this is why we are facing the biggest retirement crisis in the history of time right now in the United States. But that ends today because in this video I'm going to show you the five different assets that you
need to buy before you turn 50. That way you can not just retire comfortably, but retire in a way that allows you to live your life the way that you've always dreamed of. Now, just so we're on the same page, your parents and your great-grandparents had a very simple retirement plan. It was number one, save 10% of your income. Number two, follow the 4% rule. And then number three, that social security fill the gap. Well, unfortunately, this 10% rule does not work the way that it used to. Let's assume that you start at the age of 25 and you start saving $500 a month and you put your money into a savings account that's paying 0.4% a year, which is actually higher than the average savings account in America
today. You do this every month for the next 40 years until you retire at 65 years old. you're going to retire with around $260,000, which again is not enough. This is where investing your money comes into play. Now, if you could get just an 8% return on your money, which is below the market average, well, now you're going to retire with about $1.55 million, assuming that you invest the same $500 a month. But this assumes that you start investing at the age of 25 years old. And according to the math and the data, most Americans don't start investing until way later, which is why this is not working. Then number two is every financial advisor's favorite, the 4% rule. And what the 4% rule said is,
let's assume that you put aside a million for retirement. You will be able to pull out 4% of this money, in this case, $40,000 a year, every year for the rest of your life, and be able to retire and live off of this money. The problem with this is number one, inflation because inflation has gone up. The prices of things keep going up, which means $40,000 today doesn't buy you what $40,000 did 5 years ago, let alone $40,000 10 years ago. And number two, because people are living longer, they have to keep pulling this money out for more time. This is why we keep seeing more articles from big banks and institutions on Wall Street saying the 4% rule does not work anymore. You cannot pull out 4% of your assets every
year. You have to pull out a smaller percentage of your assets, which means you can't live off of $40,000. You have to figure out how to live off of $30,000, which means this doesn't work either. And this is where your parents and grandparents heavily relied on social security. The idea being every time you get paid, money is invested into the social security fund. Now, when it's time for you to retire, the social security fund is going to pay you every month until you die. The problem is social security is running out of money. And now the money you are investing into social security is not there to fund your retirement, is paying for somebody else's retirement. Which is why social
security is not there the way that it was before. which means in order for you to retire, you have to take it into your own hands. Which is why in this video, I want to go over different ways that you can invest your money. But you also want to understand some advantage ways that you can invest your money to get a bigger rate of return while keeping more of your money for yourself. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go over five specific assets that you can consider investing your money in. But I also want you to understand different tax advantage accounts that you have access to once you hit the age of 50 that can help you accelerate your wealth by paying less money in taxes. For
example, number one is the Roth IRA catchup. What this says is that in the year 2026, you can contribute $7,500 a year into your Roth IRA. But if you are over the age of 50, you can contribute an additional $1,100 a year into your Roth IRA just because now you over the age of 50. That way you can accelerate your wealth towards retirement. Number two is an HSA catchup. The HSA is a health savings account. The idea being you can invest money tax-free into this HSA account. And not only now can your money grow tax-free, but you can also pull this money out taxfree if you use it for a qualifying medical expense. And as people get older, you start to have more medical expenses. Well, as you get
older, you can contribute more money to your HSA tax-free. In 2026, if it's just for yourself, you can contribute $4,400 into your HSA. If it's for a family now, you can contribute $8,750 to your HSA, again tax-free. And now, if you're over the age of 55, you can contribute an additional $1,000 into your HSA as that catchup bonus. Option number three for you higher income earners is the backdoor Roth IRA. If you make over $165,000 a year as a single tax filer or $246,000 a year married filing jointly, you do not qualify for a Roth IRA. But there is a backdoor option. Now, just so we're on the same page, the way that a traditional IRA works is you put money into your IRA
account today, the money grows taxfree, and then when you pull the money out when you retire, you're going to pay taxes on the money when you do that. A Roth IRA or Roth 401k works a little bit different. You put the money in after paying taxes today. So you pay taxes before you put the money in. Your money grows taxfree and then when you pull the money out of your Roth IRA, you don't have to pay any taxes because you paid taxes when the money went in. So, if you want to qualify for this Roth IRA and you make higher incomes, the backdoor option is to invest money into a traditional IRA and then immediately after you do that, you convert your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA. So, it's kind of a backdoor way to invest
your money into a Roth IRA. Why don't they just allow you to invest into a Roth IRA? Well, I'm not a politician. And the fourth tax advantage that you get once you turn 50 is the 401k catchup. Let me explain this and then I'll go over the five different assets that you can consider investing in. In 2026, the max that you can invest in your 401k is $24,500. But once you turn 50 years old, you can contribute up to an additional $8,000 a year on top of the $24,500. And once you turn 60 years old, instead of the $24,500 limit, you can contribute up to an additional $11,250 to help you achieve your wealth and retirement sooner. So, now that I've laid out the foundation, let's get into the specific investment opportunities that you want to consider buying before
you turn 50. That way, you can actually hit your retirement goals sooner rather than later. By the way, this is why I put together a free investing master class where I walk you through how you can get started as an investor and find hidden investment opportunities before they hit the headlines. I'll show you the exact framework that my firm and I use to research investment opportunities. It's a completely free master class and when you sign up for it, you're also going to get access to market briefs, which is my newsletter for investors completely for free. So, if you want to get the investing master class and market briefs all for free, all you have to do is sign up and I have the link for you down in the description
below. And the first investment that I want to talk about is a growth investment. This is just investing your money into something like the broad United States economy. That way, you can see the value of your investment growth. And there's a couple different ways that you can play. There's some which are less volatile than others. The first one is just to invest your money into the broad United States economy by investing your money into the S&P 500. That's a group of the 500 largest companies in the stock market. The idea being now you're not just investing your money into the American economy. You're investing your money into the 500 largest companies in the American economy which trade on the stock market.
Now the nice thing about this is if one of those companies start to struggle, you don't have to worry about it. For example, Sears used to be a part of the S&P 500. They were one of the largest companies in the world. Well, if you invested in the S&P 500, you would have owned Sears. Well, Sears eventually started to struggle and when they fell out of the S&P 500, if you would have invested directly into the Sears stock, you would have saw your money go to zero. But if you invested into a S&P 500 fund, that fund would have kicked Sears out and replaced it with another company once it fell out of the S&P 500. So, there's a couple funds that will give you exposure to this S&P 500. One
example is SPY, SPY. Another example is VO, VU. As a disclosure, I'm personally invested in VU. Now, these two funds are almost identical. They just have slightly different expense ratios and slightly different holdings, which they prioritize over the other, but they're essentially the same in that they both invest in the top 500 companies in the stock market. The idea being this is a way just to give you broad exposure to the United States economy. And we have seen historically over the last 100 years, the S&P 500 has grown by around 10% a year. If you want to get a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more volatile, now instead of investing into the top 500 companies, you can invest
into the top 100 companies that are not financial. This is called the NASDAQ 100. And what we have seen is that the top 100 companies which are not financial are primarily tech companies. Now if you've been paying attention to any of the economic or financial news, you know how much attention has been going into technology. Well, if we just want to own the top 100 companies which are not financial, that is the NASDAQ 100. And what we've seen over the last number of decades is that the NASDAQ 100 has grown faster than the S&P 500. But there's a catch. it's more volatile. When markets go up, the NASDAQ 100 goes up even faster. When markets go down,
the NASDAQ 100 goes down even faster because there's more speculation in here and there's a lot of kind of excitement and emotion in the NASDAQ 100. But if you wanted to get a little bit more aggressive, but still want broad exposure to the American economy, one way you can do that to the NASDAQ 100 is through a fund like QQQ. Now, I got to remind you, I cannot tell you what to invest in. Investing has risks. You are never guaranteed to make money when you invest. In fact, you will lose money at some point. So, make sure you always your own due diligence and never blindly trust a random guy on YouTube. I'm just here to give you examples that way you can start thinking like an investor
instead of me trying to tell you what to invest in because what's right for me might not be right for you. The second type of investment you want to have before you turn 50 is an investment for income. The idea being, if you were to stop working tomorrow, how are you going to continue paying your bills, eating, and paying for your mortgage and your travel? You need an income to do that. One option is you just sell off some of your investments every year. But I don't like that idea because if I have to keep selling my investments, I'm going to keep losing my assets. But what if now my investments just pay me money every
month or every 3 months? It just deposits money into my bank account. And now I can live off of these dividends. I can live off of this interest. That's what it means to invest for income. I love this type of income investing because now you can just work to stack the income. You never have to worry about selling your investments and you can live off of this income. The reason why people hate it is because it takes more time to actually build and grow. But if you have the time, if you have at least a decade ahead of you, you have the ability to build solid income if you stay consistent. So, let me go over a couple ways that you can invest for this type of income. Example number one is
SCHD. As a disclosure, I'm personally invested in SCHD. And the way that SCHD works is that this invests in about 100 highquality dividend paying companies in the United States. These are not just companies that have been paying out dividends, but also been working to increase their dividends year after year. At the time of me recording this video, SCHD is paying out a dividend of around 3.3% a year. But where it gets even more interesting is that over the last 10 years, they have worked to increase their dividend by approximately 11% a year on average. Which means they are growing their dividends significantly faster than the inflation rate. That's one of the advantages of investing for income is you want to
think about where can you invest your money for income where your income is exceeding the rate at which inflation is growing because if your money is growing faster than inflation, you are becoming wealthier. Example number two is an ETF called DGRO. DGRO is an ETF that's a little bit broader. It holds about 400 different United States companies which have had at least 3 years of consecutive dividend growth. At the time of recording this video, DGRO is paying out a dividend of around 2% a year, but they've also been working to increase their dividend year-over-year over the last 10 or so years by approximately 8% a year. The third asset that you want to own before you turn 50 is real estate.
And there's two different types of real estate that people think about. Number one is the home that you live in. Number two is actual real estate as an investment. And I want to talk about the home that you live in first because one of the things I talk about pretty often is that your house that you live in is not an investment. But the reason why I say that is because a lot of people think that if I go out and buy a big house that I can't afford, then I'm investing my money because my mortgage payment is my investment. That is a losing way of thinking. The person that gets rich is your realtor because they get a bigger commission and your mortgage banker because they get a
bigger commission. Now, I'm not against you buying a house. In fact, I want you to buy a house. I think it's better for you to buy a house than if you rent a house. But you have to know how to buy a house that you can afford. Because if you're buying a house now, you have no more money to actually invest your money. Well, now you are becoming poorer because of that house. Because now anytime something goes wrong, the roof starts leaking, the window breaks, the AC stops working, money has to come out of your pocket, and you're constantly just working to maintain and live in the house as opposed to actually building wealth while living in the house. So that's the first thing that I want you
to understand. Now, it is good to own a house because when you own a house, well, you can reach a point where you don't have to worry about mortgage payments anymore. Plus, you can lock in your mortgage payments if you get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage versus when you rent a house. Well, now you have to worry about rent hikes year after year because of inflation. So, that's the benefit of owning. But what I really want to talk about, the bigger advantage, the bigger value is when you talk about being a real estate investor. Because as a real estate investor, you get to actually benefit from inflation.
The idea being that you're going to go out and buy this house, but you're not buying it for you to live in yourself. You're going to buy it for somebody else to live in and use. So, if you can go out and you buy this house for $300,000 and you can rent it out to a family and they're going to pay you, let's call it $3,000 a month. Well, now you've done three things. Number one, you own a hard asset. You own something that you can see, feel, and touch. Compare that to buying a stock on the stock market. If you buy a share of Amazon, well, you don't actually see, feel, and touch anything that you own. If you walk into the Amazon factory, nobody knows who you are. The second advantage with real
estate is you get steady cash flow because the goal is now that you're making this $3,000 a month and now you take this income that the tenants are paying you, you pay for all your expenses, your property taxes, your insurance, your maintenance, your management fees, and your vacancy costs and your mortgage if you have one, and then you put some money into your pocket every single month. You might be making, let's just call it, $300 a month of profit, but this is money coming into your pocket every single month that you don't have to go to work to earn. And no, you shouldn't be plugging the toilets either. You should have a property manager dealing with the day-to-day. So, this is money coming into your bank account every single
month without you having to go to work. And the third benefit and probably the biggest benefit here is the tax breaks that you can qualify for. As a licensed attorney who is not your attorney, I can tell you that real estate has some of the biggest and best tax breaks that our tax code has to offer. That's why we have many real estate investors that make huge sums of money, millions of dollars a year that pay little to no money in taxes 100% legally. It's because you get to qualify for something called depreciation. And what depreciation is you get to tell the IRS, hey, my property is one year older. And because my property is one year older, I deserve a tax write off. Even
if your property goes up in value, your property could go from $300,000 to $500,000. You still get that tax write off. Even if you're making money every single month, you still get that tax write off. This allows you to make money and pay less to no money in taxes legally because that's what the IRS tax code says. Now, yes, you can get exposure to the real estate space through the stock market as well, but you're not going to get these same benefits that I just talked about. You're not going to be owning a hard asset because you're still just investing in the stock and you're not going to get the same tax breaks that I just talked about, but you will get exposure to the real estate. So, if you
wanted exposure to real estate, example could be VNQ. This is an ETF created by Vanguard that gives you broad exposure to the real estate market in the United States and it has some income associated with it. So, if you just wanted exposure to the real estate market, but you hate the idea of dealing with tenants or buying a property and doing all that stuff, this is an alternative. There are many other real estate funds out there, but I just want you to start understanding the different ways to think about real estate. The fourth asset that you want to consider owning before you turn 50 are some aggressive growth investments. These are a little bit more risky. It'll probably be a smaller piece of your portfolio. The
idea being some of these might become bigger home runs, which could lead to more wealth, especially if you're trying to play catch-up. Now, you don't want to try to get into this game of getting into more speculative and risky investments because you're behind. The idea being a smaller piece of a portfolio can be a little bit more aggressive as a way for you to have a little bit of fun, but also you kind of balance out your portfolio with some the keyword some more speculative investments. Let me go over some examples. If you wanted to get some exposure to cryptocurrency, you could do that. You can go out and buy the actual Bitcoin itself. for if you wanted to buy Bitcoin indirectly through the stock
market, which I'm not a huge advocate of, but if you wanted to do that, you could do IBIT. That is an ETF that will give you exposure to the Bitcoin. My thinking is if you wanted to invest in Bitcoin, which is speculative, why not just buy the Bitcoin itself? But that's for you to decide if you wanted exposure to the Bitcoin. Option number two is ETF IWM. This is an ETF that's going to give you exposure to the EyesShare Russell 2000 ETF. This is a group of about 2,000 small cap smaller United States companies. The idea being that these are trading at a discount and because they're smaller, they have more upside potential, but it's more risky. Option number three is SMH. This is the VANC
semiconductor ETF. There's been a lot of talk about more money going into AI and technologies, but you need semiconductors to power all of this AI. This is an ETF that's going to give you exposure to the semiconductor space. The idea being if there's going to be more money going into AI, we're going to need more semiconductors and this gives you exposure to that space if you believe that's where the economy is moving. Similarly, in order to power all of this AI to power all this technology, we need more energy. And we're starting to see more talk about nuclear energy. We're starting to see more companies build
their own nuclear sites. So, if you wanted to get exposure to energy, more specifically nuclear energy, if you believe that's where the economy is going to be moving, there are ETFs that can give you exposure to that. For example, NUKZ is an ETF that specializes in the uranium and nuclear side of the economy. And then another small cap growth one is AVUV. This is kind of an alternative to the IWM side. This is an ETF that's created by Avantis. The idea being this is going to give you exposure to United States small cap value companies that if you believe that these smaller companies have more room and potential to grow, you can see more potential upside here, more risk for
more potential return. And then last but not least is the insurance investment. The idea being you want to have a little bit of diversification. That way in case something were to happen to the United States dollar, inflation becomes a bigger problem, something happens to the United States economy that you have some sort of protection outside of just the traditional investments inside of the United States. And there are a couple ways that you can think about this. Option number one would be gold. The idea being gold is known as a hedge against inflation. If people are worried about the dollar, gold prices go up. If people are not worried about inflation, gold prices generally fall. So don't buy
gold thinking that it only goes up in value. Just understand that gold is also volatile. But if people are concerned about the dollar, inflation, the economy, people generally turn to gold as a hedge. Just so you know, I don't personally think of gold as an investment. I look at it as a way of saving hard money. The reason your gold doesn't actually produce any value. It just sits there in a drawer and it looks back at you versus an investment like Amazon or real estate is actually working to produce value. Amazon is working to produce a product and a profit. your real estate is providing a roof over somebody's head. So, it's very clear how those provide income, but gold is just sitting there. It's not really
doing anything. So, it's more of a hedge. There's a couple ways to buy gold. You can go out and buy the physical gold, or if you didn't want to buy the physical gold, you can go into the stock market and get exposure to gold with an ETF, kind of like GLD. Insurance number two is investing internationally. And there's a lot of different ways that you're going to invest your money internationally if you were in the United States. And I'll talk about how you can do it through the United States stock market. Let's assume that you wanted to pick the safest and the broadest option. You wanted to invest in the total stock market outside of the United States. Well, there's an ETF like VXUS that's going to give you
exposure to the total international stock market that is not the United States to give you some diversity outside of the United States. Or maybe you want to get a little bit more niche. You only want to invest into developed markets. These are the countries in Europe, the countries like Canada and Australia and Japan. Well, there are ETFs out there like VA that are going to give you exposure to the developed markets around the world. Or maybe you want to get a little bit more niche and now you want to invest into the emerging markets, the countries like India, China and Taiwan and Brazil. If you want to invest in these types of emerging
markets, there are many ETFs that give you exposure to that. One example again by Vanguard would be VWO that gives you exposure to these emerging markets. Or if you want to get even more niche, you can invest into specific countries. For example, INDA is going to give you exposure to the Indian economy in India markets. EWJ is going to give you exposure to the Japanese economy. EW is going to give you exposure to the Mexican economy. The idea being if there's a specific country or economy that you believe in, there might be a fund that gives you exposure to those companies inside of that country. Again, we're talking more risky here, but it's a hedge and protection outside of the United States economy. This doesn't have
to be the hugest part of your portfolio. But now, as we get a little bit more speculative as we get a little bit more on the insurance side, it might be worthwhile for you to think about having some of your portfolio as some insurance in case the United States goes through a recession, the dollar goes through more inflation problems as a way to protect you against that. When I first started learning about money management, I avoided using a credit card because I thought that credit cards are bad and evil. And then when I realized that I knew how to spend my money and I wasn't going to spend money I didn't have for credit card perks and points, I realized that I could earn more cash back, I
could earn more perks and points for doing nothing except making the transactions that I would normally make anyways with a credit card instead of a debit card. And that's why I partnered with my sponsor, Finance Buzz, to put together an article of some of my favorite credit cards. Now, here's the caveat. If you don't know how to manage your money, don't use a credit card. But if you're comfortable using a credit card, in this article with my sponsor, Finance Buzz, I go over some of my top credit cards based off of different types of tiers. If you have credit card debt and you want to pay it off faster, I go over some of the top 0% APR credit cards. This will give you an opportunity to attack the credit card debt faster
while not acrewing any interest during the 0% APR period. I go over some of my favorite cashback credit cards. That way, you can earn more points and cash back while you spend on your normal transactions. I go over some of my favorite travel cards for those of you that are traveling more often and earning more income. And then I go over some of my favorite business credit cards as well. So, if you know how to manage your money and you're comfortable using your credit card, you can see some of my top credit cards right now in the free article that I have for you down in the description. So, what we talked about in this video is that the United States is facing a retirement problem
because more and more people are reaching the age of 50 and are facing a crisis that they don't have enough money to retire and they don't know how they're going to retire. Well, this is where it is important for you to take these matters into your own hands. We started by talking about different catchup things and tools that you have access to once you turn 50 years old that you can take advantage of. That way, you can ramp up your investments tax-free as you get into retirement. From there, we talked about five different types of assets that you can consider investing your money in. That way, you can figure out different ways to invest your money depending on what your goals are. Again, I'm not here to
tell you what to invest in. I'm here to help you start thinking like an investor. that way we can come up with a better plan for you and your family. Again, if you want to watch my free investing master class, I have that link for you down in the description. But we went over five. Number one is we talked about growth, more specifically investing money into the broad United States economy, whether something like the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ 100. From there, we talked about income. The idea being if you quit your job or retire or just stop working, you still need an income to be able to live off of. Well,
how are you going to get that income? Are you going to sell your investments or are you going to get cash flow from your investments? And one way that we talked about doing that was through the stock market. Another way that you can get that income is through real estate. Now, I talked specifically about physical real estate because when you invest in physical real estate, not only do you get cash flow, but you also own a hard asset and you get some of the biggest and best tax breaks that our tax code has to offer. Now, if you don't want to go out and invest in real estate yourself, yes, there are other ways to get exposure to real estate through the stock market as well, which I talked
about. Then option number four, we talked about more aggressive growth options. Investing in things like small cap companies, investing in things like our growing technology with semiconductors, investing in things like the future of energy, potentially nuclear, depending on where you believe the economy is going to go. Now, again, a little bit more risky, but more risk for more potential return. And as you start to build your portfolio, you don't want to have the bulk of your portfolio be the more speculative stuff. This is where it can be a smaller piece of your portfolio, which has more potential upside. And then finally, we talked about insurance types of investments. That way, if the United States does go
through any sort of downturn, you can have some protection, which may not shield you against everything, but it's a way to give you diversification against different types of things happening in our economy here. If you got value out of this video, the best thank you is a referral. So, if you could please share this video with a friend, family member, colleague, or fellow investor. That way, we can continue to spread this type of financial education. Thank you. One year ago, President Trump signed the biggest tax cut bill in the history of America. And now, your taxes are going to change in 2026. Take a listen. We have officially made the Trump tax cuts permanent. That's the largest tax cut in the history of our country added to substantial
