Joey Loss 00:15
All right. Adam van Lee, welcome back. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Well. Here we are liberation week, freedom is ringing. Yeah,

Adam Van Wie 00:23
I wore my I wore my red shirt, but it isn't for the USA. It's for the blood bath that we saw yesterday, and it was awful.

Joey Loss 00:31
Yeah, it is a crazy week in the markets, and seemingly bigger than people expected. I'm just going to do a quick rundown of exactly what Liberation Day was this week, what it means, what has happened, and how the market's reacting, and then we'll run from there. So over the last several weeks, President Trump has been talking about Liberation Day. It was a day in which he was going to apply a broad array of tariffs across countries around the world, and the idea was, we're not getting treated fairly in trade in a multitude of ways, and these tariffs were going to provide motivation for us to reassess that and punish bad actors, and just kind of reaffirm where we believe we're supposed to be in terms of trade around the world. So what ended up being unveiled from the Rose Garden on Wednesday afternoon was a universal 10% tariff on all nations with an additional tariff specifically calculated for each country that was going to apply to bad actors, is what they called them. So countries like China, who we know has been kind of hard on us with trade, have bigger tariffs than countries like the EU or other places who don't have as harmful trade policies against us. In the days that have followed, it came out that these tariffs were actually calculated on trade deficits that we have with these countries, as opposed to just looking at the tariffs that they have applied against us, or certain trade blocks that they've put up against certain industries. An example of those trade blocks might be for Australia, for example, doesn't allow American beef in their market. That started in 2003 because of mad cow concerns, but has persisted. Really is more of a defensive economic decision for farmers in Australia. And the idea was, you know, if we apply tariffs, we'll potentially be able to reopen that negotiation and see if we can get American beef in their economy. Play that out 1000s of times with 1000s of different things across the market, and you have the basis for Liberation Day, and the market has reacted pretty extremely. Yesterday, market was down about three or 4% this morning, China announced a reciprocal tariff of 34% on all goods exported from the US to China, and the market has reacted with another three to 4% decline so far. Today, we're speaking at 10am on April 4, Friday. So that's kind of where we are. Small caps are taking the worst beating. But yeah, so here we are in Adam's red shirt looking at the market.

Adam Van Wie 03:03
Yeah, a lot of red on the screen all over the place today. It's the markets did not react well to this news. I think that perhaps they underestimated what what Trump was going to do with his announcement. And I just don't know if anyone knew what to expect, the general feeling I get, I've listened to probably five, six podcasts, all going over these tariffs since they were announced, and nobody predicted what was going to happen. And there's part of it, the announcement, that I think, Okay, this kind of makes sense, and then part of it is really left me just wondering. I don't, I guess I don't get it and or maybe it's just bad policy. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a foreign trade expert, but I do know that there are, there are certain things that that stimulate trade, and certain things that are very anti competitive or anti trade, and this seems to have a lot of all of it. And so I think that the idea of free and fair trade is very important. And I completely agree with that. If there are countries that are tariffing our automobiles so that we can't sell into their markets, and then they're selling us their automobiles, that's clearly not fair trade that it's it's just not. If you can't sell Fords into Germany and take BMWs into the US without with the same or is no tariffs, then that's not, that's not fair trade. And so that part, I totally agree with the when it comes to looking at trade imbalances, though, and using that as part of the calculation, that's where it kind of loses me, because you have trade imbalances all the time, and it has to do with so many other things besides tariffs or free or fair trade, because maybe a country just produces something that we don't produce, and we need more of it. So why is that a bad thing? If we're buying more this happens all. The time, technically, you have a trade imbalance with any company you do business with that you don't then sell something to. So I just don't understand why that's such a bad thing, or why the administration views it as such a bad thing. Now, if it's just that they are tariffing Everything that goes into that country, and that's why that imbalance exists, then it makes sense. But I don't think that's the case. When you start looking at some of these small countries, their GDPs and their average personal income, household income isn't enough to create a fair trade situation with us. They don't have the dollars to buy our goods. So I'm just a little confused and maybe a bit frustrated when you see when, when you see what happened to the market yesterday, I just This better be worth it, because I think there's a lot of frustrated people out there, including myself,

Joey Loss 05:54
yeah, and I think, Gosh, people, I think, are willing to suspend disbelief to see if there's some magic behind this strategy, which we really haven't used tariffs like this in 100 years. But I think the way that this was executed shocked Wall Street clearly and the market had not priced in this type, this level of tariffs. I don't think it priced in this calculation method. And frankly, I I agree with your thoughts on the trade deficit. I don't understand why we're viewing that as a bad thing. That shocked me, because I think the sentiment was in the clients we talked to, the people we talked to, we don't want trade wars and but we we are willing to explore a little bit of what's possible. As far as making trade a little bit more fair to your original point, and focusing on trade deficits, does not feel like the execution method and, and it's not like it was just part of the formula. It was the formula. And, yeah, and, you know, but we're calling it reciprocal tariffs. It feels misleading to me, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that I'm against everything about the execution of this. I think I was curious about the spirit of truly reciprocal tariffs. These don't feel like that to me. Doesn't feel like that to investors, clearly. And so, you know, what does it mean? Maybe it's a negotiating tactic. I think that's what people are hoping this is meant to be, and that it plays out that way, that would be interesting. And if that's the case, and it runs a course that they're hoping for, then we could improve the cost of goods coming into America pretty quickly. We might improve infrastructure establishment in the United States, which could theoretically create jobs and stuff, but that just has to play out pretty perfectly based on where we've positioned ourselves now for that to be the case. And I don't know that. I feel optimistic that that's what's going to happen. But with that said, you know, this is the kind of event, and from an investing perspective, that happens many times over the course of an investing lifetime, not this exact event, but these types of events where we all kind of scratch our heads and don't know what's going to happen. But Adam, I guess you you have a very strong grasp on long term investments. What are investors supposed to do when things like this happen? There's really

Adam Van Wie 08:13
not much you can do. I guarantee you that if you try and make a move and react to what happened yesterday, you're going to make it worse. There is no way that you will improve your situation by making a drastic move, because it's all you you might get one thing right, but then you're going to miss the next three things. So if you sold out yesterday, let's say and you were down 4% and you're today, you're thinking you're the smartest trader in the world because you're missing out on another 3% downside. The problem is you have no idea when it's going to turn around, and you have run a very good chance of missing the the rebound and getting back in at a price point actually higher than where you sold out and making your returns worse. Meanwhile, you're also missing out on the chance to reinvest dividends at a lower level. And so there's multiple things at play there. The The fact is, trying to time the market is a losing battle. I've seen it happen multiple times. It's a bad idea, and I just, I, I do not recommend it. Please don't try it. I can't stress this enough, my grandparents, in 2008

Joey Loss 09:27
got out of the market, and then they had this question. You know, maybe they timed it kind of right. I don't know the details, but I know in a from a macro view, this hurt them big time, because they didn't know when to get back in, right? You don't know when the news has officially turned good for a while. And I think that's the hard part as an investor. It seems like it should be obvious, right? Things have gone down. Okay? They're they're going to flatten for a while. That's when I'll buy back in, and then things will be jolly from there on. It just doesn't play out like that.

Adam Van Wie 09:57
No, if a top of you. Were paying attention during 2008 some of you might be too young, but I was, I was a young investor during 2008 and I watched my 401, K, I had just hit $100,000 saved, and I watched it go to low, below 50. And it was the, the worst, the worst thing that ever happened to me at that point. I The fact is, by the market turned around in March of 2009 but I worked in sales during that time, and I was on the road every day, and things were bad in March of 2009 and I mean, just awful, like I would go eat at a restaurant because I was out on the road, and I'd be the only customer in the restaurant, and it was just there were, if you drove around Florida, there were all sorts of properties that had been started and just sat as empty shells for years and years. And in March of 2009 they were everywhere. It looked like a like a house graveyard. It was awful. But the markets forward looking, and it has more insight than you do, than the average person does. And for whatever reason, the market determined that in March of 2009 things were about to bottom and start to get better. But even as late as 2011 there were still people that didn't believe it, because they had been personally affected. Lost their job, they had lost their house, and so the mood in the country was still not great. But if you didn't get back until 2011 you missed the boat. You were you, you missed all of the rebound and then some, yeah,

Joey Loss 11:33
in the years after market callbacks. I mean whether you're looking on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, quarterly basis, six month basis, yearly basis, when the market pulls down dramatically, as it has from a statistical standpoint, historically, the periods immediately falling tend to be better than the average period. The problem is you don't know whether you're dealing with the weekly down, the monthly down, the quarterly down or the six month. And so as an investor, you just kind of have to stay put. This is when rebalancing becomes very strong. This is when if you have excess cash that you know you're not going to spend, and you want to throw it in the market, it tends to be a buying opportunity, because you know you're buying a 10 or 15 or 20% off the all time high. It's one of the few free lunches for the disciplined investor. But again, you have to have that long term view that that can be very challenging when the headlines get as dismal as they are right now.

Adam Van Wie 12:22
Yeah, and there's going to be a lot of people telling you that this time is different, and that's always what happens every time the market pulls back like this, or draws down or goes into a bear market, people say this time is different. It's never coming back, or we're doomed as a country, yada yada it's that has never been the case. It has never proven true. And you just have to remember that and know that that this time is there's like a 99% chance that this time is not different. It's just never different. It's always the same. It's just hard to hard to realize that when you're when you're experiencing so much personal loss in your account, yeah,

Joey Loss 13:03
I agree to zero back in on the tariffs. You know. JP, Morgan has raised their recession chance dramatically, right? It was 40% like last week. Now it's 60% after Wednesday's announcements and so. And if you look at the like poly market and these other places, the chances of a recession, you know, back to your point about the market as a whole, knows more than any individual does. All of these things are pointing more towards a recession, even if you go into the umbrella of like, what a recession means in every different pocket of life, you know, whether it's economy or your specific industry for work or specific stock prices, you can't really predict what a recession means if that's where we're headed, and if and if things could turn around quickly. You know, what does JP Morgan do with their forecast next week? So all of these headlines and data points are interesting, but it's just like, what do you what are we supposed to do with that?

Adam Van Wie 13:58
Again, there isn't much that you can do a recession. Recessions are out of your control. There isn't much that you can do to change that you can hedge your portfolio against further downside. That's probably the most prudent thing to do. But again, recessions don't always come with huge stock market drops, you sometimes see a recession come and go with very little effect on the market. And you might not even know that you're in a recession until the recession has been called by economists, because you saw two quarters of declining economic growth. And so it's very hard to judge recessions, because sometimes recessions don't even feel like recessions. So the fact that you you can't even determine if you're in one, how are you supposed to insulate yourself from one? Yeah,

Joey Loss 14:47
I agree. I mean, especially if it's a recession focused on a particular industry that you're not working in, you very well may not feel it at all.

Adam Van Wie 14:55
Yeah, no doubt about it. It's, I mean, a true. Is a downturn in the economy, so it technically should hit every part of the economy. It doesn't always do that, but one sector can drag down the whole economy, where other sectors might be fine, and you won't even know that that it happened. That wasn't the case in 2008 but that was an extreme example. There are many other cases where we went through a recession that was very short and very mild. Let's talk

Joey Loss 15:27
about, you know, where's inflation? I know a jobs report came out. I mean, what do these things mean? And is there any beacon of hope?

Adam Van Wie 15:34
Yeah, I think there is. The jobs report today looked really strong. 228,000 new jobs, I think was the headline number. There was a negative revision of about 40,000 to the last two months. So that counts sort of against that higher job number, but still pretty strong growth if we are in a recession. You usually don't see job numbers like that when you're in a recession. So that was a little bit of a bright spot. The inflation is interesting right now. The government is still saying that it's a bit high, but if you look at a site like trueflation, it's showing about 1.75% which is actually under the Fed's target rate. And I tend to believe that the inflation hasn't been as big of an issue over the last six to 12 months as many would have you believe. It's there was clearly a lot of inflation two years ago, three years ago, it was off the charts. You were seeing it every time you went to the grocery store. It wasn't just eggs. Everything was higher. Everything and your your bills were going up, your rent was skyrocketing, your the price of cars was off, the going up like crazy. But today, I'm not seeing that anymore. And the numbers, especially on the on the trueflation site, which you should definitely check out, it's very interesting. They take 1000s of data points and feed it all together in an algorithm to come up with what they think the true level of inflation is, and it feels more like that is correct than what the government is saying. I don't think the government's aligned to I think that their data is probably just a little more, maybe a little more outdated and a little more skewed than what what these this website algorithm is seeing,

Joey Loss 17:21
well, it's good to hear inflation really is at the point that you're saying, because I guess that opens up the Fed's toolkit a little bit more. If we do see a recession,

Adam Van Wie 17:31
we're hearing anecdotal stories, especially in housing, of rents dropping, of house prices dropping, of not, not dramatically, but, but you're seeing more inventory on the market, and so naturally, people aren't going to continue to be able to push those prices through the moon. We're seeing grocery store prices seem to be fairly level. Eggs have definitely come down a lot. Gas prices, the price of oil has been plunging in the last two days, so that should show up at the pump, and it was already somewhat lower than it had been. So I do think that the fears of like runaway inflation are probably overblown now, with the tariffs going in, should they actually go in and be fully implemented? That concerns me a bit on the inflation side, because there's almost no way for companies not to pass on those added cost to the consumer. Yeah,

Joey Loss 18:29
that's the part that scares me and makes me kind of against the policy as it's written, because there are so many businesses that live on five and 10% margins, and if we have especially small business, right? And if you have small business that mostly does commerce with Americans, but they're getting a lot of their goods from overseas, and now those costs have gone up. I mean, that is just going to punish those businesses if they don't pass the price on to the consumer, which means at least transitory inflation on those goods is the only outcome if those businesses have a chance to survive.

Adam Van Wie 19:04
The only other, yeah, the only other option is for them to go out of business, which is which is more destructive than than passing price increases on. So I certainly hope that that is not the case. But honestly, I'm kind of in a wait and see mode with this. I don't just don't have a good feel for what's going to happen. The tariffs are supposed to go in Saturday night, I believe. So maybe we'll have a better idea on Monday. But it's, it's a, I don't know what's going to happen there.

Joey Loss 19:31
Yeah, I really don't. And as far as we can tell, I don't think this administration is interested in in, you know, in other times where we've had quantitative easing policy, there has been large influxes of cash into the economy at the same time as potential strain was applied to the economy through other policy. So as an example, you know, in 2008 we had all this tough time. We had all these pressures closing in on a. Many industries in the banks, huge banks, were really failing, right? This wasn't even about small business then, and right or wrong, the decision was to infuse a lot of cash into businesses to keep them alive for a certain period, while the rest of the economy, the complex system that it is, had time to ripple out and business to stabilize, right? And so basically it was just giving more runway. And so a lot of these small businesses, I'm concerned, won't have an option for that runway, which theoretically could carry them through the end of the tariff period and the negotiations if that ends up being a longer process. But if we don't have that sort of policy coupled with, you know, a prolonged tariff negotiation process, then we may have a lot of pain that's irreversible for business owners in America before we reach the resolution and American prosperity that we're hoping to get to.

Adam Van Wie 20:48
Yeah, and then you you compound that problem of if they do infuse cash into the system, that's inflationary. We just saw it in 2020 and 2021, and we don't want to get back to those that you don't want to compound the effect of tariffs with increasing the monetary supply, that would be an inflation nightmare. So we'll have to, I don't think that's the solution. I think it has to be on negotiating down these tariffs and and, and really coming to that, that sort of fair trade agreement with other countries that we spoke about at the beginning of the podcast.

Joey Loss 21:28
Yeah, well, an interesting stat, you know, as far as investments go in relation to this, an interesting stat that I just saw is during periods like this on at least Robin Hood's platform, investors leave individual positions in droves and buy into indexes, and they feel and I guess, what that suggests is that investors feel more confident about their ability to weather and predict entire markets than they do about individual companies, which is interesting, right? Because the last few years, the story has been, if you've owned the mag seven, Nvidia meta, you know, the usual suspects, then you've probably outperformed by a great margin most other investors Absolutely. Then during this time, those are the guys getting hit the artist. And I guess investors are speaking voting with their dollars on where they think some safety is, or at least less risk. Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 22:19
I mean, that's that's always the as a financial planner, that always the problem with the good times is that the the people who follow trends and jump in on the hot stocks, they're always going to outperform our sort of balanced portfolios. But on the flip side, I think the last few days have been a really good illustration of this. In fact, I had a client email me late yesterday and just kind of checking in. He wasn't upset, but he was worried slightly, and I told him I was happy to tell him, look at that. The time that I'm replying to you, your account is down 1.4 something percent, and the market's off four to 6% so this is where, this is where a balanced portfolio is your best friend, where. So I kind of agree with the individual investors. Like, stop trying to pick those stocks. There were winners yesterday. By the way, there were actually quite a few of them, largely in like the defensive and consumer stocks, not the discretionary the other side, the things that people have to buy. I saw McDonald's was up this morning. I saw few others just kind of as I was going over things, but, but picking those individual stocks, especially in a Well, anytime is really hard, but especially when there isn't this, like, really easy trend to spot where one company or one basket of companies is just doing so well.

Joey Loss 23:37
Yeah, it is amazing how, like, just the aura. I mean, we there's an aura in our office when we're talking to clients like at all times. And I remember in January, if there's just such optimism, right, there's a bit of turbulence after the election, but we felt like we're headed towards some some good times continued. Good times. The market had been doing well for two years. Felt like corporate earnings and corporate spending was in a good place. And it's just funny how quickly, you know that feels like so much longer than three months ago or two months ago. I mean, really less than two full months ago, we were feeling that way, and it feels like it's been a huge version.

Adam Van Wie 24:15
Yeah, no doubt about it. But those times can come back really quickly too. It's but a lot of times, the market, as they say, climbs a wall of worry too. So sometimes the uncertainty drives the market higher. And it's when you when you least expect the market to go up, it goes up. It's that march of 2009 effect. But you see it all the time. In fact, last year is a great example of this. Nobody thought last year would be a 20 plus percent on the s&p year. There was no reason for it. I couldn't come up with any viable theory as to why the market was going up like it was. It just seemed to be getting ahead of itself and sort of defying logic. So these things happen all the time, and sometimes they happen when things feel the darkest, like perhaps right now. All

Joey Loss 25:00
right, let's get a little silly and speculate on what do we think the play is like the story that we're not being told behind the tariff regime, because, given the aggressiveness of it, it kind of changes what I think they're trying to do. And I've read a couple interesting theories. None of these are probably right, as they never are, but I think it's interesting to talk about and wonder about. One of them is if, if you can create a market environment where everything is slowing down and the stock market is not looking too happy, people are rushing into bonds, you can actually push down yields in a significant way on treasuries, and that would give the Fed an opportunity to refinance the debt on which they currently pay $1 trillion a year to a lower rate, yeah, and, I mean, I think that's

Adam Van Wie 25:47
part, maybe part of

Joey Loss 25:48
it, a lot of pain, but it's an interesting thought.

Adam Van Wie 25:51
I don't I think that might be an unintended consequence more than the whole theory, but I do think that lower interest rates a weaker dollar. These are all things that President Trump is a big fan of. So I don't necessarily think that they're the main goal of the whole strategy, but I sure don't think he hates it either. So yeah, I think I think that that's a valid thought. Anyway, yeah,

Joey Loss 26:13
it's interesting factor. And another thing that I heard that I think is interesting is, you know, the world that Donald Trump comes from, the New York investing, real estate investing, deal making world is brutal. I mean, those guys are horrible to one another, and the only way you can tell if somebody wants to do a deal with you is because they're still sitting in a room 20 minutes after you started, even if they just been humiliating you the entire time. The fact that they're still there is how you know you're winning the deal. It's just a different world in which that is so different from everything else. And my guess is, you know, most international countries, and historically, the US has not operated on an international trade basis in this way, or was that sort of candor. And it seems like maybe that's part of what he's bringing to the table in the hopes that he can drive certain outcomes. I don't know how that's going to play out, but it's a theory that makes me hope this isn't where we're going to end up as far as the tariffs, and it's just a starting point that he thinks maybe gives him a stronger leg.

Adam Van Wie 27:16
Yeah, that's, that's where I come down on it. I really think that's what it is. And with, with the President. I've noticed this over and over again. He always says something that is like outrageous to get to a point for something that is, that is pretty normal and but he's very, very serious when he says the first thing. Because without that, if people don't believe that you're willing to go to extremes, then they're going to take advantage of you. And he doesn't want to get taken advantage of he wants to meet in the middle, and he's got an idea of where he wants to end up, but he's going to say something, and he's going to stick to his guns until the compromise is made, and he does it over and over again. So it's this, I think there's a very good chance that that's what this is, but I truly do not know, and I don't think anyone else does at this point, and it is pretty scary, and the markets are clearly spooked. Yeah,

Joey Loss 28:12
it's the whole figuratively versus literally thing, right? It's like, Is he, is he saying what he literally means, or is he speaking figuratively to eventually get to literal needs?

Adam Van Wie 28:24
Yeah, and he uses hyperbole all the time. I mean, the guy is, you know, he this is, this is who he is and, and it's straight out of the New York City Real Estate playbook, in my opinion. I think you made a great point with that.

Joey Loss 28:36
All right, so I feel like I could talk about this a lot, because it's really interesting and it's painful, and I think it's just got everybody's focus right now, but I guess looking forward. You know, we touched on a few positives. If you had to write a short story on why there's optimism or opportunity for things to improve, what, what would the chapters be? I

Adam Van Wie 28:59
mean, I think you start with, well, the everyone was saying how overvalued the market was just three days ago. And now, guess what? It's not so overvalued. So things are starting to look attractive. Historically, when the VIX hits 30, it's been a decent entry point. It hit 40 yesterday. So So definitely, when you see blood in the streets, you know, that was the buffet quote, I think so there's all sorts of things that would say, Wow, this could be a good buying opportunity. But all of that is also predicated on, well, we can't destroy the economy or go into recession or have these tariffs increase the price of everything that we buy by 20% so you have to couch it all in that, in that framework, where that this is just a negotiating tool, and that would make this an excellent buying opportunity. But we don't know that yet, so I can't, can't say that, but all the signs are there. There's panic, there's. There's fear the prices are way down what they have been recently, and things are not nearly as overvalued as they were, yeah.

Joey Loss 30:07
And any emotional sentiment versus performance start looking backwards. This is gonna look like with 100% clarity at some point. You know, the moment where buying opportunity was abound,

Adam Van Wie 30:20
yeah? And we may not be there yet. We might. We might have more to go on the downside. I It's hard to say, but, but at some point we are going to look back and say I should have bought right.

Joey Loss 30:32
Okay. Well, any other thoughts for current market situation, headlines, stuff like that. If

Adam Van Wie 30:37
this is your first time going through this, and I suspect that for some of you, it is you just, if you're going to be a long term investor, you have to get used to this. This is normal. It happens all the time. Happens on average. We see a correction every 15 months, and we see a bear market every three to six years, or something like that. But every single time that I've been through this, I bounce back on the other side, and even when things return to just their normal level, if you stay invested and you reinvest your dividends, you're actually going to have more money than you did prior at the previous peak. So that's why this thing works. And if you can keep buying, keep dollar cost averaging, and you will be a winner in the market eventually, if you just stick to your guns. I

Joey Loss 31:24
think that's right, yeah. I mean, the best from a planning perspective. You know, we've got a new client just starting right now, and I'm wondering if she can see the future, because she just happened to pick a day that feels like it might be the bottom of something, right? Maybe we've got more to go, as you said. But as far as activity year to date, she picked right after the last two days to move the cash over. And I you know there's going to be rewards for that over the long term, if history plays out as it always does, yeah,

Adam Van Wie 31:50
and we just had a couple of clients roll over 401. K is because they're retired. Sometimes you get lucky with these things. Usually you don't, but it does happen, all

Joey Loss 31:58
right. Well, we may get together again sometime this month, if the headlines stay this hot, but think we've covered what we can today.

Adam Van Wie 32:05
Great. Thanks for having me on. Joey, thanks for chatting, man.

Joey Loss 32:13
Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends or family. This is the best way to spread the word, and we want to keep churning out great content for you guys. Show Notes and episode transcripts are available on our website at strivus wealth.com/podcast Special thanks to bode lessons for the intro outro music and to the podcast man for producing the show. Until next time,

Disclaimer 32:39
the wealth unplugged podcast is sponsored by strivus wealth partners, Joey and Adams SEC registered investment advisory offering Financial Planning and Investment Management services to clients across the United States. The opinions voiced in this episode are for general informational purposes only. Nothing any host or guest says on the podcast is meant to serve as advice or recommendations for any individual security to determine which investments may be appropriate for you. Consult your financial advisor prior to investing. This information is not intended to substitute for individualized tax insurance or estate planning advice. Please consult your tax advisor, insurance agent or estate advisor regarding your specific situation.