So

let's look at another one of these assumptions. This is investment returns. Not that long ago, I was listening to Ben Felix, rational reminder podcast. I mean, the guy's really, really smart. And he was talking about this idea that the equity premium, this idea that the general stock market is gonna return eight to 10% on a regular basis for the rest of our lives, maybe overblown a little bit, that we might be too aggressive when we're really looking for those kind of returns. This is a problem I think all of us are gonna have. Many of us say, I'm betting on the market, right? I'm not gonna stock pick, I'm not gonna try to manipulate returns above and beyond what the market will bear. But what is a reasonable return estimate for someone who's gonna look at market returns for the next 20 or 30 years? And is that something we can even figure out?

Yeah, what a deep question. Starting on the second part of your question, is that something we can even figure out? That to me is the hard part of the question because I think the easy thing to do, and it's something that I do, I'll fully admit to this, is you look at the past 80, or 100, or 130 years, whatever your preferred time period is, you say, oh, from World War II until today, here's what historical returns have been, here's the compound average, sure, maybe I can make it a little bit more conservative than the past, because you don't know if the future is going to be like the past, but either way, you do something where you say, you know what, historically, a 60-40 portfolio has returned 9% per year over long periods of time. That's before adjusting for inflation, right? Those are nominal dollars, but boom, 9% 6040 portfolio. That's a true fact. The hard question is, because we don't want to be overly optimistic, we also don't want to be overly pessimistic. The hard question is, do we feel comfortable that the future is going to resemble that past? Do we want to worry about things like demographic changes? Demographic changes are already affecting Europe in some pretty big ways. The USA is one of the least demographically affected countries when we look out decades into the future when it comes to population decline that some countries are going to see and population decline leads to economic decline and leads to maybe stock. Okay, it's easy to get ourselves wound up. And there might be some facts there. And that's why it's really hard to say, will the future stock market resemble the past? I don't have the answer. I don't have the crystal ball. But my hesitation, again, is to be a doomsayer and say, no, it's gonna be negative returns for the next 30 years. And here's the reason why. I don't have any evidence to say that. Long story short, I don't think there's anything wrong with a little bit of conservatism, that the future might be not quite as great as the past in terms of returns. But I just think we have to be very careful about how much conservatism we bake in there.