First, a maxim of sorts about our collective state of anxiety — whether you’re pulling for four more years or a new occupant in the Oval Office. “Emotions are really good at raising questions and really bad at answering them,” said Zach Teutsch, a financial planner in Washington, D.C. It’s true in life, and it’s certainly true with financial decisions. Try not to make any big ones anytime soon.
Second, it’s easy to overestimate how much change is possible in the first year of any presidential term, especially for things that can hit you squarely in the wallet, like taxes, retirement rules or health care. Mr. Teutsch learned all about that during his time at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he worked from 2013 to 2017.
As Mr. Teutsch tells it, many people working in government spend their careers focused on a single problem within a specific policy area that they would love to fix. They make plans and have memos in their back pockets and are ready when the legislative, executive or judicial clouds part.
“Mostly, what you do is think and wait for those brief moments when you can move the thing to fix the problem that you’ve been obsessed with,” he said. It tried his patience enough that he found another line of work.
But here’s the problem for those policy lifers and for those of us who pay the taxes that keep them employed: Only a tiny fraction of them finally get to do their thing during any presidential administration, and it isn’t possible to predict who will get their shot or how successful they will be. It would be foolish to, say, fundamentally alter your retirement savings strategy in anticipation of a change to some or another tax rule.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/your-money/investing-stocks-trump-biden.html
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