Your Survival Guy’s January 2026 RAGE Gauge is in, and as you’d expect, it’s not pretty. But that doesn’t mean you allow your lazy cash to sit on the couch and do nothing. Even when warning signs flash, you want to get your money working.
This is a great time to get a lay of the land. Market headlines can pull you off course, so you need to keep your eyes on the real data in front of you. Just like on the ocean, you can’t let the instruments do everything. Sometimes you need to look at the water for yourself.
- Take a look at my charts below, and you’ll see the Atlanta Fed’s Fed GDP Now estimate at 5.13%.
- You’ll also see that Federal Reserve Bank Assets have ticked up to $6.57 trillion after declining for years.
- On my chart of the Coincident Economic Index to Lagging Economic Index, you’ll see the index trending upward, as it normally would when the economy is recovering from a recession.
- Also, despite horror stories about layoffs, the number of average weekly initial jobless claims has remained historically very low.
- And in the latest jobs report, the unemployment rate fell for the first time in six months.
CLICK THROUGH THE SLIDESHOW BELOW
As you know, I always favor a balanced portfolio and use the efficient frontier as a GPS of sorts. Because my favorite three letters in investing are y-o-u. You need to be confident you are invested according to your risk tolerance, not according to how you feel the market will do this year.
Protect Yourself
You spend more time online than you used to, so does everyone. Bank accounts, credit cards, investments, insurance, tax payments, utilities, subscriptions, shopping, and every other way you spend or move money have been pushed further online. And with every account comes a login, with a username and password. Does your spouse know them all?
If you’re like most busy families, you divide and conquer. One person might handle the bank accounts while the other handles the investments. Or one the electric bill and the other the groceries. So it’s possible you have set up some accounts that your husband or wife doesn’t use regularly, or maybe has never used at all. What happens in an emergency?
The time to safely share passwords and logins is before an emergency hits. There are services that can help you, like LastPass, Proton Pass, Dashlane, and others (this isn’t an ad for any of these, but they might help if the feature set works for you).
Alternatively, you can do it the old-fashioned way and simply print out your logins and passwords on a piece of paper. The trouble with this method is that multi-factor authentication (MFA) has become much more popular, and if you don’t have access to passkeys, cell phones, or email accounts, you can quickly find yourself just as stuck as you would be with no password at all. You can mitigate those problems somewhat by sharing cell phone and email login passwords.
Verizon Outage
You may have been one of the many Americans who lost cell phone service yesterday. Some of Verizon’s customers were out of service for up to ten hours. Verizon has resolved the issue and is offering those affected credit for the outage, but if readers of YourSurvivalGuy.com were affected, maybe they had their satellite phone ready to go.
Your Survival Guy has long been a proponent of backup satellite communications, whether that’s a satphone or a Starlink-type service with internet. If you were prepared for yesterday’s outage, congratulations on taking the necessary steps to protect yourself from loss of communications. If you were stuck with no service, read below to find some encouragement and advice on how to get prepared for the next outage.
- OUT OF THIS WORLD: More Satellite Communications Arrive
- Smartphone Satellite Communications Are Here
- What’s Your Backup Internet Plan?
- How Does Internet from Space Work?
- What You Can Do to Protect Yourself from Cellular Outages
- Avoid Isolation and Danger with the Reliability of a Satellite Phone
- Here’s Why You Definitely Need a Satellite Phone
Action Line: Be prepared, know thyself, and do what you can today. It’s better to make small progress toward your goals today than to hope for a big miracle to happen later on. Don’t let inertia hold you back. When you need a helping hand building a plan for your investments, email me at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com.
