5 Ways the Pandemic Is Imperiling Retirement

In this episode of the Motley Fool Answers podcast, hosts Alison Southwick and Robert Brokamp reveal three lessons related to the unveiling of The Motley Fool's new logo, including one from the best-performing stock of the past 25 years.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on July 7, 2020.

Alison Southwick: This is Motley Fool Answers. I'm Alison Southwick, and I'm joined as always by "Blobert Blokamp," personal finance expert here at The Motley Fool. I don't know.

Robert Brokamp: You forgot about the cramp part -- Blow Cramp is what they used to call me in school.

Southwick: Could be worse.

Brokamp: I guess. I don't know

Southwick: Hey, Bro, how are you doing?

Brokamp: Butt Cramp, that was another one. Fine, Alison, thank you very much.

Southwick: I don't go to therapy every week to get over the nicknames. Thank you.

Brokamp: Did anyone call you Pretzel as a kid?

Southwick: Yeah, all the time. Always got that, because my maiden name is Preszler. So yeah, that's why. Otherwise, it would be weird. So anyway, in this week's episode, I'm going to share three investing lessons and a new look for The Motley Fool, and Bro is going to talk about five ways the pandemic is weakening retirement security in America.

Brokamp: Such happy news.

Southwick: Fun stuff. All that and more on this week's episode of Motley Fool Answers.

Brokamp: So Alison, what's up?

Southwick: Well, Bro, you'll notice things are looking a little different here at The Motley Fool. We have a new logo, which we launched on our birthday, June 30. For many years now at The Motley Fool, we've been talking about how perhaps Elvis -- that was the name of our old logo -- perhaps he didn't reflect the diversity of our community, and that having a logo be a blue-eyed man in a jester cap would maybe make someone who wasn't a blue-eyed man in or not wearing a Jester cap, feel welcome.

Brokamp: With no teeth.

Southwick: With no teeth. It's true, he didn't have teeth. Remember that one time, I put it in Paint and I drew little teeth, it was so creepy, it made it worse. You're right. Well, anyway, there were a few problems with our previous logo even though it served us well for a very long time. So we enlisted the help of Luke Hayman and Shigeto Akiyama over at Pentagram, it's a design agency in New York. We reached out to them over a year ago, and they helped us come up with the new logo. We ended up with a logo that you'll see at the top of Fool.com. You'll see a variant of it in our show's icon. It a two-bell jester cap and snuggled in between the F and L, above the Os, you'll see the little jester cap making a little face. It's all very clever and amazing. Rick, don't you love the new logo?

Rick Engdahl: I love the new logo, even though it still has no teeth. I mean, wouldn't make sense to have teeth anymore, I suppose.

Brokamp: Occasionally, it has eyeballs.

Southwick: Rick actually worked a lot. He was part of the team that helped work on developing the new logo and working with Pentagram. So I was hoping I could get him to say some nice things about it, but I think I caught him with a little bit of sandwich in his mouth.

Engdahl: Yes, you did. I've been advocating for a new logo for a very long time. So it's really nice to see something that's simple, even just from a design perspective, it's so much more flexible and fun. There's no animations with little blinking eyes we can do if we want to. It's all kinds of colors.

Southwick: It is very colorful and happy.

Engdahl: I think it does a great job of reflecting who we are going forward, and it looks really good on the swag.

Southwick: It does look so good on the swag. Of course, we couldn't just launch a new logo without having some fun. So we circled The Motley Fool's birthday on the calendar, June 30 -- it's our 27th birthday -- and we planned some hijinx. Before we announced our real new logo, we decided to create some other somewhat problematic new logos, "new logos" and announced those as our new logo on our site to see what our members thought. So our first failed logo was a big green claw-mark M, and it's funny, it looked a lot like Monster Beverage's (MNST 0.87%) logo, a lot, which many people on social media let us know. More than a few people emailed us to say our logo was just plain awful, or if they did recognize the similarities with Monster Beverage, they let us know that we were committing trademark infringement. But if we're going to deliver market-shredding returns in even the gnarliest of conditions, shouldn't our logo reflect that? No. All right, never mind, we said. Forget that old logo that maybe looks a bit like Monster Energy Drink.

How about this logo, which looked a lot like Netflix's (NFLX -0.08%) logo? Again, people let us know that we were idiots in stealing another company's logo. We said, forget that logo. What about this logo, which happened to look a lot like Amazon's (AMZN 1.49%) logo? So at this point, people still thought we were dumb enough to commit trademark infringement three times in a row. But some of our more savvier Fools on social media were catching on that maybe we were doing spoofs of logos of some of the best-performing stocks that we recommended, and they were not too far off target there.

As we revealed the next day, Monster, Netflix, and Amazon had three valuable investing lessons to impart that we've learned over the last 27 years. I want to thank Rich Greifner, he's an analyst at The Motley Fool, for compiling those lessons for our members, which I'm going to share with you right now.

So let's start with Monster. Oh, boy, it's easy to hate on that logo, but it's hard to argue with that company's returns. Known for its highly caffeinated energy drinks, Monster has been the market's best-performing stock over the last 25 years. I'll say that again. Monster Beverage has been the market's best-performing stock over the last 25 years. Increasing 233,000%, turning $10,000 into more than $23 million. But it's unlikely that many investors were able to capture those incredible gains because Monster endured extreme volatility on its journey to 100,000-bagger status, and holding on through the rocky ride was not for the faint of heart. As our Foolish friend Morgan Housel noted in his excellent article "The Agony of High Returns," Monster's stock suffered four separate drops of 50% or more. It lost more than two-thirds of its value twice and more than three-quarters once. So the first investing lesson here with Monster is that successful investing entails more than just simply identifying great companies. We must have the courage, conviction, and temperament to hold those great companies through turbulent times, such as the breathtaking volatility we've experienced.

Our second fake logo spoofed the red block lettering and up-streaming entertainment King Netflix. Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner first recommended Netflix to our members as a buy in 2004. Over the years, David continued to recommend that members invest in Netflix, even as the company strengthened its competitive advantages and its share price soared ever higher. In 2013, David recommended Netflix once again at a price 13 times higher than his original cost basis. Netflix's share price is up 1,200% from that point, which brings us to our second lesson. When a stock has enjoyed a big run-up, it's easy to feel like we've missed the boat. When the whole market has taken a hit, it's hard to know which companies we want to buy more of. But David believes that winners tend to keep winning, and truly exceptional companies like Netflix can grow to far greater heights than most investors can imagine.

Our third fake logo was a hastily assembled parody of Amazon.com's smiling yellow arrow. Amazon began in 1994, of course, as a simple online bookseller based out of Jeff Bezos' garage, but today the company is a juggernaut in retail, with rapidly growing high-margin cloud computing business and a market capital of over one trillion. Looking back, it feels as if Amazon's success was inevitable, but that wasn't always the case. In a famous May 1999 cover story titled "Amazon.bomb," Barron's listed a litany of reasons why Amazon would fail. The scariest threat of all came from? Who did it come from, Bro?

Brokamp: I have no idea. Barnes & Noble?

Engdahl: Walmart.

Southwick: Walmart. Rick got it. This is quote: "Once Walmart decides to go after Amazon, there's no contest." Retail Trend's Kurt Barnard told Barrons. Walmart has resources Amazon can't even dream about. Walmart probably could have crushed Amazon if it had made a concerted effort to do so, but Walmart didn't think the fledgling market for online books warranted its attention.

The mistake that Barron's and Walmart made was viewing Amazon for what it was at that time, not what it could become. No one could have predicted Amazon's business model metamorphosis into categories like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, but it wasn't hard to see that Amazon was fanatically focused on customer satisfaction with a brilliant entrepreneurial CEO. Those attributes gave Amazon optionality, multiple ways to win as the world came online and consumer needs evolved.

So our third and final lesson we wanted to impart is that it both business and life, it pays to be optimistic. The "experts" failed to see that Bezos had a vision for Amazon beyond selling books. As the CEO of your life, strive to remain, focused on your long-term vision for yourself, your family, and your wealth, especially during these trying times.

So again, I want to thank Rich Griefner because I basically just read his article verbatim. Thanks for doing my homework, Rich. So after ditching this spoofed monster, Netflix and Amazon logos, we announced that we actually do have a new logo here at The Motley Fool. I hope you like it or at least don't hate it. A lot of fine fools like I said, including Rick, work hard on it and I promise it will grow on you. We do have a new online store at shop.fool.com, where you can buy shirts, hats, etc. The last thing I'll say is that while our look has changed, I promise you, not much else has or will change around here, especially when it comes to our long-term focus and buy-and-hold investing philosophy, and of course, investing together as a community. And that, Bro, is what's up!

Brokamp: Retirement is a relatively recent invention. When you look back at the year 1900, the average retirement age was 76. However, most Americans didn't actually live that long. So if you actually made it to 65, you lived just another 11 or 12 years on average. So retirement didn't last very long. However, as the 20th century progressed, we started living longer and retiring sooner, which means theoretically, we should have been saving more and more over our increasingly shorter careers to pay for retirements that have grown, in some cases to span decades. But that's not what most people are doing.

So despite research showing that workers should be saving approximately 15% of their incomes for retirement, most Americans aren't saving that much. How much have average Americans saved? While a Transamerica survey released in May, provided estimated median retirement savings according to generations. So for Millennials, the median savings is $23,000, for Gen X, the median savings is $64,000, and for the Boomers, median savings is $144,000. That doesn't sound like very much, but here's the kicker. Those figures are as of the end of 2019, before the virus crisis turned the world upside down. So thanks to the pandemic panic, many investors actually have less now. But a possible lower portfolio value is just one way the retirement planning is more challenging after one of the most sudden economic disruptions in history. In fact, there are five ways that America's overall retirement security has become even more imperiled over the past few months. Let's take a look at each one. Shall we?

Southwick: Yeah, let's start with No. 1.

Brokamp: That's a great place to start. So No. 1, we all know this one, we actually know all of these. But here we go. No. 1, unemployment has skyrocketed. So over the past 15 weeks, almost 50 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance.

Southwick: Unbelievable.

Brokamp: It's almost incomprehensible. Fortunately, many have gone back to work. So last Thursday, the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate dropped to 11.2% in June, down from 13.3% in May, so that's good news. However, that 11.2% is still the highest rate since 1940. Now, when you lose your job, you obviously tend to stop saving for retirement. You have more important things that take care of, plus you no longer have access to a 401(k), and people who have access to retirement plan at work are much more likely to save.

But even those who have jobs still are not saving as much, because many workers have seen their pay cut and have reduced their savings as a consequence, and many employers have reduced or eliminated their 401(k) matches. Then finally, a survey from Bank Rate found that 14% of Americans have taken money from their retirement accounts during the crisis, and another 13% plan to do so, many because they need the money due to losing their jobs. So many people are going to have much less saved for retirement, just looking at the IRAs and 401(k).

Southwick: Didn't we just talk on the show about how some people are actually saving more? So it seems like this is another opportunity to just create even more of a divide between those who have a lot of money and those who are just scraping by.

Brokamp: Yeah, there's no question. So what you're talking about is the personal savings rate, which is a little different than what you save in your retirement accounts. Basically, it was a combination of looking at what people had in their bank accounts for the people who lost their jobs. For many people, in fact most of those people, their unemployment benefits were actually higher than when they were working, and they weren't spending as much money. So you really look at it as like, what happened to people's bank accounts?

But even in those situations, let's say you're out of a job, and your unemployment benefits are higher than when you are working, you're still not likely to then put that money in an IRA when you can't put in a 401(k) because you are no longer working. So despite the fact that some of these people, actually up to now, are doing OK, they're probably not putting it toward the retirement savings, and they're possibly looking toward the end of July, when the extra $600 from the federal government is going to stop.

There are talks now about extending that, probably not $600, maybe like $300 or something like that. I certainly hope that will happen because if you ask me, I think the gains we saw in jobs last month, I think some of those are going to go away as some of the economy, especially in the South and the West, start to realize that maybe they opened up a little too soon and they're going to start shutting things down. So that's the first one.

Second reason why retirement planning is going to get more challenging is that many stocks are still down. Now, we're going to look at what's in all of these accounts that we just talked about. Depending on the type of stocks you own, this year surprisingly, could be very good for you, especially many of The Motley Fool members to our services who have invested in a lot of the companies that have done very well. But for many other people, your portfolio still could be in the red. So let's take a look at where some of the indexes are as of the close of the market on July 2.

Nasdaq, starved the year, up 14% so far this year, amazing. Every other index down, even if it's with slightly. So S&P 500 down 3% for the year. The Dow and international stocks, down to about 10% for the year, small caps down 14%. Value stocks having to still significantly back down, almost 20%. Partially because when you look at a typical value index or fund, they are more weighted toward energy and financial services, which have been the two worst-performing sectors this year.

We all knew about energy. But even if you look at the banking stocks, the banking stocks have taken a hit. The Federal Reserve did its stress test last month, told banks, the biggest banks, the 30 biggest banks, told them you can't buy back your shares. So you can't do any share buybacks for now, and you can only pay your dividend according to a formula based on earnings. So if you don't have enough earnings, you can't pay your dividend. So banks stocks have been put on notice that things could get dicey there. So again, depending on how you've invested, you may still be down for the year.

Southwick: The Nasdaq is up though. But is that just because it's got so many of those tech stocks that have been bulletproof here?

Brokamp: Right. Large-cap growth: That has been the asset of choice this year, but particularly over the last few years. When you think of it, it makes sense to a large degree because of the biggest companies are still going to do well, Amazon being the best example of that. So I think it's partially for a legitimate business reason, but I think it's also just, there's a momentum there behind it where you... people see what's holding up, what's doing well, and more people pile into it. That is what always happens. Things keep to continue do well until for some reasons, things change and it rotates out of that. When's that going to happen? I don't know, but that's the way it's been going.

No. 3, interest rates at all-time lows. So let's consider the nonstock portion of your portfolio; it's probably cash and bonds. 2020 has been a remarkable year for many reasons, but one is that it is the first year ever that the 10-year Treasury yield has dipped below 1%. You could go back as far as when George Washington was president, and you won't find another time when interest rates were as low as they are today. This does not bode well for the future returns on bonds, since when you look at the annualized bond performance over the subsequent decade or so, it's highly correlated to current interest rates.

I'm going to give you a real-life illustration of this, because last month, The Fool's Rule Your Retirement service, of which I am the advisor, had its 16-year anniversary. I looked at the very first article I wrote and it happened to be about bonds, and I pointed out in that article that the Vanguard intermediate term bonded X fund which is a mix of corporate bonds, and Treasuries, and some government-backed bonds. Back then in 2004, it was yielding 5%.

What was the fund's actual average annualized return over the subsequent decade? 6%. So pretty darn close. What's that fund yielding today? 1.2%. If you want to take a bit more risk, you can find bond funds that are yielding between 2% and 3%, but the bottom line is that bonds will not return the 5% to 7% they have over the long-term.

So what does that mean for diversified portfolio? Here's one example, I can't remember if I've mentioned this before on the show, but in March of 2019, we did an episode on the 4% safe rate, with Wade Pfau, who is considered one of America's retirement experts. That 4% rule is based on portfolios that are invested at 25% to 50% in bonds. In a recent article with thinkadvisor.com, he said, "if instead of basing the 4% rule on historical returns, you base that on what bonds are likely to return, that 4% drops to just 2.4%." Which makes sense. I mean, if half of your portfolio is in something that is only yielding 1% or 2%, you cannot take as much out of your portfolio. Of course, you could avoid all this by not investing as much cash or bonds and investing more in the stock market. But that means you're taking on more risk, which may or may not be appropriate for your situation.

No. 4 reason why retirement planning is going to be more challenging: Retirement benefits are further underfunded. Every year, the trustees who oversee the Social Security Trust Funds issue an annual report about the program's financial health since like the early '80s, due to a commission headed by Alan Greenspan before he was the Federal Reserve chairman, that knew Social Security was going to have trouble. So they came up with this plan and Reagan approved it. It was basically, "We're going to collect more in Social Security taxes," so security taxes went up, collected more than they actually needed and they invested the rest in the trust funds. It's basically these big savings accounts, but we've known for years that these savings accounts are going to be depleted.

According to the current report issued in April, they're going to be depleted in 2035, and at that point, current payroll taxes are only going to be enough to pay 76% of benefits. Here's the kicker with that. That report was issued before the current crisis. With tens of millions of Americans not working, that's billions of dollars' worth of payroll taxes not going into the Social Security program. According to an estimate from the Wharton Business School, the current crisis could accelerate the depletion of the trust funds by 2 to 4 years, and that's just Social Security.

So many defined benefits pensions, those classic things you work for the government or work for a company for 30 years, you retire, you get a check for the rest your life. Many of them were already underfunded before we went into 2020, and now the situation's going to be worse because not only the portfolio performance we've seen so far this year; many of the employers are going to be in a position where they're not going to be able to put in as much money, and they're going to experience lower future returns because on average, a pension has 20% to 25% of their assets in bonds, and they're going to have those low returns of bonds as well. Which is why if you expect to rely on a pension in your retirement, you've got to stay up on its funding status.

I was reading an article on Bloomberg, they were talking about the problems with a lot of states, cities, and counties. The worst states -- Illinois, New Jersey, and Kentucky -- they only have one third of the assets they need to cover future obligations. I have no idea what they're going to do. They're going to either have to not honor their obligations or raise taxes significantly on the people who live there, and we'll see how happy those people are with that one.

Southwick: Yeah, I'm sure they're going to be thrilled.

Brokamp: Thrilled, absolutely. Finally, No. 5: Taxes will go up. As you likely know, Uncle Sam does not live below his means. In 2019, taxes and other revenue covered just 80% of the federal budget. To make up the difference, Uncle Sam had to borrow almost a trillion dollars. In June 10th of this year, the Treasury Department announced that the deficit had widened to almost $2 trillion for just the first eight months of this fiscal year, an all-time high. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that deficit will reach almost four trillion by the end of this fiscal year, and by the way, the federal fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. The increase is due mostly to the various ways that Uncle Sam is trying to keep everything a float, such as the CARES Act and the PPP loans and all those other initiatives.

At some point, we're going to have to pay for all this, which means taxes are likely going to go up. In fact, according to current law, they'll definitely go up at the end of 2025, which is when the lower tax rates from the 2017 law are set to expire, at least for households. Corporations get to keep their tax cut, by the way. I don't know why they decided that.

Southwick: Really, you don't know why they decided? You have no possible idea why it went that way.

Brokamp: I have some theories.

Southwick: Yeah, I have some theories too.

Brokamp: Anyway, if and when they go up, that may reduce the amount that workers can save and increase expenses for retirees. By the way, now is a great time to hedge against future higher taxes by contributing or converting to a Roth account, especially if, for some reason, your income is lower this year. This is a great year to take advantage of Roth accounts.

Those are the five ways the pandemic will make retirement planning even more challenging for the average American.

However, what's most important to you, dear Answers listener is determining whether your plan is still on track and to do that, you probably can guess what I'm going to say. You can use a range of retirement calculators on the Internet, and I do think you should choose a few; every single one is going to give you a slightly different answer. What you're looking for is a general consensus of whether you're on the right track. Now, when you use these calculators, you're going to have to input some assumptions about the future, and one of those will be what your portfolio will return.

For guidance on that, we can turn to Vanguard's somewhat recently released 10-year projections for various asset classes. I say "somewhat" because they were released in the beginning of June and they are based on where things were at the end of March, back when everything was still down. Since then, stocks have rebounded, become little bit pricier. I'm sure if Vanguard were to do those projections today, they'd be lower than what I'm going to tell you right now. But still, I think they provide a good starting point than the most recent I could find, and I trust the way they do it.

Anyway, what does Vanguard expect between now and 2030 from U.S. stocks? Between 5.57% and 7.5%, so not horrible, but not near that 10%. Again, I bet if they were to do that today, I'd say they're probably going to say 4.5% to 6.5%, but let's put in the middle there, let's say between 5% and 6%.

Interestingly, they do expect the trends of what we've recently seen to reverse. So they expect small caps, value stocks, and international stocks to outperform large growth stocks over the next decade. In fact, what they expect to return the most: international stocks, between 8.5% and 10.5%. I hope they're right because a good quarter of 401(k) is in international stocks. The thing is, firms have been saying this for years.

Southwick: I was going to say, they've been saying this for a long time.

Brokamp: It happened in 2017, but it hasn't happened a while, but that's what they expect. Since REITs -- real estate investment trust -- have come up in a couple of episodes this year, I'll just say that Vanguard expects 4% to 6% from REITs. So they do expect REITs to underperform the overall market, I assume because they know that office REITs, retail REITs, hospitality REITs are probably going to struggle.

Looking at bonds, they expect 0.9% to 1.9% in cash, 0.6% to 1.6%, and that's pretty much locked in. All the returns that I just said about stocks, good deal of uncertainty. You don't know for sure what's going to happen. But we can feel pretty confident we're going to get low returns from cash or bonds.

So what does that mean if you're using a retirement calculator? When I personally use it, I assume my portfolio, which is more than 90% stocks, is going to return between 4% and 5%. I like to play it a little safer. If you have a significant portion of your portfolio in cash and bonds because you're nearing retirement or you're just a conservative investor, I think it's safer to assume you'll get 3.5% to 4%. I know people aren't excited about that, but it's better to assume low returns and save more rather than banking on high returns, getting to the point where you're right before retirement, and you didn't realize those returns.

One other thing you're going to have to input when you use retirement calculators is how much you're going to get from Social Security. Now, most retirement calculators will estimate it for you based on your current annual salary.

But it's actually better to get an estimate based on your actual earnings record, which you can get by signing up for a My Social Security, account and that's the official name, My Social Security, I'm not telling you to sign up for Bro's Social Security account. Then you can get that at www.ssa.gov/myaccount. SSA stands for Social Security Administration.

Once you sign up for that, you'll see your earnings history and you'll get an actual number of your protective benefit. I would say if you're in your mid 50s or younger, you should assume you're only going to get 75% of that of what's projected [static] ... just to see if I'll still be

OK. Regularly recommend that you should hire a fee-only financial planner to give you an expert objective analysis once every 5 to 10 years, especially once you've reached your 50s and later and as you close in on your target retirement date. Just find someone who charges by the hour. It probably will cost you a few hours, $250 an hour, could cost you as much as $750, $1,000, but I think everyone should do that every once in a while just to make sure you have all your bases covered. Hopefully, despite all this virus chaos, you'll find out that you're still on track and you can retire how and when you want.

But the bottom line, I would say, for the average American is that they're going to have to work longer, or if they're retired, consider returning to work at least part-time. Fortunately, as we've mentioned in previous episodes, even working an additional few years, even if it's just part-time, can have a very powerful impact on your retirement security.

Southwick: Well, that's the show. Before we sign off, we have a correction to make from last week, and when I say we, I mean, Bro tell them the mistake we made.

Brokamp: So we had a mailbag episode with the guest, Ross Anderson, very smart guy, but he did say that when you look at the expenses, I'm going to target retirement fund, that you see the expenses of what they're charging to manage that one fund, what they don't express are the expense ratios of the underlying funds within it. That was true years ago, especially when they first came out. These days though, that's not usually the case, especially from the big companies, the Vanguard, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Schwab, all those folks. The expense ratio that you see when you look at them on their website or Morningstar, that is the all-in fee. For example, the Vanguard fund, if it says it's charging 0.14%, that is all you're paying. You're not paying an underlying fee charge on that. Just want to make sure everyone was aware of that.

Southwick: Some of our eagle-eared listeners, a few of you reached out. Thank you for reaching out. If any other listener wants to reach out and tell us what we got wrong, they can do it by emailing us.

Brokamp: Especially if it was someone else.

Southwick: You just want them to email us and tell us that they saw someone else do something wrong?

Brokamp: Yes.

Southwick: So you may feel better.

Brokamp: Exactly.

Southwick: Our email is [email protected]. This show is edited, chopped-up-fool.comly. Go buy some swag, people, or don't, whatever. I don't know.

Engdahl: Should we ask our listeners what they want on a T-shirt?

Southwick: Yeah. Drop us the line, email us, and let us know what you would like. I know I've heard from at least one member over on Fool Live that we need a golf shirt in there. We don't have a collared golf shirt, polo action. So there's an idea that we need to work on.

Engdahl: Specifically which of Alison's or Bro's quotes need to go on the shirt, that's what I'm asking.

Southwick: I don't know what you're talking about.

Brokamp: If only a shirt could have a gif on it. We got some good gifts.

Southwick: We got some good gift.

Brokamp: That is only a matter of time. I predict it, in the future, animated T-shirts. It's going to happen.

Southwick: Let's reach out to the Patent Office and get a hold of that one fast. Drop us a line, [email protected]. Apparently, you can just email us about anything you want, so why not?

Brokamp: Christmas traditions, got any? Send them my way.

Southwick: For Robert Brokamp, I'm Alison Southwick. Stay Foolish, everybody!