Why Stocks Keep Setting Records While Rates Rise, Plus New Tax Breaks for Seniors Over 65

In this episode of Money Matters, brought to you by Greenberg Financial Group in Tucson, Dave and Todd hold down the fort while Dean is in San Diego coaching the University of Arizona lacrosse team and Dylan takes Sebastian to his first SEC game in Kentucky. They dig into something Dave says he has not seen in his career. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ both set new all time highs in the same week the ten year Treasury hit a 24 year high, and the technical oscillator was reading oversold at the top. Rising rates are supposed to work against stocks, so we get into why this market has been able to shrug that off, how multiple compression is quietly squeezing price to earnings ratios across the board even for NVIDIA, and why earnings growth has been doing all the heavy lifting.

The more useful conversation for anyone near retirement is what high rates do to the math. When you can lock in north of five percent on long duration, the old four percent withdrawal rule starts looking like a relic of a three percent world. Todd walks through why we built the four percent rule the way we did, what a 60/40 portfolio actually generates in this environment, and how our strategic income model keeps five years of your spending in bonds so we never have to sell equities at the bottom to pay you. Dave shares what he told a client in a planning meeting last week, which is that this may be one of the more forgiving moments in decades to be stepping into retirement.

Haley Glick joins us for the tax segment and untangles one of the most confusing calculations in the code, which is how much of your Social Security actually gets taxed. She explains provisional income, the thresholds where zero, fifty and eighty five percent of your benefit gets pulled into your taxable income, and why Congress built it that way in the first place. We walk through a real client with a small pension and thirty thousand in Social Security who owes nothing on that benefit, and how the One Big Beautiful Bill stacks a new six thousand dollar deduction per person over 65 on top of an already enlarged standard deduction. She also gets into what she keeps finding when she reviews returns prepared elsewhere, and why the phrase it is a write off has cost people more money than it has saved them.

On the market side we cover Micron reporting the biggest quarter in its 48 year history with revenue up roughly 380% from a year ago and guidance calling for an even bigger one, Marvell taking orders into 2031, and why m