This is a US centric answer. We were taught that retirement funds and portfolios needed to outpace inflation to increase spending power. But inflation is not th

This is a US centric answer. We were taught that retirement funds and portfolios needed to outpace inflation to increase spending power. But inflation is not the right metric to measure against. Maybe the right metric is the percentage growth of the federal reserve balance sheet. Since it has recently inflated at a rapid pace, people are left with relatively much less purchasing power and facing economic uncertainty. We can not rely on conventional investments like real estate or the stock market to keep pace so you need to allocate a larger portion of portfolio towards more alternative (read: risky) investments. Not too long ago the conventional wisdom was to stick your money in S&P 500, or a mix of stocks and bonds and forget about it. Bond real yields went negative. Bank savings rates are a pittance. While all that happened, indexers lost out on all the gains from TSLA until the end of 2020. More people are catching onto this regime change. Growing piles of money are chasing smaller pockets of growth in the same way the pool of well paying careers is drying up. You can't get by with an average portfolio unless you have an above salary with above average savings. Stay tuned for more creative destruction ahead.