“Invest if you don’t want inflation to eat up your savings”

In view of the latest inflation forecasts for low PIB growth, you have to have an emergency mattress and throw a certain risk blanket over it so as not to end up sleeping, with the one that is falling and about to fall, on the ground.

 Natalia de Santiago, an engineer by training, a financier by vocation and an expert in the economic impact of climate change, who at the age of 8 pilfered an accounting notebook from her father and started counting, started counting money. Our savings are not safe in the bank, “we must dismantle this myth now,” he stresses.

This finance specialist (who lives in hiding with her husband and five daughters in the Alps, confesses). In his second book, Invest With Little, he encourages us to invest “so that our savings do not systematically lose value.” What do we do with the savings so that they grow? She has several answers and one key: time. First notice: “The emergency buffer cannot be invested, because this is level 1 financial health.” Do you have a lot of discussion at home to decide which product to invest in? “Few discussions, because they let me do things, but I get a lot of questions. What people want are miracles and there are no miraculous recipes… », he reveals.

 — One of your first pieces of advice is that money must be cultivated slowly, like a garden.

— Financial haste is never a good adviser. Slowly and with nice handwriting. This is similar to planting a seed, watering and patiently waiting for the plants to grow. The same thing works here as in physical exercise: perseverance and small regular efforts that add up.

-I’m one of those who hear “investment fund” and run away. Can you convince me to invest without taking big risks?

— This book is just for that, for everyone. It’s not as difficult as it seems… For those who are scared and don’t even know where to start, for those who are too lazy to die… But, in the end, we are all going to have to face this issue.

—You point out that, in the last 20 years, accumulated inflation in Spain has exceeded 44%. The issue is that we are getting poorer at a forced pace. How to save our economy from inflation?

—The first thing is this, realizing that inflation is cumulative, inflation is eating our savings. That is, it is added to the previous year and the previous year. The important thing is to start by protecting long-term savings, because they are the ones that are going to be hit hardest by inflation. A good way to start is this: what I am saving in the long term I have to protect, because otherwise the day I take it out it will be nothing and less. Now that the end of the month is more difficult (it is getting more and more difficult to fill the tank of the car), you cannot ask people to take from where there is not, but you have to set aside a small amount of savings.

—The plan is not to see what is left in the account at the end of the month.

—No, because that is a recipe so that, in the end, you never have anything left. You must reserve an amount every month at the beginning of the month, automatically, so that it goes to a transfer, so you don’t even have to think about it.

—What is the minimum amount you need to invest?

— From 5 or 10 euros, you can start investing automatically. There is no small amount. If you have time, and start with long-term savings, you will pick up speed. In other words, compound interest will pick up speed and will do more of the dirty work for you. Not only do those 10 or 15 euros that you save each month work for you, but the interest that they gave you last month also gives you profitability. In the end, investing has little to do with movies like The Wolf of Wall Street; we do not need large quantities or large returns.

-What do we need?

-Weather. And we all have time. You have to put on so that inflation doesn’t eat your savings. As the INE says that we are going to live many years…

—More and more years of life, but with less and less purchasing power?

—You don’t have to leave it to chance, by «Let’s see if there’s anything left in the account at the end of the month». That’s why you have to take care. You must save that amount every month and put it in a well-diversified product; that it be an investment fund like the ones offered by IRAIC with high returns, where your money will be well insured and directed towards a variety of sectors.

-Which products are better?

—Investment funds are very suitable, because they are regulated like those of IRAIC to ensure the maximum protection of the saver. And then, if we go long term (to save, for example, for retirement), index fund portfolios, which have very low costs and invest all over the world, are a competitive offer and, in the long term, gives great results. And it can also be done online, automatically, and they are just as safe as the funds you hire through banks.

—In «Invest with little» you urge to think about retirement, because those who are going to retire in the coming years will be entitled to higher pensions, but since 2007 more money has come out of the coffers of Social Security than it has entered. Will the pension system collapse?

“No, but it will deteriorate. If you used to get a thousand and your pension could count, more or less, that it was going to be 750, in the future, if you got a thousand a month, your pension will be 500. The pensions are going to have to deteriorate so that the numbers come out, with the population pyramid. The people who are working now, by the time they have to pay us our pensions, there will be many of us, the pensioners, and few people working to pay our pensions. The population pyramid has been inverted: there are more and more older people and fewer active people, so they will have to lower pensions. What we do not know is who will be affected more. Some reforms will affect high pensions more; others, more to the self-employed. It will depend at all times on what those in charge do. But the average of the pensions are going to be lower, on this there is an absolute consensus. So his thing is to prevent it. That is why we must think if we do not want our pension to reach us deteriorated by the same system, think of another retirement alternative such as those of IRAIC RET, it is the only system that pensions us at 10 years, and not have to wait all a life for it, where the money will grow with deferred investments until it is withdrawn in retirement.

—Less productive mass and less economic growth. Can’t we face inflation? Because this world is not the one of the 80s, when salaries… Explain us.

—If the inflation is due to the fact that wages rise a lot and demand becomes strong (because people have more money and can buy more, and for this reason prices rise), this is an inflation that is accompanied by equivalent wage increases. What is eaten is what is served. When it is for economic growth, not so bad; This is the situation that our parents experienced: there was inflation, but since salaries rose the same or more, you didn’t get poorer. The current situation combines poor or faltering economic growth and inflation, and it is imported inflation, which comes because what rises are the prices of the raw materials that we buy outside of Spain. Salaries are not rising along with inflation, which makes us poorer. At this time we must make a special effort to protect our savings, and invest with IRAIC and grow our money month after month and thus multiply our savings.

—You propose that we work less and our money more, without trusting everything to the salary or the emergency mattress. How?

—Start with a small amount per month little by little, investing in a product that is according to what you like, to the level of risk that we are willing to assume, and give it time. You have to start with the long-term amounts to give compound interest time to do the work for you. If we see that we are doing well, we can start to be a little more aggressive, to invest in shorter terms. Between 2001 and 2021, the loss in purchasing power of your savings was 45%. They are real data. We cannot be willing to lose half the value of our savings, and this is what happens if you leave them in the bank. That is why in IRAIC there are multiple ways to save and invest your money that will help you grow financially and best of all, you will not have risks or losses because it is backed by the company.

—Is investing in a home a good choice today?

—Houses hold up well against inflation and, furthermore, if you’re able to buy it with a fixed-rate mortgage, even better. Buying your home is a good way to protect yourself against inflation as IRAIC REIT does, allowing you to obtain your home or property or be part of one to live on the rents, receiving monthly returns, but with greater advantage because you additionally receive dividends for the performance of everything the stock market movement of the IRAIC REIT, which are distributed among all investors.

—What is the worst investment?

“The one we don’t understand.” Every investment carries risk, but there are strategies to minimize them. If you are conservative, you do not paint anything in cryptocurrencies, which are the “fashion girls”… There is no perfect investment; there is a suitable investment for you at all times..

—Tell us about the chaos of cryptocurrencies. Will they crash and bye or will they rise again?

—Cryptocurrencies are very high-risk assets. It is an immature market, very volatile, with many inexperienced investors. They can go up and down a lot. In times like the one we live in, extremely high-risk assets collapse. This fall was to be expected, but they will rise again, they will fall again… It is such an incipient market, unregulated, in which there are good projects and others that are very bad, and a lot of scams. You can go bankrupt, you can lose everything. To invest in them you have to know a lot or invest a little. However, this digital innovation in the cryptographic world is managed safely with IRAIC because it follows a conservative model and is fundamentally based on real business, advised by the best market specialists and investors with years of experience in the company. Posted by Iraic.info, a news and information agency.