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Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money. I'll best save your life, I'll free. But you can get up to the present.

From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Monthly Fool Money. It's the Monthly Fool Money Radio Show. I'm Chris Hill, and joining me in studio this week from Million Dollar Portfolio, Jason Moser from Supernova, David Kretzmann, and from Motley Fool Explorer, Simon Erickson. Good to see you as always, gentlemen.

Hey, Chris. We've got the latest on big tech consumer products, transportation and more. Retirement expert Robert Brokeamp is our guest this week. And as always, we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar.

But we begin with entertainment, shares of Netflix hitting a new all-time high after a fourth quarter report that included more new subscribers than anyone, including Netflix, I might add, was projecting David the international front. They just crushed it. Oh, it was huge. Netflix knocked it out of the park this quarter.

They were guiding for 5.2 million subscribers, this quarter adding 5.2 million new subscribers. They ended up adding more than 7 million for the quarter, including 5.1 million internationally. And I think the scary thing here, Netflix has about 94 million subscribers now. Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix.

Late last year, he said that his long-term goal, essentially, for Netflix is to have 20% of members in the US and 80% internationally, which leaves the door open for Netflix to potentially hit 250 million subscribers down the road. So obviously, we're seeing Netflix get closer and closer to 100 million subscriber mark, but management still has its eye on a lot of long-term growth. The quarterly report chasing got the headlines. But just below that, one of the other bits of news from Netflix this week, they locked up a deal with Jerry Seinfeld for a reported $100 million.

They get two stand-up specials and I think 24 episodes of his web series, Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee. It's gold, Jerry. Gold. I really enjoy that show.

But just for comparison, say Hulu paid $180 million. And they got all nine seasons of his sitcom, Seinfeld. It kind of feels like Hulu got the better deal. Netflix is spending a lot of money on content.

They are, and they are unabashedly doing so. I think that's one of the things that when we talk about all of the things that Netflix is doing really well, and they're doing a lot of things very well, it is not an investment that comes without risks. And I think one of the risks is that you have to acknowledge in order for the business to continue to succeed, they're going to have to continue to invest heavily in new and compelling content. And that content is living a far shorter life today than ever before.

And that's okay. I mean, they can still do certainly very well with that. But in that letter to investors, they clearly noted it. They will continue to fund working capital through the debt market.

So this is a company that's going to continue to issue debt. They will probably sell some more equity along the lines. And while that's okay, as long as the subscriber base keeps growing, at some point that subscriber base growth starts to slow down. And that's when you really need to pay attention to the growth in content costs.

Because if you see those lines across at some point, then it could be problematic for investors. But again, it's the nature of the business. Yeah. And Chris, we've always heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

You just see Amazon Prime and YouTube and Facebook and Apple. Everyone else is interested in this space too, that Netflix essentially created a digital streaming. We just saw the BBC now saying they're going all in for their new seasons to be online first, linear TV seconds. So it's attracting a lot of competition, but unless you're lead Husky in the race, the view never changes.

Yeah, Netflix is guiding to for spending $6 billion on content this year, which is up from 5 billion in 2016. And part of that international strategy is producing content in local countries like Brazil, France, Mexico. And that content resonates with those local audiences in those countries. But the thing that really benefits Netflix is when those shows are popular around the world.

And they're seeing a lot of success with those shows. So that's something we want to keep watching going forward. Yeah, we've taken some questions about David Einhorn's recent short thesis. And part of the crux of that was that the original content isn't really bringing any returns to the investment.

And that really, getting a matter of perspective, I think perhaps he's being very literal in like material profits today. That's not what they're trying to do. I mean, what they're trying to do is to grow that subscriber base and build out that library. And if you look at it from that perspective, I'd say they're bringing wonderful returns.

The question is, will it result in material profitability down the road? And that's yet to be determined. Fourth quarter profits for IBM came in higher than expected, but revenue falling for the 19th quarter in a row. Simon, the sales are falling, but big blue stock hitting a 52 week high on Friday.

Well, and that's because the headline number is slightly deceiving. I mean, the headline was, yes, it's the 19th quarter of less revenue than a year ago. It was down about 1% like you said. But I think that more important is that no one ever got fired for working with IBM.

This is a company that still has decade long relationships with some of the largest corporations across the entire globe. Their strategy has always been to vertically integrate, find markets that they're really good at, work with those companies for a long time. And now Chris, they're starting to bring a lot of that customer data to the cloud and interpreting it. This is something that IBM calls cognitive.

We all remember it as Watson being on Jeopardy, but it's basically making sense of analytics so that customers in these verticals can make more and more money and be more and more efficient. Their strategic imperatives, which largely cover what we described there, were up 14% now 41% of sales. So they're really moving the needle for this company. And Chris, I just like this play.

IBM is kind of thought of as a legacy, older kind of company, but they're selling it 13 times earnings. That's pretty cheap. They're paying out three quarters of their cash flow as dividends and share repurchases, but they got some real growth initiatives. I kind of like this one at $170 a share.

Yeah, I don't know if they meant to do this, but in hindsight, you can look at IBM taking Watson, putting it on Jeopardy as a masterstroke, because at the time, there were a lot of people who were just sort of looked at that and thought, well, that's cute, but I'm not really sure what that means for the business. And now we can look back and say, well, that was actually a genius branding move. Absolutely. It added the credibility that IBM was wanting to establish.

There's a lot of companies trying to crack this AI code right now, but to show that this really works and they're looking at 30 billion images and 200 million patient records in the healthcare market alone, this is really going to pack a punch, I think. Procter and Gamble's second quarter profits came in higher than expected. The consumer goods giant also raised guidance for the full fiscal year. Share's up 4% on Friday, Jason.

The raising of guidance, that's with currency headwinds baked in. They're really getting it done. Hey, my guy Johnny Cakes-Ava with the sports junkies is really happy about this one. Listen, it's interesting to look at how Procter and Yannell has performed over time, because the more recent you stretch that chart, the more you see the challenges that become very apparent for this business, it's trailing the market by every measure of the last one, three, five years.

And I think most of that has become more and more of a commodity business than perhaps before the weight of its brands, the weight that its brands carried long ago. I don't think they carry the same weight today. We're seeing more private, legal brands and just new brands in general, as we move towards organic and more sustainable type of living. But I do challenge you to go ahead and make a list of the prokner and gamble products in your house.

My bet is it will take you more than one hand to do it. And I think that says something for the business. So while I don't suspect there is going to be significant growth for these guys going forward, I do think there are ways for shareholders to win. I think it's imperative that management continue to repurchase shares, continue to raise that dividend.

And I think they're already doing a good job of sort of ridding the portfolio of the lagers that really didn't offer much in the way of future. You look at the share account, it's down about five percent since 2012. That needs to get better. But again, I think it's a stalwart business.

It's not going anywhere. It's better than three percent dividend yields. I think it's worthwhile holding is sort of a bedrock part of any long-term portfolio. Well, and that's the thing when you look at a company of this size, it is sort of the blue chip dividend paying stalwart.

Four percent in and of itself is not all that impressive. But for a dividend stock like this, it kind of is. And you mentioned what they've done with their portfolio. That really has been one of the more interesting narratives in the consumer goods space over the last five to eight years is how PNG has really shed the number of brands that they have.

And I think it's also encouraging to see that they continue to find new ways to saddle up with Amazon in order to utilize that physical warehouse space to help consumers get those products from point A to point B as quickly as possible. I mean, they are not just laying down in the face of this sort of new e-commerce world. Fourth quarter profits for United Health Group rose nearly 60 percent. Shares down despite that summit.

But the last year really has been a great run for this. Well, and I'm not going to surprise anybody by saying this, Chris, but the US health care system is pretty darn complex. We spend $3 trillion a year on health care. That's almost 10,000 for every man, woman and child in this country.

And it's United's job to make sure that everybody that they cover with insurance has got really good health care, but also bring down the cost of that the entire system. So they want to be efficient and effective and a lowest cost. So not easy to do. Huge challenge for a company like this.

But United Health care is also very, very good at it. They added two million new members this past year. They got double digit growth in each of their product category lines. And they're processing 600 billion transactions digitally every single year.

So they've got a ton of data. They know health care better than anyone else in this country does. And now it's going to be a matter of how do you connect the dots between pharmaceutical, clinical and care delivery to bring down the cost of the overall system while still going after profitable growth as a public company that's got shareholders. This is the biggest health insurance company in America, which investors be watching to make sense of how they're actually doing.

Well, you know, there's a bunch of different product lines and it's very difficult to interpret everything. But something that is very important for investors to keep an eye on is the medical loss ratio. This is something that United actually calls their four-year care ratio. But it's basically the percentage of the total premiums that they're collecting that they spend on claims and health care costs.

So you want this number to be as low as possible, ideally below 85%. United Health's medical loss ratio for last year was 81.2%. That's slightly up from the year before that, but that's still very, very good. I think that's a metric that investors should watch going forward.

Coming up, we don't have planes, but we do have trains and automobiles. Stay right here. This is Model Full Money. Welcome back to Model Full Money.

CSX is one of the biggest rail transport companies in America. Shares up more than 20% on Thursday on reports of an activist investor looking to come on board. Jason and I took the con before Simon could use it. What is the story here?

This is a really big move for a company this size. It is a big move and it looks like the headline pop on Thursday, gave a little bit back on Friday as these things were wanted to do. I think the enthusiasm is based on the fact that Harrison was behind substantial operational improvements at Canadian Pacific. So it sounds like he is going to retire early from Canadian Pacific and has this angle of joining up with activist investors to gain a senior position with CSX.

Now, it could be argued, and I think quite effectively, that CSX has not done as great a job at bringing the improvements to its gross margin over the past few years down the bottom line. I mean, definitely seeing sort of a gap there between revenue and operating income profit. And I think that whenever you have sort of rumor that perhaps a proven operator could come in there and recognize the problems and fix them, we talk about the competitive nature of railways and how attractive they are often. I mean, you just can't go out there and build more railroads.

So it is a very sort of a mody type of business. And if you can find an opportunity there for to ring out some profitability, which this could actually do, I think that's where the enthusiasm comes in from investors. Yes, Simon Hunter Harrison, not exactly a household name, but if you study the rail industry at all, he is well known. Well, I was just hoping Chris said the company finds me to get back on track.

Oh, man. No, I shouldn't have gone to you. Strong. Steve right away again from the other side of the glass.

Strong first quarter results for SkyWorks solutions shares up 12% on Friday and hitting a new all time high. David, you saw these guys when you were out in Las Vegas for CES, right? Yeah, yeah. This is one of the companies we met with and SkyWorks is not a household name, I don't think, but this is a company that I think is in a good position to benefit as the world becomes increasingly mobile and connected.

So a high level way to look at it is SkyWorks is one of the semiconductor companies that enables devices to connect to a cellular network to Wi-Fi to Bluetooth. You name it. It enables mobile connectivity. And the company reported good results.

I mean, revenue and earnings were slightly down but ahead of management's guidance and they're guiding for sales growth of 8% next quarter. What looks really good with SkyWorks is its cash positions. Right now for this quarter, they produced a record amount of cash flow, about $500 million for the quarter. Right now they have $1.4 billion in cash, no debt.

They just authorized a half a billion dollar buyback. So returning more cash to six shareholders. And as we go forward and we need more faster data and lower lag time, whether we're talking about 4G LTE connection or 5G connection, SkyWorks should benefit. And especially as we're talking about the Internet of Things, Wi-Fi speakers, connected cars, virtual reality, wearable technology.

I think SkyWorks has a lot of room to grow in the coming years. Our email address is RadioAtFool.com from Mike Connors in San Francisco who writes, I'm worried about the chances of a general stock market fall, periodic corrections being only one of the potential reasons. As a mostly long-term investor, I'm not interested in selling many of my foolish rule-breaking holdings, but I am seeking something that will benefit from a temporary downturn. Is there a foolish way to achieve this type of insurance?

Well, Simon, before I turn it over to you, let me just put Mike's mind at ease. There is a 100% chance of a general stock market fall. I can't say when it is. I just know there's 100% chance it's going to happen, but in terms of his question, what is the insurance against a market downfall?

Yeah, well, Mike, when he says insurance, it's almost referring to an option play. There are a couple options you could do for that. One would be just to buy a put on a market index, you know, buy a put against the S&P 500, where if the market falls, you would profit from that drop. You have to pay for that up front.

That costs you money for the premium. And if you wanted to counteract that cost, you could set up what's called a bear put spread, where you'd also sell a lower put at a lower price than that to counteract the upfront premium. But again, option strategies are something that we have. We have two services, not like for pro and not like for options, that I would highly encourage at least take a look at, because they are very complex.

The devil's in the details of a lot of the pricing of those. And definitely before you start playing with options, want to know what you're getting into the upside, but also the downside as well. Not for beginners. Correct.

Yeah, options are definitely more advanced. And I think for a lot of people, what I do in my portfolio is just have a cash position on the side. So if you're losing sleep at night, wearing a pocket downturn, but 5%, 10%, 15% of your portfolio in cash, something that serves as an insurance policy for you to invest when we do have one of those. Inevitable of market downturns.

A second to cash emotions. I mean, that's just a great way to do it. Don't necessarily have to sell. Just start building up a little bit of the cash, cash work is there.

And if you've been keeping a watch list of stocks, all of a sudden one goes on sale, you can take advantage. Yeah, we talked a lot about sort of the lack of returns on that cash, but you really have to look at it from the perspective that the return is the liquidity is the opportunity. That is the return. It just takes a little bit longer to realize it.

Guys, why do we invest? We invest a secure better life for our families to have financial independence. We invest so that we can afford the life we want, the things we want. And this week, something became available that I know Jason Moser once.

A 1978 black Trans Am driven by Bert Reynolds and modeled after the car in the iconic movie, Smoky and the Bandit. It is up for auction this weekend. Jason Moser, I know you are tempted. I know you're tempted to head on out to this auction and put in a bit.

Yeah, and I just, I mean, I really, I want to picture just a sort of the quizzical look from David Kretzmann here. It was like smoking a what? Just because it reminds me exactly how old I am. But one of the funnier movies I have ever seen now to be very clear, I am not the biggest car guy in the world.

So you're not going to catch me plunking out any money for this. If I had the opportunity to get in it for a photograph or a take this bin. I think I'd be hard pressed to turn that one down. But yeah, this one brought back a lot of memories.

Simon, anything from the world of movie memorabilia you'd like to put in a bit on? Chris, I would make a bid for the Holy Hand Grenade Evantiac from Money Python and the Holy Grail. David? I would go with the Tars robot from Interstellar.

Wow. I like the door. That's a really cool movie. I would like to have that robot in my house.

I think that in a nutshell sort of displays the age spread. I'm way too young. I know what I need to watch. Jason and David.

I know what I need to watch this weekend. Let's go to our man behind the glass Steve Brodo. Steve, you're smoking in the Bandit fan, aren't you? Well, it is a good looking car.

I'll say that. I saw a photo of it. You sent a link and it's a very handsome car. But you're not putting in a bid.

I don't think so. Anything from the world of movies that you would be tempted to put in a bid on? I would love a lightsaber from any of the original films. That'd be great.

What if the boat from the classic comedy film Captain Ron was on? Then I would be definitively interested. All right, David Kressman, Jason Moser, Simon Erickson, guys. We will see you a little bit later in the show.

Up next, Robert Pro Camp is going to help you rule your retirement. Stay right here. This is Motley Blum on the Beast. All right, before we get to Robert Pro Camp, New Year's Resolution Time and two of the most popular are taking better care of your money and getting healthier.

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I'm Chris Hill. Robert Brokamp is a certified financial planner and Motley Fool's resident expert on retirement and he joins me in studio now. Thanks for being here. Always a pleasure of this.

In the start of 2017, with a quick look back at 2016 for just a minute, you'd written something recently about some of the key themes that determine the investment performance in 2016, things like commodities, making a comeback, value stocks being back in Vogue, and for the fourth year in a row, which is pretty amazing to think about, the US stock market outperformed the rest of the world as a group. Right. At first, did any of these surprise you? Because the commodities won, when you look at the performance of commodities in 2016, that was kind of a surprise to me.

Sort of, except my basic opinion, I'm an asset allocator. I invest in different types of assets, all over the world, small, large, mid-value growth, based on the fact that these take turns being leaders. I call the Hokie Pokey some points in. Sometimes it's out.

I read a Morningstar article called LeapFrogging. You could call it Reversion to the meme. But basically, things take turns doing well and then something else takes over. I think we all agree that Hokie Pokey is better than Reversion to the meme.

That's why I choose it. So some of these things have been going on for a while. Commodities had a horrible run. So it had to turn around at some point.

Growth was beating value for several years, pretty much in a row. That had to turn around. We all know that historically, smaller stocks beat large stocks, but up until last year, large stocks are winning. So I knew at some point, a lot of this was going to turn around.

To me, really, the big surprise is that US stocks keep outperforming international stocks as a group, because right now, international stocks are so much cheaper. I've been saying that for a couple of years now, but still, US stocks keep doing well. I think there are a couple of ways you can go as an investor or certainly be tempted to go. One is, well, look, on the international side, that can't continue on an item.

But it's also sort of tempting to go, well, wait a minute, if value stocks are back in Vogue, maybe they're going to be in Vogue for a little while longer. So I guess my question is, these were some of the key themes that determine investment performance in 2016. Should we expect any or all of them to continue in 2017? I never like to make predictions based on one year, but generally speaking, these types of trends do play out over a course of a few to several years.

The best way to take advantage of this is just to rebalance your portfolio. If you've been doing this type of thing for a while, the growth allocation of your portfolio has grown. The US allocation has grown. The large cap allocation has grown.

You rebalance, so you sell some of that, but not all of it, and you buy some of these other things that look to maybe take over the leadership for a little bit. President Trump, freshly in office, and a couple of things I want to get to. And the first is this idea of corporate taxes being cut, because there are always a lot of predictions anytime a new administration enters the White House about, well, this industry's going to do well, that one's going to be hampered, et cetera. This is one of those situations, I think, where there is a decent amount of consensus that if corporate tax rates get cut, stocks are going to benefit, investors in stocks will benefit, and I'm wondering, with your asset allocator hat firmly on your head, there are a lot of people who just think in terms of stocks and bonds, and I have my allocations.

Corporate tax is being cut. Is that going to be a big enough benefit for stocks that we should seriously factor that into our asset allocation, and potentially even change course once it actually happens? Yeah. I personally wouldn't, though I understand the argument.

First of all, there's some debate about how high corporate taxes really are. There's the stated rate of 35%, but then you look at how much corporations actually pay, and I've seen various studies that on average, actually corporations pay maybe 12, 14, maybe close to the market, and I'm not sure what you're asking. But depending on if that's really the corporate tax rate, how much of that is actually going to get cut, number one? Number two, then what are the companies going to do with that money?

Some of them are just going to let it sit in cash and not really do that much with it. So, and then you look at other things that are going on, related to what I just said, US stocks are not cheap, and if there's any indication of future returns, not in the next year, but over the next seven to ten years, it is valuation right now, the stock market is not priced for outstanding returns. So I would still remain cautious. The downside of that is if you're not in stocks, where are you going to go?

Bonds look just as unattractive right now because interest rates have come up and it looks like they're now going to start gradually moving back to something close to what we would call normal. That's not good for bonds. The only thing that really leaves you with that is cash, meaning you might earn a little bit more in your bank account, but it's still nothing exciting. Isn't that a little bit of what has driven the US stock market's performance over the last four years?

This idea that there are institutional managers outside the US who look around the world and just think, well, you know, to your question, where am I going to go? Where am I going to put my money? Well, right now, the US as expensive as the stock market's getting, it's better than my other options. To a certain degree, it certainly is if you look at interest rates, for example, like our interest rates are low.

In other developed countries, they are even lower, or in some cases, in some government, it's actually negative, which is a mind blowing concept, a negative interest rate. So that is one reason why some money has come in to the US. As for coming into the US stock market, I don't know if that's a real. I don't know how many international folks are coming over here to invest in the US stock market because I think they all recognize that it's also expensive.

Even if you just look at dividend yields, if you're a dividend investor, it is so much easier to find higher yielding investments in international stocks than it is in US stocks. When it comes to President Trump, is there a retirement story or an investing story that you find yourself curious about over the next few years? I will be most curious about what happens to the entitlement, social security in Medicare. Most retirees rely on social security for the majority of their income.

Something like 20% of retirees rely almost exclusively on social security. What's going to happen to that? Last year, there was a bill proposed by a Republican Republican that is suggesting that we should raise the age for social security a couple of years. That wasn't discussed in the campaign, so I will be very curious to see what happens to that.

There's Medicare. We hear a lot about Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act. Medicare is a huge deal. It's for retirees.

It's for disabled folks. It is in worse shape than social security. Nobody is talking about how to fix it. I will be very curious to see what happens to those programs.

At the Motley Fool, we like to focus on stocks. That's our real house. Let's face it, a lot of people are invested primarily through mutual funds. A lot of them actively manage.

I'm curious for anyone who has actively managed funds. What is the best way to monitor those? You're right. A lot of people are invested actively management ones, partially because they choose to be.

They don't pick individual stocks, because they have a choice, because most of our retirement savings are in 401ks and most 401ks are popular with mutual funds. So you're stuck with them. The first thing to do, of course, is to look at the bottom line, the performance. The key there is to make sure you're making apples to apples comparisons.

If you are going to look at, for example, a small cap value fund, you want to see how it did compared to other small cap value funds. You can actually do that pretty easily on Morningstar.com. You just put in the ticker, click on the performance tab, and you scroll down and you see rank and category. If it says 25, that means it isn't the top 25% of funds, which is pretty good.

You give it at least three to five years. A few years ago, Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard was here at the Motley Folk in the Speech about picking actively managed funds. He said, there are some folks who do a good job of it, but you're going to go with actively managed funds. You have to expect that one out of every three years is not going to go well for you.

So you do have to give an active manager enough time, three to five years to make a good judgment. Another thing you should also look at is if you have index fund options, either in your 401k or in your brokerage account, and find a comparable index fund. So let's say you have that actively managed small cap value fund. Look at a small cap value index fund.

If the active fund isn't being the index fund, why bother? Just go ahead and buy the index fund. Let's go back to the managers for a second, because as you said, there are some really good managers out there. But does tenure play a role in that?

Is that the sort of thing where you want to find out, well, okay, I'm going to give them a three to five year time period to see how they've done. But at some point, maybe they leave or they take their team with them. I mean, that seems like that is a slight risk as well. Right.

We all know that the vast majority of actively managed funds do not beat a comparable index fund. So you have to stay on top of this. And if your actively managed fund is actually being an index fund, it's because of that manager. It's because of what that team is doing.

If they leave that fund, then they might be taking the record with them. It is possible that the company has sort of an institutional knowledge in a culture that instills a certain type of method, so that whoever's running the fund, you know that you can expect similar results. One example is Dodging Cox, which is one of the oldest mutual fund companies that's been around since I think 1931. And they have a committee approach to managing the fund.

So if few people leave a fund, you know that there's still a long history of managing that fund in a certain way. And you can be pretty confident that things are going to go pretty much like they have in the past. Is there any data on size in terms of the mutual fund companies themselves? I'm just wondering like, is this one of those situations where as a general rule of thumb, bigger is always better?

Or I could see someone making a case where actually you want to go with a smaller company because they're going to have a more personal approach to it? You definitely want to, in my opinion, I think it's more important to pay attention to the size of the fund itself. One of the problems mutual fund managers have, one of the challenges is that they're not just picking an investment and sticking with it. They have to deal with the daily cash flow of people sending money to them or asking for money back.

And they have to factor that in to other buying. Like if the market were to tank tomorrow, you and I could decide, we're just going to hold on to our investments. But mutual fund managers can't do that because a bunch of people are going to say, I want my money and they're forced to sell one they don't want to. So you want to fund that small, relatively nimble and that doesn't have what some studies have and it's when the fund does well and becomes very popular.

They get a flood of money coming in and they don't know what to do with it because they've already invested in their best ideas. So that's something I think is more important to pay attention to. And we've also talked to fund managers who have had that situation going back to what we just talked about, that the market in the US going up over the last four years outperforming other markets and fund managers dealing with these inflows. And I'm a value investor and there are no values to be found.

Right. And then so they can sit on cash, but then people will say, well, why am I paying you 1% a year to sit on cash and not doing anything with that money? Is there any new data in terms of the so-called magic number in terms of what is it cost to be retired and how much should I be saving and what should my target be? Or is it all just about who you are as an individual?

It really is very individualized because it depends so much on all kinds of other factors like other resources. I mean, if you have a defined benefit pension, that traditional pension, you aren't a much better shape than someone who does not have that. That said, as a rough guideline, you would often hear people say that you should not retire until you have 8 to 10 times your income saved. So, you know, if you make $100,000 a year, you should have $800,000 to $1 million.

Now that figure is jumped up to about 10 to 12, partially because of low interest rates on bonds and high valuations on stocks, future returns don't look quite as rosy as they may have in the past. So you should have more money sucked away before you retire. And I'll add to that also the belief that today's retirees are going to live longer than these retirees. I was going to say something you and I talk about from time to time, health.

And just the fact that a lot of people are living longer and in some cases may find themselves in a situation where they're in danger of outliving their money. Right. Yeah. So I would say one thing, one rule of thumb that has taken that people have been questioning a lot recently is that you may have heard the classic 4% rule.

You withdraw 4% from your portfolio, first year of retirement, and then you adjust that annually for inflation. The belief was that you should have your retirement income adjust for inflation every year. So that goes up a little bit every year. But what we're seeing more and more of is that actually isn't what happens.

Retirees actually they retire. They might spend a lot of money because now they have that freedom, they go on vacation stuff like that. But gradually their spending goes down because the mortgage gets paid off. As we get older, we don't update our wardrobes as much.

We don't have to have furniture as much. We get to a point where we can't travel as much as we do. Sadly, if you're married couple of one passes away, your expenses drop by about 30%. So actually for most retirees their expenses go down.

Why is that important? Well, if you assume that instead your expenses are going to go up in retirement, and you put that into a calculator for example, it's going to overestimate how much you need before you retire by 10 to 20%. It's telling people they need to say more than perhaps they actually have to. If you want to hear more from Robert Brokeamp, good news you can.

You can check out Motley Fool Answers, the weekly podcast from the Motley Fool. You can find it on iTunes, on Stitcher, on the Motley Fool's podcast center. Check out Motley Fool Answers, all kinds of great information on basic money topics every single week from Robert and his co-host Alison Sasser. Thanks for being here.

Always a pleasure. Coming up next we'll give you an inside look at the stocks on our radar. This is Motley Fool Money. Oh!

Guess what I need. I'm going to talk about it in Motley Fool and the conformal recommendations for or against the Sonobire Sallstalk Space, solely on what you hear. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money, Chris Hale here in studio. Once again with Jason Moser, David Krenzmann and Simon Erickson.

You can check out past episodes of Motley Fool Money and all of our podcasts by going to podcast.fool.com. Also there in our podcast center, you can test drive our flagship service Motley Fool Stock Advisor on Friday the brand new issue of Motley Fool Stock Advisor came out with two new stock recommendations from David and Tom Gardner. You also get stock advisors, best buys now, a whole lot more. So check it out, go to the podcast center and just scroll to the bottom of the page.

That's podcast.fool.com. It's time to get to the stocks on our radar and Steve Gardner will come in from the other side of the glass to hit you with a question. Simon Erickson, you're up first. What are you looking at?

Chris, I'm looking at Activision Blizzard, ticker ATVI. This was the winner of our December Best Buy now. Export to mission, so it's been on our radar for a little while now. This is coming to make video games.

They're one of the largest video game companies in the entire world. They just launched this past year called, or I'm sorry, title called Overwatch, which already has 20 million members, which doubled Blizzard's year over year revenue. And even more interesting to me, Chris, 86% of sales this last quarter came from digital, which means as you're seeing this increase in esports and more than 200 million people globally watching organized video game competitions, I think that spells really good news for Activision. Steve, question about Activision Blizzard?

What platform are you the most bullish on today? They've got a lot of mobile versus PS4 or Xbox, which platform do I want to be on? Yeah, I think that mobile is really big with Candy Crush kind of taking the world by storm a couple years ago, but overall, it doesn't really matter to me, Steve. It's a franchise that people are still using on mobile phones, on personal computers, on Xbox, whatever else it is.

Activision holds all those franchises, so they're going to continue to monetize for years. Jason, what are you looking at? Yeah, TripAdvisor had a horrible 2016, of course, ticker as TRIP. And I think investors have every right to be frustrated with the stock, revenue growth came to a screeching halt.

But let's remember that was by design as the company continues to roll out this instant booking platform, which is not done. Just got back from Universal Orlando, had a great time, and I attribute that in part to TripAdvisor and finding a great hotel, and I actually booked it on TripAdvisor as well. This is in fact the most popular travel website in the United States. They've cleared the biggest hurdles in acquiring traffic by building a killer platform and actually building out the instant booking offering.

Now it's just re-educating the consumer. That's a matter of when, not if, and I think today's stock price rewards patient investors. Steve? How should consumers differentiate between the place that says, this is the best hotel in the world, I almost died at this hotel.

How do I make sense of that? Is it just cumulatively what I'm looking at? Because it's all over the map of these reviews? Well, it is all over the map, you're right.

And generally speaking, you're filtering for the ones that have the highest ratings, but it's also interesting to note that TripAdvisor is rolling out additional tools for hotels and restaurants and whatnot to really highlight the best reviews to get that stuff up to the forefront for travelers like yourselves. David, thanks for your question. Well, the federal government recently wrapped up an investigation into Tesla Motors, and it's autopilot feature and found that this autopilot was essentially installed on its vehicles accidents with Tesla vehicles went down by 40%. So I think that's interesting.

Put it on my radar. This is a big year for Tesla with the Model 3 production. It's slated to start Solar Roof tiles with SolarCity, big factory production, you name it. Steve?

What year does my car drive me to work? 2040. Alright, Jason, those are David Kretsman, Simon, Ericsson, guys, thanks for being here. That's going to do it for this week's show.

Our engineer Steve Broino, our producer is MacKerreer. I'm Chris Hill, and we'll see you next week.