Are you letting fear or outdated strategies sabotage your portfolio? In this important interview, Brandy Maben of Windrock Wealth Management joins Maggie Lake to reveal how the wealthiest investors are preparing for volatility, inflation, and taxes, and what everyday investors can learn from them.
Brandy explains why:
- Treasuries aren’t the safe haven they once were
- Tax planning (not market timing) is your biggest edge
- Sitting on cash may be riskier than investing
- Gold, farmland, and private credit are essential inflation hedges
- Most people completely misjudge their true risk tolerance
She also breaks down misunderstood tax strategies like Roth conversions, donor-advised funds, and how to prepare for the looming 2026 tax sunset. If you’re unsure whether your portfolio can survive what’s coming, this episode is your wake-up call.
Volatility got you concerned? Get a free portfolio review with Wealthion’s endorsed financial advisors at https://bit.ly/4m1zC73
Hard Assets Alliance – The Best Way to Invest in Gold and Silver: https://www.hardassetsalliance.com/?aff=WTH
Brandy Maben 0:00
Wealth isn’t flashy, it’s disciplined.
Maggie Lake 0:07
Hello and welcome to wealthion. I’m Maggie Lake, and today I’m joined by Brandi Mabin, Director at windrock Wealth Management. Hi, Brandi. It’s great to have
Speaker 1 0:15
you on Hi. Thanks for having me, Maggie. So we are
Maggie Lake 0:18
four months into the year, and it feels like a lifetime. Markets have been so volatile, and I think so many people are unsure about what to do with their investments and their portfolios. So let’s start big picture. How are you dealing with this ever elevated level of uncertainty? What have you been telling your clients?
Brandy Maben 0:38
Yeah, it’s, you know, there’s a lot of emotional calming down at the moment, because most financial advisors make a plan at the very beginning of working with a client, and if you stick to the plan most of the time, you’re going to be you’re going to be just fine. So I’ve used a lot of my background coming in to this volatile time to help ease my clients. I was a stock broker at first, really put portfolios together. Then I discovered what alternative investments were, investment strategies, and I wanted to be a little bit more complex, where windrock really was a blend of all of the things I was looking for in a firm to tell my clients in moments like these, we have the right team, we have the right firm behind us, and we’ve been through this before, and these are our strategies to get you through so not only our holistic planning, but our tax smart planning is really what’s giving our clients peace of mind, even If the markets are correcting or we see a recession in the future, we always have a game plan
Maggie Lake 1:46
that’s so interesting because, and I’m interested in what you mean by a little bit more complexity, because I feel like one of the conversations that’s been coming up, and frankly, one of the questions that I hear a lot from people you Know, who post comments or who write in are things like, you know, how much of what should my sort of mix of assets look like? Or, you know, everyone was sort of brought up thinking 6040, or some version of that, right? Like, okay, I just shift if I’m in, if things are good, I’m all equities, and then maybe as I get a little older, I have to have more bonds, but it was a sort of plain vanilla, you know, that wheel, and it feels like we’ve moved out of that time. Is that what you’re talking about about more complexity, what should investors be prioritizing for this year, especially now that we’re into it and we we’re seeing how volatile it is,
Brandy Maben 2:36
right? And, you know, you’re getting into the weeds of specifics of just investments, and we actually like to take a step back and go back to basics first, which everyone wants to predict the market, but in reality, we need to just control what we can, which is taxes, structure and behavior. We can plan on all of those. We can’t plan on what the market’s going to do, and that Tesla is down 50% so a lot of times we refer back to The Millionaire Next Door, right? Wealth isn’t flashy, it’s disciplined. And if we can start our clients on reminding them that it’s all about 5030, 20 rule, which young investors really need to know that’s saving 20% of your money every single year, right? That’s, that’s the bread and butter of where we get to the minutia of what you’re talking about. I think they start to panic and forget even those basics that really keep us grounded. Um, after that, you know, we, we try to focus on making sure everything is diversified within a portfolio. So the 6040 really has to do with risk tolerance and what clients feel they’re afraid of or not afraid of. Our portfolios, luckily, have alternative investments in them. So we’re in real estate, we’re in private credit, we’re in gold and silver, actual bars that are held and custodian. So when we talk about diversification within investments, make sure you’re looking for inflation hedging funds. We buy farmland, even actual farmland that’s going from conventional farm to organic farm, and we’re making sure that those type of investments are in a portfolio to where we see a market drop. Our clients don’t feel it as much because we’re diversified amongst not only tax free and tax tax deferred accounts, we’re also in these complex investments that really help. We’ll
Maggie Lake 4:39
come back to that tax issue in a minute, because that is certainly something that I think a lot of people don’t even consider when they’re looking at this, which is something I think we were all going to need to drill down on. You just said something really important, I think, and that is what you’re hedging against, or what what you need to be concerned about. And you mentioned inflation. Are. We, you know, we went through this period of super low interest rates, concerns about deflation, and then we had this inflation spike, but we were told it was transitory. Are we what do we need to understand about the inflationary environment we’re in, and what do we need to make sure we’re protected against when we look at our portfolio,
Brandy Maben 5:17
right? Yeah, that’s a very good point. Inflation right now is as volatile as the market. It can go high, it can go low, and you have to be ready for either one. So when I talk about farmland hedging, inflation over the past, since the 1970 is hedged inflation by 6.1% so it has beat whatever inflation is, if inflation is 130% in a year, it still beats it by that 6.1% same with gold and silver. We’ve seen a great hedge of inflation off of those. So if you look back at the 1970s we have a chart that actually shows a 10 year run where it’s at 6% it’s at 7% it jumps to 13% and it just is very volatile and up and down. And I think that’s where we’re at right now. I think we’re going to have years that spike, and even our 10 year treasury bill could go up tenfold, but we’ll see, like we need to see what actually happens and just be prepared for it. Yeah,
Maggie Lake 6:23
are do you consider treasuries a safe haven? I mean, they used to be, but it seems like people are wondering about that. I mean, are you, are you changing or advising your client to shift their approach when it comes to how they view you as treasuries?
Brandy Maben 6:40
That’s a really good question, and I would answer it differently, maybe for each investor, because their viewpoints right now about that topic can be very different. My personal belief is that, just like everything, don’t have all of your eggs in one basket, right? So it’s like farming. You plant different crops every season, because no season is guaranteed, even treasury bonds and bills. And a lot of people are afraid of not only the value of the dollar, but also what is happening with our government. How are they going to pay back this debt? Are treasuries a terrifying place to be in? Well, I would, yeah, I’d be cautionary Absolutely. Does that mean pull all of your money out of treasuries? No, I don’t think that’s completely necessary, unless we get the headlines that show we need to. But we do diversify that. So we’re not only in private credit, we’re in real estate funds that produce 8% annually. We’re in real estate funds that can give us 10 to 12% at times, and it acts like a bond, and it’s maybe a little bit more risky. I guess that depends on how risky you think Treasuries are right now, but we put them into income producing investments that are outside of treasuries as well.
Maggie Lake 8:01
You mentioned before gold bars, and you seem to make that distinction. We have seen a big run up in gold. So we get people asking, is it too late, if I haven’t diversified into gold? Is it too late to do so? Should I wait and then how to best do that? How should I best invest in gold? Should I be holding the commodity itself? Is a gold? ETF, Okay, what about miners? Is there an equity play? How do you think about that asset class? Because I think a lot of people have forgotten about it for the last couple of decades. Right? We kept hearing about the value of it. But when you look at the data the people, the exposure to gold is still pretty low historically. So how, how should people sort of start to think about moving into that asset class?
Brandy Maben 8:49
Right? I think it’s like anything you want to get in slowly and over time, and then you’re going to avoid these highs and lows. And maybe people know what dollar cost averaging is, but that’s exactly what it is, is we want to get into gold now, even though it seems high, there are some analysts that say it’s going to double in the next five to 10 years. So you don’t want to be that person five to 10 years that said, Ah, I waited on the sideline and I didn’t get in. Now, in terms of what kind of gold and silver we go back to diversification, we don’t know if actually having hard bars of gold and silver is going to be a greater investment than in the stock market. What we actually like behind that is that it’s a liquid asset that you can hold in your home. You can actually carry it like cash and trade it in. If any doomsday errors out there prefer that they can have hard bars and coins of gold and silver. So we just play all the angles of gold and silver. We have coins, we have bars, and we are also in a couple of market, marketable. Whole assets of that class.
Maggie Lake 10:03
How, when we’re looking at this, I keep thinking about you saying it’s good to have a plan, because it feels very much like we’re all getting we’re all having these sort of knee jerk reactions. Oh, we’re seeing all this happen. And we want to sort of herd run to gold, and then, what if we’re at the top you want to herd run back someplace else. Is this a time when people should be thinking more about capital preservation, given the volatility, or is that a mistake, and you should still be focused on on trying to reach a little bit and grow and make sure you do have some exposure to risk, even though it feels kind of scary when you look at the headlines
Brandy Maben 10:41
Exactly. We We like everyone to have a piece of every bucket, and everyone has an end game, whether it’s retirement or they’re in the midst of midst of retirement, and want to have a legacy goal, whatever it is, we look forward to that time, and then we shift back on the planning. So when you get to that moment, when you get to the time where you say, I am more cash preservation because I don’t work anymore, I don’t have an income, we want to make sure you’re not only pulling from your retirement account that’s been tax deferred, but you have an equal amount in a tax free account, and there’s different strategies to make sure you have a tax free account like a Roth IRA. But a lot of our clients are very high net worth and have phased out of that income level. We still have ways that we can grow money, tax free, all of my background with different executive bonus plans and deferred compensation and mega Roth conversions that are really smart, especially in solo 401, K is those can give you that bucket of tax free money, and then, of course, that taxable account where you’re paying taxes on it as it goes. And we try to make sure on down years, if we have a recession this year, we might take advantage of those tax loss harvesting moments. We also might use some estate planning techniques. If you were in Tesla and it had dropped, it’s dropped significantly, you could use that stock to gift tax right now, and your heirs will benefit from it greatly, and your estate tax of gifting is then at an optimal time. So we deal with all things like that with planning.
Maggie Lake 12:28
What are some of the common mistakes investors make when it comes to taxes? Because, like, we just passed tax day here in the US, and a lot of us think, oh, it’s behind us. I don’t want to think about it now for a little while, at least until it sort of rears its head at the end of the year, and then we’re rushing to make our decisions. What are some of the common mistakes investors make? Yeah,
Brandy Maben 12:46
I, you know, one I just dealt with with a client, actually, is they get paralyzed with cash and they think, Well, I know what I have. I know taxes are coming. I know my tax bill is going to be about this. So let’s just plan so that everything is predictable. Well, it was my first year working with them, and we had a growth strategy. We really wanted to make a run at whatever the markets were doing and all these private investments, their tax bill was not the predictable taxes that they had, and we had to have a a very heartfelt conversation of you made X amount, and you’re only paying this amount of tax, so don’t have a big hiccup when you actually are strategizing differently, and it looks a little uneasy compared to your your previous predictable taxes, right? Another mistake is, let me
Maggie Lake 13:42
just, let me just ask you, are you saying like you made more money than you expected? So your tax bill is bigger, but don’t freak out and go back, because don’t worry about paying the tax if you made the gain. Is that sort of what you’re saying?
Brandy Maben 13:54
Yes, exactly. So he was really stressed that his taxes went up. And I showed him his account and said, Listen, we can just pull from the money you made to pay those taxes, and you still made a significant amount more. So don’t it’s
Maggie Lake 14:11
funny. It’s a psychological thing, though, isn’t it? Yeah, it
Brandy Maben 14:13
is. Oh yeah, it was. He just saw the tax bill number, and he had a panic attack. He absolutely had a panic. Well, we
Maggie Lake 14:20
don’t. We don’t blame you. None of us want to spend us want to see
Brandy Maben 14:23
that tax Yeah, right, right. So don’t be paralyzed with wanting your money to grow.
Maggie Lake 14:28
Are you? So you were gonna think of another example. Yeah,
Brandy Maben 14:32
ignoring tax changes. I think CPAs do a pretty good job of communicating with their clients when their clients are sitting down and it’s tax season, it’s time to go over it. The problem right now is CPAs have a breather. The 15th just passed. Now is the time to start asking your CPAs about the 2026 tax sunset. Right? Right, especially if you’re a wealthy individual, your tax brackets about to raise almost to 40% your estate taxes and gifting is about to be cut in half. We really have to hone in on those strategies of how to diversify your money right now and really plan on what’s about to come if maybe Trump will extend a lot of these rules, and it’ll all be another five year term of this benefit for high net worth individuals, but it’s quite possible we’ll see a lot of changes.
Maggie Lake 15:34
Yeah, that’s something talk about. Unpredictability. You’ve got to be ready. So it sounds like you’re kind of be it’s smart to be conservative and get ready for that negative change or higher taxes that may be in the pipeline. And then great, if it doesn’t happen, then you can work backward from there, but you’ve got to start looking at that now. Correct one of the other I’m just going to let that sit for a minute, because nobody wants to think about taxes right now, but we have to. And this is i but we have to. And this is, I think, one of the pitfalls that we all fall into, myself included, one of the other areas that I was curious to get your thoughts are on in terms of the changing landscape we’re in is international exposure. So we know looking at, you know, the tumultuous four months that we’ve had so far in 2025 and a little bit at the end of at the end of last year as well, we’re starting to see international equity markets really outperform US markets. And again, I think this is maybe, like gold or some commodities, an area where, you know, the average person maybe doesn’t have as much exposure because it hasn’t worked. It just wasn’t, you know, a winning strategy for so long are you should investors be diversifying internationally as well as as into some of the other asset classes and hard assets that you were talking about? How are you thinking about the international versus picture? I
Brandy Maben 16:57
think that’s a great question for everyone’s personal advisor and how high your risk tolerance is, because it is a risky market to be in and it’s ever changing. The economics around the world are are volatile as anything right now, and no one knows what’s going to happen with any country, so we start to rely on analysts within our own firm, and we’re very tentative with international exposure, and it is a place to be in for everyone. Is it a very high percentage for us? It’s not. We really don’t want to put all of our eggs in that basket. We want to have some exposure, but it’s very tactical. It’s very active for us. So when we think of all of these international changes and wars going on, we start to have little buckets of stocks. Maybe it’s oil focused. Maybe it’s a commodity focus right of a certain country. Instead of just looking international direct, we want to make sure that it’s very pinpointed and very strategic on a time frame. We want it like right now, even the US, you look at different areas to get in. Oil is very cheap right now. You can get into oil, and it’s very possible the next four years that’s going to have a good run up. It might not. So put one or 2% in there. Don’t over expose yourself, but dabbling is always a good idea in our book.
Maggie Lake 18:29
Do people accurately as describe themselves, or can, can we accurately assess our own risk? And I ask this because, you know, you’ll ask people, they say, I’m a long time I’m a long term investor. But then if they suffer short term draw downs, we all freak out. So maybe we’re not as long term as we think. Or people think, yeah, I want to grow my money. I have a high tolerance for risk. And again, if there’s a drawdown, are we good at assessing our own risk profile?
Brandy Maben 18:59
Oh, no. I very rarely talk to clients that have that piece figured out on their own, and they come in and they say, what they think they are, what their spouse is, what their goals are, and really all we can rely on is that end game, that end goal, and scale it back from there. So we have clients that have a long trajectory. We they have a long time horizon, and we can encourage them that it’s it’s okay to start to be a little bit more growth focused. A lot of them think they know what growth focused is. But like you just said, the market drops, and on a day, they call you and say, what’s the plan? Well, let’s take it back to day one, where we said it’s about 20, 3040, years from now. It’s not about the fourth it’s not about that drop day. It’s about that long term play. We also have clients that are purely in an income play or very protective, and we have to tell them you used to and. Aggressively. You used to be a growth or an investor, but now you can’t be. You have this much money, you have this much life. We have to make sure it, it maintains. So then we get phone calls on a drop day, Hey, are you putting in? Are we buying we’re not, because your play is the income stream that we have you on, and we’re on a budget, so we have to play those emotional reactions when they come in. But yeah, I think advisors are so key. When you get to that phase of life, these young kids have so many Robo investors they can use. It’s absolutely fantastic for starters. But when you get to the moment of actually assessing risk and actually needing to have some introspection on what what you need to do. It’s always good to have someone to lean on, to really tell you where you’re at, what’s going on, and not to emotionally React, React, yeah,
Maggie Lake 20:56
and I feel like that’s exactly the roller coaster people have been on the last few weeks, because, you know, we are seeing really unprecedented volatility. So I think it’s all causing us to sort of try to gut check and figure out, you know, do we have a handle on this? Wanted to round out by asking you about cash, and it’s sort of related to this, I think because, you know, it’s very easy to fall into kind of a bunker mentality and say, like, I just, I just want to get out and just go all cash and just sit in cash until it blows over. I’m sure you’ve gotten some of those calls. What do you say to that? And
Brandy Maben 21:33
that goes back to one of the mistakes, right? People are just sitting on the sidelines and they’re missing opportunity. Whatever it is an advisor needs to advise on what could grow, where the risk should be taken, and then using cash and being active with it. But it goes back to that inflation conversation we had to that topic, if you let your money just sit, it’s it’s deflating. It’s not making as much money as the dollar is worth even a year from now. So sitting on cash, you’re actually losing value. And it’s really important, whether it’s a cash strategy up until the day you think it’s going to drop again, or making your clients aware that we have 20 allocations we’re watching right now. We are going to start to dabble in and this is our game plan. It’s not going to be all in one shoot. It’s going to be very strategic and go forth. Also, when you see your money go down that we’ve we’ve been in allocations for years with some of these people, doesn’t mean we’re getting out at a low point. We might actually shave some off the top, and we have in the past like energy right XLE, we took a huge profit off that, but we stayed in it because we want to make sure that we’re hitting highs and lows. But it’s long term. We really think assets like that have a future that’s not just on an active day to get out and panic and then sit in cash. That’s the worst thing people can do. You have to make your money grow and you
Maggie Lake 23:12
bring you bring up a good point. Even in these times, there’s still opportunity,
Brandy Maben 23:16
always opportunity. You look at natural gas right now, it’s incredibly cheap, but if you look at the political atmosphere that could change in the next four years, and you could really see a growth market in that in that sector. That’s just one example. But then gold, you brought up gold and how expensive it is right now, a lot of people think it’s actually very affordable, where it’s going to be, where the value is going to be with gold. Is there?
Maggie Lake 23:45
I’m so interested in the tax issue that you brought up, because I really feel like we just don’t talk about this enough. Are there sort of favorite, I don’t know if it’s vehicles or favorite strategies that you have to sort of optimize tax or is that something that really varies depending on the investor and the profile?
Brandy Maben 24:07
I think it’s both right. I think if you have a w2 client that’s very black and white with their investments, there’s not a lot of tax strategy you can do other than, hey, let’s, let’s look at trying to get your tax free money growing, or let’s bring up charity type of events. We also have people that have to get really strategic with tax, not only the high net worth individuals that are over that estate gifting limit, but we have entrepreneur lawyer makes a great deal of money every year, constantly trying to find ways not to pay the full tax on all of that money each year. So we just went through a big he went through a big settlement, and he gets a lot of money and a lot of bonus off this settlement we are now integrating. The Donor Advised Fund, more so making sure we’re really utilizing that we’re using these down days when something drops, to put into his grantor trust and make sure that he gets in at a low point and he’s strategizing on taxes with his grat. Then we have, like I said, the donor advised fund. There’s so many charity vehicles to use depending on your situation. There’s charitable remainder trusts, there’s charitable lead trusts that pay your family income while you’re giving back to charities. And then the donor advised fund is one that I think everyone should have a donor advised fund, because if you have a lumpy year and you want to kind of give a lot more away and not pay tax on that. It’s a really good strategy. Or if you’re young and don’t know what your charitable inclination is, you can give $100 to it a year and start to build that up and get the tax deduction up front. So those are all ways we use solo 401, K is using Roth conversions with those mega Roth conversions. Executive bonus plans are way unutilized within business owners. They can use it, not only for their employees, but they can use it for themselves, and that’s a tax free method. No one talks about enough. I don’t think, yeah,
Maggie Lake 26:20
absolutely. I mean, I think because of, you know, it’s that, it’s what we need, but we have an aversion to it, because this is negativity around the idea of taxes, like we don’t think of it as tools we can use. We just think it is something we want it we don’t want to think about until we’re absolutely forced to. As we wrap what what advice? What kind of questions should we be asking ourselves when it comes to creating a smart portfolio, the tax issue and the fact that we need to pay them a lot more attention to that aside, what should we all be asking ourselves as we you know, it looks like we’re in this period of continued volatility. What should we what should we ask ourselves?
Brandy Maben 27:00
You know, you always have to think about volatile markets, and what we should think about that we just can’t predict out predict outcomes. So control the controllable. We can keep an eye on what we’re earning and what we’re keeping and making a game plan, not for the days that are down. Of course, invest a little bit, but stay focused on that big picture plan and talk to your advisor, get their help, make sure you’re walking through what is happening, and don’t emotionally react with your own accounts. If you don’t have an advisor, don’t click all the buttons on one day just because you’re a little nervous this, this too shall pass. Make sure your game plan is set and solid,
Maggie Lake 27:46
and make sure you have one. That may be the question we need to ask ourselves. Do we really have one? We think we do, but do we really have one brandy? I love this conversation. You gave me so much to think about. I think for all of us, it’s such timely advice. So thank you so much. Thank you for the time. I
Brandy Maben 28:01
appreciate it. Thank you. All
Maggie Lake 28:03
right, we’ll talk again soon. Thanks everybody.
