By Weld Royal

As markets swooned over fears about a global trade war, financial advisor Aaron Cirksena recalled another jaw-dropping time. His father had just sold his medical practice, his parents were eyeing a grand Hawaii retirement, and put a substantial amount of money into a private healthcare company. Then the 2007-09 recession hit and funding dried up for private companies, damaging his parents' retirement plans. "It became extremely difficult during that time," he recalls. "It ended up putting them in a worse situation than they needed to be in."

Speaking with Barron's Advisor on April 4, Cirksena, 36, talks about how watching his parents struggle through the 2007-09 recession inspired him to start MDRN Capital in Annapolis, Md. The firm bills itself as a one-stop-shop for retirement planning. It serves about 800 households, has about $425 million in assets under advisement and hires people "as fast as we can find them," says Cirksena.

Clients are typically between ages 55 and 75, either close to retirement or already clocked out. Cirksena runs the business and has his own book of clients. He talks about what to expect in markets in the coming three to six months, concerns about stagflation, and the best asset classes to hedge against rising prices in 2025.

The S&P is down about 5% as we speak, what are you hearing from clients? They are asking, "What is going on?" It's less a concern about what's going on with my portfolio and more what is going on out there. We've been telling them, it's a conflux of things. It's inflation worries. These tariffs that Trump has announced haven't even gone into effect yet, what is it going to look like when they do? Anytime unknown or unexpected information gets all of a sudden lumped into the market, that's when you see craziness like this. It's the market trying to digest information very quickly that it didn't have before, and that it wasn't predicting.

When do you think the market turbulence will come to an end? That is the popular question of the day. I've been telling prospects and clients, I think over the next three to six months, things are going to continue to be very, very volatile. What everybody has got to realize is that we're in the very early days of this tariff game, this game of chicken that we're playing. In my opinion, there's still more downside potential left to be had.

What does this mean for retirees, or people approaching their golden years? Right now, when we're going through volatility, it's when you need to start looking at other potentially principal-protected investments. That could mean having some money in cash, CDs, money markets, fixed annuities, or fixed indexed annuities. These are all things that have principal protection to them. Each is going to come with varying degrees of liquidity and varying degrees of return potential. Those are the types of things that we're having clients look at if they're coming to us right now and they have all of their money in stocks and bonds. You have to have enough money that is safe in place for whatever your specific situation is. It's not something that you want to be waiting to do until the market starts to have days like this.

What are your thoughts on inflation? There was a University of Michigan study that just came out that said inflation could be closer to 3.9%. It's going to be very, very dependent on how this game of chicken with tariffs plays out over the next 12 months. If countries end up coming to the negotiating table, and tariffs begin to get peeled back a bit, hopefully that would reduce inflation. If that is not the case, and we go forward into this all out global trade war that some people are predicting, we could see inflation significantly go the other direction.

For retirees, what could be worse than inflation? A period of stagflation. The biggest danger that we have with the tariff game is that it could potentially cause economic growth to slow significantly, and inflation potentially to increase significantly. If both of those things happen collectively, then you're in a stagflation environment, and that really hurts retirees and preretirees the most. It doesn't make a good scenario if you had an expectation that your portfolio would average 6% to 8% a year. Then [things change] and it averages 3% to 4% a year. You're taking money out of your accounts, and inflation is at a significantly higher rate.

How should retirement portfolios be adjusted for inflation risks? When you're at that five years out from retirement period, or five years into retirement, that's really what we call the "danger zone." It is the most dangerous point because if you experience a big loss in your portfolio around that time frame, it can really come back to bite you for the rest of your retirement because of sequence of returns risk [or the risk that markets fall right when you need to start tapping your retirement savings].

If somebody is concerned about inflation and they're in that age [range], that's where we're telling them, now is the time to be protecting some of your portfolio, not the day before you're ready to retire. We need to be doing that now. But again, with inflation being in play, we want to make sure that the money we are protecting has the best growth potential that it can possibly have. It doesn't mean we just want to sit on everything.

What about gold? Gold can be a hedge. You're typically going to see the value of gold and most commodities go up in volatile times. What I would say is, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Let's not go crazy and sell everything else to put all of our money in gold. If you look historically at gold, it's had a lot of volatility as well. It's something that is fine for a small allocation, to maybe 5% of one's portfolio. You don't want to have too heavy of an allocation.

How do you feel about bolstering retirement with a little Bitcoin? Honestly, the same way I view gold. If you want to use a little bit of what you might consider gambling money or money that you don't need to live on and put it toward something longer term, like crypto, sure, give it a try. Do you want to take all of your portfolio and all of a sudden throw it into an asset that has proven to be wildly volatile over its short history? Probably not.

You've had tough conversations with people holding bonds. We see a lot of problems with people coming in with bond portfolios. They didn't understand why those bonds lost them so much money. They were always told that bonds were the safe portion of their portfolio. We'd have to tell them, if you bought bonds back in a rate environment like the [early 1980s], when rates were very high, they basically fell for 40 years.

Recession looks like a real possibility. What did you learn from the last big recession? I was about 18 years old. My father had sold his medical practice, and was entering the retirement phase, and [its sale proceeds] was one of their financial windfalls that was going to provide for their retirement. They had been working with a private company, in the healthcare space, investing in it already, and put a substantial amount of money into that company, probably more than would have been appropriate, if they had had some good retirement planning advice. The financial crisis of 2008 came, and funding for private companies dried up. It became extremely difficult during that time. It ended up putting them in a worse situation than they needed to be in. The stress, compounded with making some mistakes that probably could have been avoided, hurt them.

It sounds like a very rough patch. You kind of have lingering scars from that, especially for my mother, it became very difficult to want to put money back into the market. It sets you in that fear turtle mode, where you want everything to be safe -- cash or no-risk investments. You do that, and for the next 10 or 15 years, the market goes on a run, and you experience none of that growth.

It has a double-whammy effect. My parents are fortunate in the fact that they had saved proper amounts of money up to that point. It's not that they were going to be destitute. It's just their retirement could and should have looked differently than it ended up looking. To this day, there is more than there should be in cash and very, very low risk investments.

Is there another economic period in history you'd compare to what we face today? Even though I may be the age that I am, it's funny because I actually end up being the one, a lot of times, to remind people of the tech bubble bursting. There are baby boomers that come to me asking for advice, and the tech bubble from 2000 to 2003 is long enough behind us that some of them have forgotten it. When I remind them, they're like, oh yeah, I do remember way back then, when I was starting to save into my 401(k), and I saw it take a big hit.

You have about 300 clients personally, how do you spend your time when you're not advising retirees or those planning for life after work? The only way that I take on clients at this point is if they're referrals from existing clients. Otherwise, my whole day-to-day focus is on running the company. We've got 20 advisors now. We're onboarding another four to five in the next month, and we're continuing to onboard more, pretty much as fast as we can hire them, and train them. Some companies are still hiring. We certainly are.

Thanks, Aaron.

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April 10, 2025 09:15 ET (13:15 GMT)

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