Financial literacy has always been a challenge. However, now that much of the burden of retirement income has shifted to employees instead of employers, it is all the more important that we begin teaching the principles of saving and investing to people as early as possible.

When the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, the hope was companies would spend their influx of money on expansion and increased jobs and wages. Instead, public companies’ most popular way to spend the excess capital has been to buy back their own stock.

March 9, 2019, marked the 10th anniversary of the current bull market, the longest-running in U.S. history. In that decade, the market more than quadrupled, and when you factor in dividends, it’s up fivefold.

The short-term spikes over the past few years coupled with corporate share buybacks have served to keep performance humming. As we move forward, a few points of note: