- Millennial Money founder Grant Sabatier thinks 2023 is going to be a great year to invest.
- Everything, from stocks to real estate, will be on sale.
- It also could be a great time to buy businesses, as many boomers who own them will be retiring.
Grant Sabatier grew his net worth from practically nothing to seven figures by sticking to a simple investing strategy: saving the majority of his income and stashing most of it in index funds.
“It’s not lost on me that I started investing in 2010,” noted Sabatier, who was able to quit his day job at age 30 thanks to his investments. “The returns over the past 12 years, minus this year, have been pretty much always up, so I was able to really benefit from a lot of that compounding.”
A lot has changed since then, most notably the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the stock market into freefall in March 2020. Nearly as quickly as it dropped, the market rebounded, and the S&P was back to its previous highs by the fall of 2020. This year, however, stocks have been slipping again, recession fears continue to grow, and investors are increasingly scared of putting their money in the stock market.
Sabatier, who founded Millennial Money and wrote “Financial Freedom” after achieving financial independence, has some good news for investors: “If you have some money saved up and you’re looking to invest, 2023 is the year. It’s going to be one of the greatest years to invest in the past 15 years.”
That’s because, “pretty much since 2008, so the last 14 years to 15 years, everything has been going up,” he told Insider. “Outside of the craziness of the early days of the pandemic, there really hasn’t been a correction in 15 years, so there’s just a ton of value to be gathered for really any type of investor, but especially younger investors. They can get more for their money no matter where they’re investing.”
Sabatier is pointing out that, when there’s a dip, stock prices are low — and investors can take advantage of that.
It’s a good time to invest in more than just the stock market, he added: “When it’s very difficult to get access to credit, valuations for everything drop. Because money is so hard to get access to, pretty much everything is going to be on sale, from stocks to any form of real estate to online businesses to offline businesses.”
Investors with accessible cash will really be able to capitalize.
Take real estate, for example, said Sabatier: “With mortgage rates going up and the housing inventory dropping, if you’re a cash-buyer, you can get really good deals on houses right now. You can get really good deals on multi-family properties and on commercial warehouse space.”
It’s also a great time to get deals on businesses.
We’re in the middle of a massive wealth transfer from baby boomers to millennials, he explained, “in the form of boomers selling their companies. There’s an increasing number of really high-quality, non-digital businesses that are coming to the market. It’s a really incredible opportunity for anyone who is interested in business to go on BizBuySell and look for businesses in your local community that are for sale and learn about them.”
As cities continue to grow and demand continues to increase, “the profit margins and potential of these traditional, blue-collar trade businesses — tree removal companies or landscaping companies or house power washing companies — is exploding,” he said. “The value of these businesses is going to be huge in the coming years and a lot of them you can purchase because boomers are retiring.”
He never recommends anyone buy a restaurant or food truck, “because the margins are so low,” he noted. But you can buy things like gas stations, FedEx freight routes, vending machine businesses, and car repair shops. “Really anything you can think of, right now people are looking to sell.”
His main takeaway is that, across the board, “there are going to be a lot of good deals and a lot of good value in 2023.”
