Hi {{first_name}},

Back in February, an AI startup CEO named Matt Shumer wrote an open letter. He'd been softening what he was seeing for months. At dinner parties, in group texts, when his family asked. He decided to stop softening it.

Shumer felt compelled to reframe the era we are entering. In his letter “Something Big Is Happening” he reached for an analogy most people would recognize: February 2020. The moment before the world shifted, a handful of people were changing their behavior and getting strange looks for it. And then three weeks later everything rearranged. This moment, he says, is like those three weeks.

Eighty million people read Shumer’s letter. It was republished in Fortune. The letter has its own Wikipedia page. You probably saw it. You may have forwarded it. Or maybe, like Scott Galloway, you thought it was overblown.

I didn’t think it went far enough. Shumer was writing as a technologist, focused on how AI will change the job market. As an allocator, I kept thinking about what those changes could mean for markets, income, and portfolios.

'Will AI take my job?' That's a big, uncomfortable question. Here's the next one. ‘What does your balance sheet look like if your income stream funding everything becomes unreliable over the next five years?’

That's concentration risk. And guess what? Almost nobody is managing it.

I haven't taken a consistent paycheck in over ten years, and even when I was I never took it for granted. Knowing it wasn’t guaranteed helped me shape the way I built my portfolio and future.  But most of the investors I work with took a different path. They built serious careers, earning well and investing the rest.  The plan I hear most often: I will keep earning, keep saving, let this portfolio compound over 15 or 20 years until it can carry the load.

That plan assumes income stays roughly consistent. Preferably it grows. But the speed of advancement and adoption of technology means that assumption just got more fragile. The data proves it.  I’m helping investors understand how to build a portfolio solution factoring in fragile income. In fact, we'll meet one of them in this issue.

This week I’m sharing:

Let’s go into it.

— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth

Your 401k is celebrating the same technological shift that's compressing your income's shelf life.

From 2016 through November 2022, equity market performance and U.S. job openings moved in lockstep. Companies made money and then hired more people. The S&P 500 went up, job openings went up. The Dow went up, jobs went up. The correlation coefficient was +0.89.

Then in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. We’ve been on a roller coaster ever since. 

The S&P 500 and Dow Jones continued climbing. Job openings had fallen materially. The new correlation coefficient: -0.90. Same magnitude. Opposite direction. Equity investors were being rewarded for the same productivity gains that are reducing the number of people companies need to employ.

Yes, interest rates were already rising, pandemic-era hiring excesses were unwinding, and corporate America was under pressure to cut excess and be more efficient. But the arrival of generative AI accelerated the thinking inside companies that growth no longer required a net increase in headcount.

Since then, major stock indexes have continued climbing while job openings have cooled materially from their peak. Investors have rewarded companies for productivity, efficiency, and operating leverage, even as hiring demand softened.

If you hold index funds and earn a W-2 salary, you are now long and short, the same trade.

The Restructuring Hiding Inside a Healthy Labor Market

The labor market looks fine by traditional measures. Not the best ever, but fine.

Initial jobless claims remain low by historical standards and unemployment is still just 4.3%.

But these numbers ignore what is happening inside the income bands where most accredited investors earn their living. 

The cuts are real and they're accelerating. 

Thousands of individuals have been displaced by AI-attributed layoffs in 2026 already, across industries spanning tech, finance, logistics, consulting, and media. In 2025, companies directly cited AI in announcing 55,000 job cuts.

Some of these cuts are surgical. Attrition absorbed, roles automated, headcount reduced through hiring freezes. Some are blunt. Entire divisions restructured in a quarter. The aggregate employment data stays low either way because the workers being cut from six-figure knowledge roles aren't filing unemployment claims at the same rate. They're freelancing, consulting, taking severance, and burning runway. They show up in the claims data months later, if at all.

Some economists argue companies are using AI as a convenient narrative for cuts they would have made anyway. For the person who just lost their position, the distinction is irrelevant.

The Concentration Risk You'd Never Tolerate

You would never hold 80% of your equity portfolio in a single name, in a single sector undergoing structural disruption, with no hedge and no exit plan. Any competent advisor would tell you to rebalance immediately.

Now look at your income.

Most accredited investors carry 70 to 90% of their net worth growth potential through a single income stream. If that stream is a W-2 salary in technology, finance, consulting, media, or legal services, the structural risk profile of that income just changed. The correlation data proves it. The layoff data confirms it. The aggregate employment statistics can't capture it.

Your investment portfolio gets reviewed, diversified, and stress-tested. Your paycheck usually doesn't. Most financial plans assume your income will keep growing steadily for years, even though it may be the most vulnerable part of the entire plan. AI is making that mismatch harder to ignore.

The Path Through It

The problem has a portfolio solution. And for many of you, the hardest part is already behind you.

You've likely already crossed the Inflection Point: the moment your capital's earning power structurally exceeded your ability to save.

Most high earners cross it somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in investable assets. Many of you crossed it years ago. The gap between where you are and where you want to be closed while you were focused on making your paycheck.

The question is whether the portfolio you've built can absorb the weight if that paycheck becomes less reliable. Asset selection matters here. If the same AI trend compressing your income is inflating your equity portfolio, your public market holdings are correlated to the same risk. A 401k heavy in S&P 500 index funds compounds on the companies doing the cutting. That's two bets moving in the same direction.

The assets on the other side of that correlation produce income from operations. Borrowers pay interest. Tenants pay rent. Wells produce. The AI trade doesn't touch their revenue line.

The portfolio that replaces your income is a different build than the one that grows alongside it.

Read our Full Report about AI vs Jobs HERE

Stepping Into True Income Stability 

In 2022, Angelita Garcia-Stonehocker tried to reenter the software engineering job market. She had a computer science degree from Stanford, years of technical experience, and recent training in AI. She applied to FAANG companies and smaller firms, submitting applications within the first 24 hours of posting before the pool would swell to hundreds of resumes, many of them automated.

Some companies responded. "We're really interested," they wrote. Then nothing. No interview. No phone screen. Just indefinite holds, nine months or longer. This was a different hiring environment than before.

Angelita had spent years balancing two parallel careers, in software and teaching high school math, choosing flexibility while raising her children. A divorce in 2021 made the full-time engineering path a financial necessity. She expected her credentials would carry her back in. 

Her financial planner, a former JPMorgan advisor, laid out the conventional path. She said to find a position paying $200,000 or more per year and hold it for at least another decade. But as the silence from employers stretched into months, that plan started to look like a bet on a market that no longer existed.

She questioned conventional thinking. Did she need to change her job search strategy? Or change her entire strategy? 

Angelita started researching and learning about alternatives. She found Build Wealth and started doing the math.

She modeled scenarios, mapped her investable assets against different allocation structures, and stress-tested each one against her own comfort with risk. Then she calculated what level of portfolio income she actually needed to cover her living expenses. And she was surprised to realize she already had what she needed.

Angelita recalls a wave of emotion thinking, This is what I’ve been looking for!

The capital she'd accumulated over decades of working and saving was enough. Once she stopped thinking only in terms of salary, the pressure to earn another decade of high income started to fade.

"In Silicon Valley, stocks either go to zero or to the moon," she says. "Private markets are a different kind of investment."

Angelita rebuilt her portfolio. 

Private credit became the income base layer, with mid and long-term real estate positions for compounding and diversification. She incorporated high conviction PE positions and cash-flowing energy funds for asymmetric upside. Her parents had built their own financial security through real estate decades earlier. She knew this model worked. The real assets and direct investing felt gratifying.

She could talk directly to the team on the front lines: the fund managers and operators. She could ask detailed questions about specific deals, and evaluate how they approached risk firsthand. That access provided clarity. 

“One of the things I love about the private markets is that it’s less risk than investing on my own, and more upside than I can leverage on my own,” she says.

That balance mattered more than chasing the highest possible return.

"I only invest if I'm ok with the downside. Even if these funds only hit the bare minimum of expectations, I'd still be happy," she says.

Today, Angelita can retire. She chooses to work because she enjoys it. She picks clients she's passionate about. She's present for her kids when they need her.

When asked what advice she'd give professionals who feel uncertain about their future: "Run the numbers. You won’t be able to see what’s possible until you model it yourself.”

Want access to the same Private Credit Fund Angelita is using to generate 12% cash on cash returns with a portfolio of collateralized, real assets?

Check it out along with Build Wealth’s current offerings in our portal here: BuildWealth.InvestNext

Most investors stress test their portfolio. We are familiar with the practice. So, where’s the stress test for the income that is funding your portfolio? We outlined how to do it, and it’s a fast test. 

If your earned income declined tomorrow, how long could your current financial structure support your life without forcing major changes? There’s two places to look. 

1. Your Income Replacement Ratio (the “Fragility Gap”)

What income do your assets already produce? 

Now divide that number (your total annual investment income) by your annual living expenses.

If your household spends $200,000 annually and your investments generate $50,000 of recurring income, your ratio is 0.25x. Your assets currently fund 25% of your lifestyle.

The distance between where you sit today and 1.0x is your fragility gap. Many investors underestimate this. And every allocation decision should attempt to close it.

2. Your Portfolio Correlation Score

This score focuses on whether your investments depend on the same economic engine as your paycheck. Look at the three largest positions in your portfolio. For each one, ask if the asset's performance depends on the same economic forces that employ you.

If your three largest positions all score “correlated,” your portfolio and your paycheck are effectively running on the same engine. That amplifies the fragility gap.

Capital stacking starts at that gap. The goal is to recognize when your income, savings, and investments are all tied to the same economic outcome—and deliberately layer in assets that behave differently.

The assets that close that gap produce income from operations. Tenants paying rent. Borrowers paying interest. Oil wells producing. Cash flow that isn’t dependent on the same labor cycle or market multiple expansion as your primary income.

If you want to go deeper, we previously outlined how to build your Capital Velocity Stack and how the Tax Elimination Engine helps improve the after-tax fuel available to build it.

"Diversification is protection against ignorance." — Warren Buffett

The standard wealth plan diversifies the portfolio and leaves the income undiversified. It’s a single point of failure masquerading as a strategy.

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This is not financial advice. Illustrative output of a reasoned thought experiment. Not a backtest, guarantee, or prospectus. Actual results vary based on market conditions, fund selection, timing, fees, taxes, and factors not modeled. Private credit, CRE, and leveraged strategies involve significant risk including loss of principal. Consult a qualified financial advisor.