Grant Cardone’s No. 1 Change To Make to Your Retirement Savings
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Peter Burns
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Justice Petersen
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As retirement planning evolves amid economic turmoil, many Americans are rethinking how and where they save for the future. While 401(k) plans and IRAs have long been considered the gold standard for retirement savings, money expert and real estate mogul Grant Cardone thinks it’s time to challenge conventional wisdom.
Cardone believes traditional retirement accounts no longer offer the returns or flexibility needed to build real wealth. “People have gotten wealthy selling 401(k) plans and IRAs,” he told GOBankingRates. “But the wealthy don’t rely on them — they invest in income-producing assets.”
Here’s Cardone’s top retirement savings strategy for 2026.
Protect Your Savings With Real Estate Investments
To combat the problematic course retirement accounts seem to be on, Cardone pulled his savings out of Wall Street. He sees the current market heights as having a high potential for a quick loss and believes there are better ways to invest to produce cash flow. Instead, Cardone has chosen to convert his savings at no penalty into physical real estate.
Investing in real estate provides various advantages that help retirees weather the storm ahead. Cardone explains that real properties produce cash flow, benefit from inflation, and avoid major changes to capital gains tax.
“When you’re 65, you don’t need a lump sum. You need cash flow,” Cardone says in the interview. His point is that income-producing investments act as an ongoing source of cash instead of slowly spending your life savings little by little. Purchasing real estate and renting or leasing it out can provide a monthly income that retirees can live off.
The second benefit of this idea is that real estate can help protect you from inflation. While markets and investments wrapped up in retirement savings accounts can be greatly affected by inflation, real estate has historically been a hedge against inflation. In fact, increases in rent and home prices significantly affect inflation, meaning if it’s rising, the value of your investment is likely also increasing.
Finally, you don’t need to pay capital gains tax unless you sell an asset. If you choose to keep your property as income-producing real estate, you won’t be immediately affected by any major changes to how the IRS taxes capital gains.
Final Take To GO: Worrying Trends for Retirement Savings
Retirees already seem to have a lot to worry about. In a Fox Business interview, Cardone was presented with a poll showing that 68% of retirees worry about outliving their assets, and only 44% believe they’ve saved enough. To make matters worse, Cardone pointed out some troubling trends that are on the horizon for anyone storing their savings in retirement accounts.
One concern for Cardone is an inverted yield curve, which describes when the interest rate on long-term bonds drops below the rate for short-term bonds. Cardone points out that historically, that’s led to recessions. During those periods, there were over 50% pullbacks in the S&P 500, and many lost over half of their retirement savings.
Cardone also pointed to inflation as a potential problem for retirement savings. Many retirees may not realize the extent to which this affects their savings. Cardone called it an “invisible tax.” He said, for example, that if someone had $200,000 in their retirement account in 2020, inflation would cause that sum to lose nearly $50,000 in value.
Because of these negative trends, Cardone has decided to take a different approach to investing his retirement funds.
Caitlyn Moorhead contributed to the reporting for this article.
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