The Director of Education at Augusta Precious Metals joins Income Insider TV for a candid conversation about what decades of government overspending, a weakening dollar, and persistent inflation actually mean for your retirement.
Most retirement conversations start in the wrong place. They focus on account balances, contribution limits, and projected rates of return. These are all useful numbers, but none of them answer the question that actually keeps people up at night: will my money still mean something when I need it most?
That’s the question Devlyn Steele has spent more than four decades thinking about. As Director of Education at Augusta Precious Metals, Devlyn works directly with Americans who are at or near retirement.
His customers are typically Americans who have done everything right on paper and still find themselves wondering whether their savings will hold up against the economic forces they’re watching unfold in real time.
He recently sat down with Income Insider TV for a conversation that goes well beyond the usual retirement planning talking points. Watch the full interview below. If you’d prefer to read rather than watch all 35 minutes, we’ve pulled out the most important ideas below.
Rethinking Retirement: It’s About Purchasing Power, Not Just Dollars!
The real unit of retirement security isn’t dollars. It’s purchasing power. Devlyn opens with a point that sounds simple but has significant consequences for how you think about your savings: money is only as good as what it buys.
A retirement account that grows from $500,000 to $600,000 over five years hasn’t necessarily gotten stronger—not if the cost of living has risen faster than that balance has. The habit of measuring financial health in nominal dollars, he argues, is one of the most common and costly mistakes savers make.
Inflation functions like a tax that the government never has to vote on. One of the more striking framings in the interview: when the dollar’s purchasing power declines, the effect on your take-home earnings is mathematically identical to a tax increase.
If you earn money, pay your official tax rate, and then watch inflation quietly erode what’s left, the government has effectively taken a larger share than your bracket implies. With $39 trillion in national debt and interest payments now exceeding $1 trillion annually, Devlyn sees no structural reason for this pressure to ease.
The Hidden Risks in “Safe” Assets and Economic Policy Constraints
Apparent gains in “safe” accounts can mask real losses. To make this concrete, Devlyn walks through a straightforward comparison. A customer who placed approximately $2,000 in a bank account earning 3% annually in early 2021 would see a balance of around $2,300 today—a gain by any ledger measure.
But adjusted for the inflation experienced over that same period, the real purchasing power of that $2,300 is closer to $1,900. The account grew. The wealth didn’t. That same $2,000, had it been used to purchase one ounce of gold in early 2021, would now be worth roughly $4,500, with real purchasing power in the neighborhood of $3,800.
The Federal Reserve’s most powerful tools have become significantly harder to use. Raising interest rates is the traditional mechanism for cooling inflation, and it worked effectively when Paul Volcker deployed it in 1979, pushing rates toward 20% to break the inflationary cycle of that era.
But the national debt at that time was under $1 trillion. With today’s debt load, the annual interest bill alone already exceeds $1 trillion. Sharply higher rates now would apply enormous additional pressure to an already strained fiscal situation. Devlyn’s view: the Fed is navigating with fewer instruments than the public generally understands.
A Shift in Global Strategy—and Why Individual Action Matters
Central bank behavior is telling a story most retail investors haven’t noticed. For the first time since 1996, the world’s central banks collectively hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries in their reserves. That shift didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of sustained buying across multiple years, with annual global central bank gold purchases running between 850 and 1,000 tonnes.
These are the most sophisticated institutional actors in global finance, and they’ve been methodically reducing their exposure to dollar-denominated assets while building gold reserves. Devlyn suggests this is worth paying attention to regardless of where you ultimately land on precious metals as a personal investment.
Diversification means more than spreading across stock categories. The financial industry typically frames diversification as a matter of splitting exposure across sectors, geographies, or asset classes—domestic versus international, growth versus value, equities versus bonds.
But all of those assets share a common dependency: they derive their value from institutions and systems that are themselves denominated in and dependent on paper currency.
Devlyn introduces a different concept he calls “diversification of trust”—the idea that holding some portion of wealth in physical assets that exist independently of banks, governments, and financial intermediaries is a qualitatively different kind of protection than any paper-based allocation can provide.
The biggest obstacle to action is the habit of inaction. Perhaps the most practical thread running through the interview is a behavioral one. Most American savers, Devlyn observes, have never made an active investment decision.
Their wealth has accumulated through automatic payroll deductions into employer-managed plans, where a limited menu of options is curated by someone else. This history of delegation, while not without its benefits, leaves many people without the instinct or confidence to make independent choices about their own financial future.
His prescription isn’t a specific allocation or product. It’s engagement: read more, ask harder questions, and stop assuming the autopilot settings that worked during your accumulation years are the right settings for the years ahead.
“No one is going to care about your retirement as much as you do. You have to care, and caring means getting educated.” — Devlyn Steele, Director of Education, Augusta Precious Metals
The K-Shaped Recovery and What It Means for the Middle Class
The interview spends meaningful time on a concept that’s become increasingly visible in economic data but rarely surfaces in mainstream retirement conversations: the K-shaped economy.
The metaphor describes an environment where economic outcomes have diverged sharply along wealth lines, one arm of the K rising for those with substantial assets, the other declining for those dependent on wages and savings.
For working Americans who spent the past two decades accumulating wealth in traditional retirement vehicles, the lived experience of this divergence has been unmistakable: higher grocery bills, elevated housing costs, and a persistent sense that their earnings aren’t keeping pace with the world around them.
Devlyn traces this dynamic to a pattern that predates COVID by decades, specifically, the unbroken chain of deficit spending that has characterized every presidential administration since the turn of the century, regardless of party.
Each successive government has spent more than its predecessor, and the cumulative result is a debt trajectory that has fundamentally changed the relationship between printed money and real-world value.
How Augusta Precious Metals Approaches These Conversations Differently
For those considering precious metals as part of a retirement strategy, the experience of actually exploring that option matters. Devlyn describes a model at Augusta Precious Metals that is structurally different from most financial services environments: every person a customer speaks with is a salaried educator, not a commissioned salesperson.
The company earns revenue through the standard dealer spread between purchase and buyback prices, transparently, as any dealer in any physical asset does. The difference is that Augusta does not hire commissioned salespeople.
Their educational team is made up of salaried employees. Their job is education without incentives for earning commissions or making sales. The educational team earns the same salary whether you buy from them or not.
The practical effect, reflected consistently in consumer reviews, is a lower-pressure environment where questions get real answers and the timeline for any decision belongs entirely to the person asking.
Before You Make Any Moves: A Self-Assessment
Devlyn resists the temptation to hand out universal allocation formulas, noting that a blanket recommendation – “put 10% in gold” – could be exactly right for one person and meaningfully wrong for another depending on their income sources, existing coverage, expenses, and timeline. Instead, he frames the starting point as a series of honest questions:
Is your current portfolio generating real returns, meaning after both taxes and inflation, or just nominal ones?- How concentrated are you, not just by sector, but by the type of institution and system your assets depend on?
- Have you built healthcare costs into your retirement projections? Statistically, the majority of lifetime medical expenses occur in the final decade of life
- What does your retirement actually look like in concrete terms – travel, housing, family support, and have you priced that lifestyle at today’s costs, let alone future ones?
- Are you relying on strategies and assumptions that made sense in a different economic environment?
For those who want a clearer starting picture, he suggests fee-only financial advisors (professionals who charge a flat rate and sell no products) as well as the growing number of online inflation and retirement calculators that can help model real purchasing power over time.
First Steps for Retirement Savers
Nothing in this conversation is designed to generate fear, though some of the data points are genuinely sobering. The underlying message is more straightforward: the economic environment has shifted in ways that make passive, set-it-and-forget-it retirement planning riskier than it once was, and the people best positioned to navigate that shift are the ones who decide to actually engage with it.
Gold and silver may or may not be the right addition for your specific situation. But the broader habit of taking an active, informed interest in your own financial future isn’t optional anymore.
