Friday Flight - Dumpster Diving, Housing Hellscape, & Tech Company Transgressions #600

We've got those intros down. Actually, folks would be surprised at how sometimes we do re record the entry us hit record and sometimes we'll start recording an episode before we're like completely settled. Still get my drink, clear my throat, that kind of thing. But seriously, we we really do

appreciate all of you wonderful listeners out there. You know, we've actually been at this now for nearly five years, but they were two weeks shy of our fifth years, so we wanted to celebrate this milestone episode though, this six episode, and to do that, we're going to give away a total of six hundred dollars to six different listeners right out of Maths pocket and I'm keeping my

money and Joel's on top for the next giveaway. Uh. And so all that you have to do to be entered to win is to just make sure that you are subscribed to our free weekly newsletter. You can just head over to the site where you can subscribe. You can either they're on the home page towards the bottom there's a spot where you can enter in your email or just go to how the Money dot com forward

slash newsletter. Either one of those spots will work. Uh, fill in your information, your name, and your email and you will be set. So yeah, just just make sure to do that before Monday this next Monday at midnight in order to be entered to win one of those six prizes. And yeah, that's all there is to it. We will announce the winners on next Friday's episode and we'll be reaching on the folks getting your Venmo, your cash app handle. But literally, it's it's gonna be that simple.

We're gonna center Bucks in your in your hands, Bucks over to you. Yeah, absolutely so, well, we can't we look forward to giving money away. I think last year we did a giveaway man of our own money, and we were asked listeners to give that money away in their communities and they reported back. You called it the giveaway, giveaway, giveaway, give away, which is super fun. This year, We're like, no, we're gonna put money in your hand because I don't know.

Maybe you've got some debt to pay off. Maybe you've got a credit card bill you haven't been able to get under control. Maybe you just need a little cash in your hand to to not go into debt in order to pay for some of those holiday gifts that you want to buy. And we want to help you out with that. So I gotta do is be subscribe to the newsletter and like you said, Monday at midnight is the deadline. Yeah. And by the way, this is uh. This is a giveaway that's available to old and new subscribers.

So obviously, if you have not subscribed yet, make sure to do that. But if you have been a faithful subscriber for six months, if you've been with us for a minute, here already entered. You are automatically entered to. But tell your mom, tell your grandma so they they can get entered into. But I want to mention one more thing. Mat before you get the Friday flight. I'm not sure how you feel about Christmas decorations. We got ourselves. We started going early, like November fift inside, at least

we did. We did too actually, just like I was like ready for some some of that Christmas joy. I wonder why that is my wife in particular, was ready

for him. But one of so one of the things that we couldn't do until recently though, because the live Christmas trees had not started hitting like the home depots and the lows yet, was we couldn't go get the free trimmings like they have to get to cut off the bottoms of the trees, and there's all these sorts of little cut off the bottom three branches, threw saplings hanging around half inch off the bottom that fresh cut.

But we did, like Emily was just like, okay, this Saturday, No, there's there's gonna be something this Saturday, right, And so we've gotten Now this past weekend we went. We got a bunch of free trimmings to put up across our mantle. They make for some great decorations. So just a little tipped everybody. It also makes your house smell nice. Yeah, for for all those folks out there who you get the Christmas tree smell without having to pay that fresh

Chris Christmas tree price. Right, Yeah, you don't have to buy the pine saw. I'll get the real stuff. Yeah, exactly. Which, So, by the way, did I tell you what we did with our Christmas tree. I know we've talked about buying artificial trees in the past, and there's like a break break even point for us. It was like literally the second by the second year, because we got it on

sane um. But we'd gotten I guess it was maybe a nine ft tree at our old house because we had ten foot ceilings over there and our new place, our ceilings are only eight feet tall, and so we're just like, oh, dang it, like what are we gonna do? And well, you know what all we had to do was not use the bottom section of the Christmas tree there, so it comes in four sections in your brain. Yeah, so we we took that nine foot tree down from nine ft to seven ft. It fits perfectly in the

new place. So keep that in mind. If folks out there happened to be in the weird circumstance like we were, and your ceilings are getting lower you don't have to necessarily buy a brain new tree. Yeah all right, I like that. Good Another good money saving tips Christmas tree tips? Right? Well, why not? I mean this is the season, Like I have a feeling a lot of decorating is going to take places coming weekend. I read that December one is the day that most uh neighbors say, Okay, it's fine

to put up your Christmas lights. Now we would have done it sooner. We've been out of town for Thanksgiving and stuff like that. But we're definitely putting up our outdoor lights this weekend. So we're excited about that. But let's move on, Mat, Let's get to the stories we found interesting this week. It is our Friday flight flight and speaking of curbing consumption, well begin of capitalism. Jeff Bezos, the former CEO and and the guy who started Amazon.

He recently told CNN that Americans should consider postponing the purchase of bigger ticket items in their lives. It's kind of surprised to hear him say that, because his company thrives on people not postponing purchases, just going ahead and pulling the trigger. Anyway, Maybe now that he's uh no longer holds the title of CEO, he feels a little bit of freedom to more honest, be truthful, be honest

for folks. When being interviewed from his one of his massive yachts, this is what he said, But it turns out the folks didn't really listen to him. At least this past Black Friday. A record nine billion dollars was spent over that Thanksgiving holiday. But while there are certainly deals to be had, as retailers have had too much inventory, they've had to discount more. This is an instance where this advice from the former CEO of Amazon actually makes

some sense, right, terrible advice. Yeah, with with an uncertain economy ahead of us, we should all keep an eye on our spending this holiday season. I'd rather see folks take, like, you know, a year end bonus to the bank, then to the store, and to just be be prepared. Like we talked about on Wednesday, financial flexibility is important. The more of it that you can retain, the more solid

financial footing you're going to be in. Absolutely, and oftentimes that does mean having cash in the bank, right Like, So what's interesting is that one of the reasons all these companies are putting on all these sales is because they've got well, they've got a lot of inventory, right,

and so they've got too much surplus on hand. But companies are also looking to share up their cash positions, and so companies are looking ahead, they're forecasting, they're realizing that, you know what, things may not be looking so great.

And what's crazy is that what companies are doing and what we need to do as individuals, like that's basically at odds with each other direct So they're trying to unload all these goods and we're as consumers standing there looking at all these things go on sale, and it can be tempting to want to pounce on all of these deals, which is totally fine if there's something that you were already going to purchase, But we definitely don't want folks dipping into their their cash reserves, into their

emergency fund just to take advantage of a sale, because it's like, oh my gosh, these are killer sales, and ever seen sales like this before in my life. But you don't want to end up in a position where three six months from now, it's like, Okay, I've got all these goodies, but I don't have any cash and it looks like I'm about to get fired from right. That's not the position. Yeah, that we want to see

folks highly uncomfortable. Okay. So one of the ways though, that you can spend less this holiday season is by getting your stuff out of the dumpster. Does sound like something you would recommend? Uh? Not only is this something that I'm interested in, Joe, A lot of folks are interested in this. Uh. It's a kind of the latest

TikTok trend. The Times documented the rise and popularity of trash enthusiasts out there, and interestingly enough, some of these folks are finding some some cool stuff out there, man. And what's cool too, is that they are raising awareness about the fact that many companies they throw out this old merchandise that is still perfectly good, that's perfectly useful, tired, but they are like slashing it to make it unusable

with the coach. Like when one of like, yeah, so somebody had called out one of the premier handbag companies out there because they came across a bunch of beautiful bags and they were yeah, they were sliced up with the razor blade. And I think actually because of folks who took to social media. Companies like Coach are no

longer doing that. They're they're basically have committed themselves to a more responsible disposal of goods maybe that are either out of season or maybe they were returned, that kind of thing. Uh, And so that's definitely a good outcome from some of this awareness. But how do you get the best stuff if you are interested in, uh doing your own dumpster diving? Well, mass retailers like t J Max and Home Goods they are apparently some of the

best places to find items that are still useful. And so the question is like, should you actually start doing this? Should you start dumpster diving to save money and all of this? First of all, I don't. It kind of depends on like your ick factor, like what you're willing to put up with. But a lot of this depends to you and how much you value your time and just what kind of stuff you're likely going to be

able to snag. Obviously, don't go dumpster diving thinking that you're gonna find a Apple laptop or something like that that's brand new in the box. That's not going to happen. But there are certainly some some goodies out there to be found. Yeah, alright, My only dumpster diving experience comes

from back in the day, my buddy Travis. There was a former airline called air Tran and they ran this promotion at Wendy's where if you collected I think it was thirty two cups you got a free one way trip and sixty four you got a free round trip. And I don't know if there was a limit or not, but I distinctly remember Travis jumping into a dumpster behind the Wendy's in order to get these cups, and I

can't blame him, man. I think that's one of those things where that yeah, to be able to get a free, great deal, free flight just by getting some cups and guarantee there's like stacks of them in the trash. Maybe that's why air Trend didn't stick around. They were based here in Atlanta, where there were I remember flying with them back in the day, back like oh five in that period of time, their free flights to fast food lovers.

So maybe yeah, maybe so So Okay, one of the few times I remember doing some serious dumpster diving in college, we would we would go to the dorms and students who were moving out of the dorms. They had to be moved out by a certain date, right, they had to be completely moved out. And so these I mean, these kids would just take their lofts. These are built loss made a two by fours and whatnot, but they would just take them all. I mean, there's so much timber,

so much lumber. Uh, not just in the dumpster, but just completely surrounding it. And did we would just go over there, load those things up in the back of a friend's pickup shut and then take them back to a friend's apartment and we would resell some of those loss back to students the follow The following billion also set one aside for myself because me and some friends were moving into an apartment where we were sharing bedrooms.

And so, yeah, I slept in the loft that I found next to a dumpster after my freshman year in college. Like like, and you're worth the time and effort for being trash and then you're making money on the stuff that you found. I think that's that's smart. Well, and yeah, it just goes to show that dumpster diving sounds pretty icky, and most of the time it is, but there are ways at times to make it worth your while. I just like how it's we're they're destigmatizing it a little

bit for sure. Like I think there's a lot of folks who might feel that, oh, I would never do that, or even just seeing a curb alert. But even by folks doing something like this, now somebody else who read the story might think, well, there's some folks out there who are dumpster diving. I should be willing to at least take a look at some of these items on the side of the curb, get over at least a little bit of your tramaphobus exactly, and to save money.

But all right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about ad results. We just talked about Jeff Bezo a second ago. Let's talk about some issues that the company he started is having. And uh, Amazon, as it turns out, has an ad problem that is seemingly out of control. The Washington Post had a thorough article showing just how many ads you're getting when you do a typical Amazon search. And by the way, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post,

but he has no editorial control over this stuff. And I'm glad to see that Washington Post writers are still holding Amazon's feet to the fire. And what this author found was that on the first five screens of a search result, you'll see more than fifty of the space dedicated to paid results. The sponsored content you have to comb through basically at the top of the Amazon search results is astounding, and it's not always easy to decipher

and add from an organic search result. Like they're they're getting trickier and trickier, for sure, Like everybody knows the ones where it's like written in smaller type and it's like italics, it's like sponsored content or whatever, and it's got the little information dought or whatever. But I did not realize how how they're just embedding some of the some of the more of the the paid or recommended results further down as well, like it's in a different format.

And sometimes Amazon is like promoting a specific brand that pays them a lot of money, right, so they're saying, cool tide, you get the top spot when somebody googles huntry detergent because you pay us a certain amount of

hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Other times they're promoting their own brands, like the Amazon Basics or Amazon specific brands that they own, but it's getting more and more difficult to find the top results based on search relevancy, which is what Amazon kind of built their business around. So who just say this. You know, Amazon is not the devil or anything like that, but keep keep that in mind next time you're searching for things on the

Amazon site. It might be best to do your research elsewhere, even if you do end up buying on Amazon in the end. I just like I think sometimes we think of Amazon is a good search engine for finding the thing that we want. But when you realize that more than fifty of the searches for a lot of searches are turning up a bunch of ads, Like I don't know,

you might want to look elsewhere. It seems like Amazon is a little less reliable when it comes to like finding a new product or find the brand of a product that you should be purchasing, just because of like how spammy it's gotten. Yeah. I like the recommendation to to do your research elsewhere. Yeah, search whatever it is that you're looking to buy and search like wirecutter, or head over to consumer reports, but look Reddit, even like

there's some reviews on Reddit. Those are better places to look as opposed to wait, that's going straight to the Amazon app on your phone. Four and a half stars, but it's got three reviews, and but it's sponsored and all that stuff. Exactly. Yeah, Okay, so while we're talking about shopping, let's talk again about why buy Now, Pay Later is still awful. It turns out that buyers paid via by Now Pay Later quite a bit over a Black Friday. It actually jumped by sixty eight percent, according

to market Watch, which is a significant increase. And you know, we often talk about mindful spending, and so this is just another reminder to continue being careful this holiday season when it comes to racking up debts, which is what we don't want you to do. Uh, As you are looking to give gifts to those who you love and care about, don't buy stuff that you can't afford on on on a credit card or or via buy now, Pay Later. When you're doing that, you're just kicking the

can down the road. You're creating this debt obligation that's going to be tough to to stomach come January or you know, June July of next year. That yeah, and you know it's only the beginning of December as well. And so keep in mind you still have time to have a conversation with friends and relatives about gift giving expectations. This doesn't necessarily have to be a trend that continues where every year everybody always is like slowly over time

increasing that maximum spend amount. But having that conversation is just a great way to keep that gift giving from getting out of control. And I think you can be honest Matt that, hey, guess what it's things are type financially for me right now, I don't think I can participate in at least this in this part of the gift giving that our family traditionally does. And because I think people will understand, they would rather so you be financially healthy than uh than have you racking up debt

to buy gifts for them like that. That's not your loving family does not want that for you, I guarantee it. And let's talk about the job market for just a second. Or they do want that for you, maybe they don't love you. You need a new family. It's time to find a new family this Christmas. But let's talk about the job market, because whether you're looking to find another job or you just want some part time holiday work.

Some employers are offering bonuses still for for joining their team right now, like the labor market, matt still remains fairly hot. Like we haven't seen it cool off as much as it looked like it would at this point. And Amazon it might not be as good for users because of the abundance of ads, but they are offering a minimum starting salary of eighteen dollars an hour and up to a three thousand dollars sign on bonus for

folks who are applying for their their holiday work. We say, read the fine print and make sure you know how long you've got to stick around, and make sure that working in an Amazon warehouse is something you can stomach. Sure, I'm not sure if people still left it was the truck driver's right that to pee in bottles, But like, I'm not sure, I've not heard great things about the

working conditions there, But I don't know. A hefty bonus might just push you in that direct action, and you know, you might find other employers out there willing to offer better benefits or meaningful sign up bonuses because there's just more competition out there. There aren't enough workers to fill the jobs. That's right, and Of course, most of those jobs don't require a degree, and the journal had an interesting article about the importance, or actually the lack thereof,

of a college education. This past week, a bunch of major companies out there are lowering the bar when it comes to degree requirements for certain positions for certain jobs. Companies like Delta, Google, and IBM, they are requiring a college degree for more positions that they need filled. Uh and beyond private companies as well. Some states like Maryland, actually they have stopped requiring degrees for more jobs that they have available as well. There's a good quote this.

A VP over at Walmart was quoted as saying, the company's goal is to shift the focus from the way someone got their skills, which is the degree, to what skills they do have. Is awesome, man. I love this because we talked about this a decent bit here on the show College. It still makes sense for a whole bunch of young folks out there, but it is not necessarily a slam dunk decision because the cost and the

value proposition are key to determining your choice. Are They're so important when it comes to deciding if college is going to be right for an individual we've actually were we've been hiring a few folks lately to to do some work for us on the back end here on the podcast. And honestly, I don't even know if they have a college degree or not. We didn't ask, but we didn't even ask. We we don't care. We've cared

about the skills they've got. This just like yeah, and and hopefully this is a trend that continues because we like the direction this is going. We want folks. There's certainly something to be said when it comes to being well educated right for the sake of one's own growth.

But the requirement, the mandatory nature of having to go to a higher education uh and potentially pay just out the nose for a degree that they're not excited about getting just to be able to get some sort of entry level job is not something that that we're excited about a lot of the jobs that we're talking about here.

That these companies and that these states are now saying, you don't need a college degree for our our positions that shouldn't have required a degree in the first place, and so it's good to see them walking that back and saying, listen, part of it is the hot labor market that we're talking about, Matt, that they're still they want to open up to a broader spectrum of potential employees because it's just hard to find the right people.

And so if you can listen to the requirements and still find the person that you need, but just to open it up to a broader range of applicants, I think it makes a lot of sense. But you we've got several other stories that we're gonna get to during our Friday flight today, including we're gonna we're gonna talk about the housing health scape. We've got a few stories to talk about there and more right after this. All right, we are back. Let's keep this Friday flight going, Matt.

Let get to the ludicrous headline of the week. And it just seems like today's episode there's a theme for me, which is bashing all the major tech platforms. And sorry in advance all you billionaire owners of these companies, but let's take a couple more to task. We've already kind of given Amazon some flak. We're gonna give Google some here in a second. We could even throw Apple into the mix as way. Maybe we will. Do they care about free speech or not? I don't know. I don't know.

I do. Elon must does make a point though on the thirty percent vig they take from it's it's a problem. I think it's a problem. But even though in court it's it was found out that that's an okay practice for Apple to participate in. But I digress. But let's not go there. Let's let's move on and let's let's smack Facebook around for a second. Because listener Becca, she shared an article from pro Publica in the Facebook group.

The title reads, tax filing websites have been sending users financial information to Facebook and that struck me as something that was potentially egregious or wrong. And it turns out that the big players in the tax ailing business H and R, Block, tax Act, and tax Layer have been sending sensitive personal data to Facebook about their customers, and that's messed up. That info often included the income of that customer, their refund amount, their filing status, sometimes phone numbers,

and more. And so that information was being sent over even if you don't have an account with Facebook, which is amazing They're giving Facebook this information even though you don't have a relationship with Facebook. But Facebook like, well' take that data sure, and so this info then, of course allows Facebook to better target AD two users. And it looks like a lot of these companies they're stopping

this practice based on this reporting. Not all of them, though I don't think have have said that they are. But this is a violation of consumer privacy and it never should have happened in the first place. Matt reading that, I was like, how how does this stuff happen? How did he messed up? How do people think this is okay?

It's not It's not okay? Uh? And meta they were Actually they were fined tune or seventy five million dollars by the EU for violating some privacy laws thanks to a data that made a lot of personal user data public. So this is just another reason to freeze your credit, folks. We've got an article up on the site that we can link to that shows you how easy it is. It does not take very long at all. And we we also want you to consider carefully which companies you

choose to do business with. And so to round things out, to throw one more tech company under the bus, Google they agreed to a settlement with forty states over the collection of user location data that they agreed to stop collecting, and so this has kept collecting it even though users had collicked no, we don't want you to collect this date on us, and they were like, well, we'll sneakily

just do it behind the scenes. Yeah, And honestly, like I, I don't think it'd be a bad thing to see these fines get even more severe to help keep the tech companies accountable, to keep them in check. Because you know these these numbers, they sound pretty high, right, we just mentioned that two seventy five million dollar fine against Facebook. Well here's the thing, that's actually less money than they make in a single day. So like, these truly aren't large,

massive fines. It kind of makes me get back to like a flick on the wrist and like Kim Kardashian when she got fined for not disclosing her crypto holdings or whatever, like these amounts. Like, yes, to us normal people, it sounds like a ton of money, But to the uber elites, celebrities out there, and definitely to these massive tech companies, it is nothing. Yes, that is true, and so yeah, the fines s need to go up in

order to incentivize good behavior and punish bad behavior. So that we consumers that we are stuff is another're floating around our phone numbers and our refund amounts, and that we're not being sold every which way right and left to whatever to the highest bidder. Um. But let's talk about another company, Matt doing something that you know borders

on ludicrous. This isn't a tech company, but Mercedes announced this week that if you if you drive a new Mercedes e V electric vehicle, you're gonna have to pay an extra a year for a subscription if you want to be able to drive it fast. And this is completely insane, honestly. Yeah, this also could have been a

ludicrous headline Evil week for sure. Yea. The Drive reports that in order to enjoy the quicker acceleration that these cars are capable of, you're gonna have to fork over big bucks luxury car companies they've been dipping their toes into the subscription space already right, hoping to make recurring revenue off their customers. Like BMW Matt, We've talked about them charging a monthly fee for heated seats, for access

to the hardware that's already installed in your car. Yeah, you're gonna have to pay, You don't have to pay on a monthly basis for that. One of the same thing is true of Mercedes. If you want to be able to, if you want your car to accelerate more quickly, paying them twelve bucks a year to do so sounds ridiculous.

We think it sucks because you're forking out a ton of money already for a nice car, for a luxury car in this case, And to me, this would be a deal killer for sure, Like there's just on the principle of the thing, and so I don't know. Fortunately for us, I guess our ancient minivans don't have a paywall in order to achieve max feed of eight. So on a on a related note, did we talk about me renting a Ford Explore a couple weeks ago? So

that was took a trip um out of town. I was actually up in Michigan and it was freezing up there, and the car or it was the Ford Explore that we rented. It was a newer Ford Explorer and it came with heated steering wheels. And it's just one of those things where you see these nice, nicer features being offered by cars that aren't even necessarily luxury, and you think, who the heck needs that? But I will say if we lived in a cold, colder climate, I would totally

be splurging for the heated steering wheel. I've never experienced something like that before, but I was like, oh, this is this is real nice. When I had the Nissan Leaf running, the actual heater would deteriorate the battery so quickly. Yeah, but it had heated season hearing, heated steering wheels, so that you had that, I would just put on those two and it would help so much. We don't need to warm the rest of the family, just just he

has the driver. All the seats were actually heated, even the rear seats, so oh no way, Yeah, that's crazy. It was a nice little park. That's fancy because I just think they know. Yeah, that's another that is one of the problems with evs. When you turn on the air conditioning or the heater to control zapps the battery, it does in a big way. But yeah, hopefully Mercedes will rethink their devious ways and not chargiculous to access the full abilities of the car. I kind of get it.

With the Tesla autonomous driving feature, I feel like that's something a little bit different but this is actual hardware that we're oftentimes talking about here. That's super ridiculous. Yeah for sure. All right, let's talk about housing for a second, the housing hellscape, and maybe just some of the latest on when it comes to home prizes and the housing market in general, because there have been actually a few

headlines and I thought were super intense this week. Axios reported that a collapse they use that word in home prices is coming down the pike. The Atlantic had a piece telling folks that they should wait to buy a home. They're basically, nah, you shouldn't buy home right now. It's not a good idea. And to me, those are like decently provocative assertions that it collapses coming, that people should

completely avoid buying housing. So what's the truth when it comes to the near term future of the housing market. It's tough to say, right, But one of the items that was touted as a reason to hold off on buying a home in that Atlantic piece that I mentioned is a lack of inventory that's on the market. There aren't many homes available for sale, and so that's keeping

prices up. But it's interesting to me that that was mentioned as one of the reasons because a lack of home supply in general is one of the reasons that you and I think that there's unlikely to be a home price collapse, right, that's being predicted, And how low is this supply, Well, there are different estimates on that front from different organizations, but we we could truly stand to see millions more homes and apartments being built across

the country. The truth is building has not kept up with growth, and this supply shortage it can't be fixed overnight. So I guess when I see headlines and predictions of collapse, it seems to fly in the face of other information that we have, which might suggest actually the opposite, right that home prices aren't going to collapse, but might actually remain steadier than a lot of folks think. Yeah, man,

that supply shortage. That is a major reason that we find it difficult to foresee home prices cratering in a major way, especially if interest rate hikes calmed down. In mortgage rad's chill out just a little bit. That's a huge part of the reason. By the way, we're seeing

like a freeze basically for buyers and sellers. Is morge he wants to buy a new home or move out of a home where they have a low rate locked in, although a correction is still definitely possible, and like, honestly, man, it's just a weird time to be a home buyer right um. The future is really uncertain right now again, I mean the rapid rise in interest rates basically doubling in the past eight months, that has just shocked the system as the overall cost of buying a home have skyrocketed,

and so we can't predict the future. But the keys to successfully buying a home in this market are are having your own personal finances in solid shape and that's something that you have control over, and having a longer timeline when it comes to owning that home in order

to make up for a potential housing market slump. Typically, I think like we would always say that you want to hang onto your home for probably about five years in order to make sure that you are able to write out any fluctuations in the market to be able to recoup the costs associated with purchasing and selling a home.

But given where things are now like, we're looking at even closer to seven years in order to play it on the safe side, basically in order to write out any potential dips in the market as well as those transaction costs. A decade would be even better, right, But for a lot of folks, Yeah, that five years just isn't good enough anymore. Not when not when we could see a correction, right even though the collapse, I think it's oversold. I don't see that coming. Um, But you

never know. You also never know because there are so many factors that combine to make up the housing market. It's really it's just really hard to predict. Um. But yeah, speaking of homes now, we talked about he locks for just a second on Wednesday's episode Home Equity Lines of Credit when we talked about the benefits of being financially flexible. And this might sound weird, but we would say that having a helock is great, but using it isn't, which I know is just kind of a goofy thing to say.

But the stats show that more folks are opening up lines of credit against their home right now, and more folks are also tapping those helocks that they have, according to recent stats from Adam Data Solutions. And you know, with the average helock rate being almost eight percent at this point, is rates have picked up quite a bit, borrowing against your home's equity becomes even more precarious, so we would say be careful before you open a helock

and start borrowing from it. The biggest downside of having helock and pulling money out is that if you aren't able to pay back that money, you're putting your home at risk. Right Unlike a credit card, which is unsecured debt, this helock is secured debt, and it could cost you your house. You could cost you your home if you have trouble making payments over an extended period of time.

But having access to a helock, we would say provides additional financial backstop in addition to your emergency fund, which is again something we talked about recently, But be prudent in how you use it. I know it's weird to tell people, yeah, you should get one of these, but

don't want ever use it. And it's it's kind of like having credit available to you, right, Like like you want to have large lines of money, like like with a credit card available to you, but it doesn't it doesn't mean you want to tick up more than that thirty percent utilization rest right, Like you want to have that available to you, but don't necessarily want to use it, and you don't want to use it if you can't pay it off on time and in full every month either.

Like yeah, And it makes sense that more folks are doing this, right as we've seen home equity shoot through the roof over the past to three years. There's folks and they're realizing that they're sitting on a lot of cash that's tied up into their home. And so I get the temptation, I get the desire to do this, and it can provide a nice backstop, but we just don't want folks treating their homes like a t m S where they're just drawing down that cash, whether they're

pulling that money out. We want you, like Joel said, be prudent, but we wanted to do remind folks as well, don't forget to enter into when that six hundred dollars. All you have to do is be a subscriber to the How the Money newsletter, and again you can subscribe over at how the Money dot com. There's always money in the newsletter. Mat Nice arrested development. Speaking of housing and development, it pays to be It pays to be

a hout of money Newsletters subscriber. It does, but that is gonna be it for this episode, Joel, until next time. Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,