Welcome to How the Money.
I'm Joel and I am Matt.
Today we're talking about exorbitant ev charging, interminable training, and being forced to sell. That's right. This is our.
Friday flight, Joel.
This is our weekly roundup of the most relevant news stories out there, how they're going to impact your money, and what it is.
That you should be doing about it.
Yeah, and the man, there's a lot of stuff in the news. We're talking about the stuff that partakes your.
Money right and specifically the relevant items because there's a whole lot out there that it doesn't really matter.
But uh yeah, or there's just a lot of stuff that matters, but like we don't talk about it because it's just.
On our radar, not in our field. Joel actually had a quick I wanted to get your opinion. What do you think about setting out milk and cookies not for Santa, but for the FedEx ups, Amazon Prime package deliverers out there. All those folks think you're on the right path, you know the but I'm talking about like this a junk milk out there for real, not like literal milk cookies. I'm talking like snacks out there for the folks who are working hard this season.
I dig this.
So I didn't even know this was a thing until some of my friends had, Like a I walked up to their house to snag my daughter who was hanging and playing with their daughter, and I saw this big snack pack of goodies for and it was like a little sign for delivery drivers, Hey take something, And I was like, this is brilliant. Why have I not done this? So I'm thinking of an institute that you think?
So I think.
So I feel like it's I think it makes sense for folks who do a whole lot of ordering. It's almost like a confession that like, yes, we live online and we purchased all of our stuff from the internet as a post, which is fine, like especially if you're looking.
For the best deals and and all that. But I don't know.
They also hate going into stores, which yeah, I.
Do not like going into the stores, but like, I guess it's the snack part of it that also bothers me, because like I'm not a big fan of snacking throughout the day. And food is it just food that's just out there for how long?
How long is that food out there just like forever?
No, just for I think especially during this time of year. Think about how hard those delivery drivers are working. They're like breaking their backs to deliver packages. People probably yes, and so they probably. I think if it was me, if I was working for FedEx and I went up on that porch and I saw, you know, not the healthiest snacking the world, some pringles or something like that, but I would probably be like, oh, man, this is
really cool. Even if I didn't end up taking it because I wasn't my jam, I would feel like I was thought of.
Yeah, I wish there was another way to show the appreciation. I guess that's it because I think about what I if I was in their position, would I rather be snacking on pringles and slim gyms all day or.
Like into a slim jam man they get.
You get a lunch break and the ability to dig into some leftovers.
It's hard to snack. I don't know.
Now, I'm trying to picture what life is like actually driving around these trucks, and I don't know, Like, I'm sure by law they are required to have a lunch break, but I guarantee there's a lot of folks out there where their hours are pushing into the mandated lunch break.
Well, some of these people are contractors and they there's probably no law. They're probably making their own hours, and they're just hustling, and they're hustling and so maybe that, yep, does provide a little bit of sustenance.
But it almost makes me want to leave a tip out there though, like actual money as opposed to which.
Is Food's cool idea too, if you want to go that route, it's just harder to police that.
Yeah, So I don't know.
I think there are ways that we can this time of year be thoughtful show appreciation. I mean it makes me think I love that front of the show. Andy Hill, who has the website podcast Marriage, Kids and Money. We've had him on the show before and he does this thing called Big Tip Tuesday, and he'll tip the guy who cuts his hair fifty bucks, or he goes out to eat at a place and that one of his favorite places, and he'll tip far above and beyond, dramatically
above and beyond what he normally does. And so I just think, like that's whether we're giving to charities, that's a great thing to do with money that we have, but also like tipping and seeing the people who the service people in our lives who are doing so much for us, but it goes unrecognized so much of the time. Yeah, that's probably a good thing to keep in mind this time here.
And the problem is with the delivery is oftentimes you're not there, so you don't I wouldn't have the ability to actually tip them, and it's like, all right, just take one dollar. You don't like leave a bucket of dollars there. That's not gonna happen. I will say, speaking of delivery trucks, I'm seeing more and more of the Rivian Amazon vans, which are amazing. And on that note, one of the coolest things about going from gas to electric is the money that you get to save on gasoline.
Depending on how much you drive, you can truly save hundreds of dollars a month. But specifically where you charge with an EV that matters a ton. The website Autotopian they had an article about just how expensive it can be, and in their story they charged a Rivian R one s but of course this applies to other evs as well. Sorry, my dream vehicle, but if you end up at the wrong charging station, you are going to pay a ton more.
You might be paying upwards of forty cents, and then I saw actually later in the story, I think in one instance out in California, somewhere in LA he was paying sixty six cents per kill a what hour to fill up his EV depending on the public charging station that you go to. He crunched the numbers into the math on the forty cents per kill kill a what hour, and that equates to only getting nineteen miles per gallon in a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle, which isn't great.
There's a whole lot of vehicles out there that can get much higher than that, and so of course charging at home most of the time, that is going to be crucial if you want to actually save money by owning and driving and electric vehicle. But still, I think EV's they can be fun to drive, They can make a ton of sense for a decent chunk of the population. You just got to make sure you're on that super off peak hour plan where you're paying two cents. It's just mind blowing, like that's so where.
We are copasically sixty six cents if you're at the wrong charting.
Station, or or three times that.
Yeah, there is such a market difference in the like, is there anything that has that wide of a disparity between like the most affordable and the most expensive?
I think about that.
I think there is, for like, think about bottle water. Whatch you pay when you buy a forty eight pack at Costco or something you're talking about less than twenty cents or even more affordable just it coming out of your tap, right, But I'm just saying, yeah, exactly. Like the equivalent is again, you going back home filling up
your water bottle at home? How much are you paying for that as opposed to the glass bottle of you just get a bottle the nicest glacier water that you can afford, like a baseball game or something like that, think about how much it costs. Yeah, the price disparity depending on where you get the thing matters so much.
And so if you're going to be filling up your ev with electricity on the go most of the time, it's not going to save you nearly as much money as you think a huge part of the savings that you that accrues to you is if you charge more at home. Makes me think one more thing, Matt, that I had a Nissan Leaf for six years that got the range was terrible. I still charge it at home
ninety plus percent of the time. It went a solid fifteen miles, right, And I think everybody people when they get an EV, they think, oh, I need a level two charger, And a level two charger can be nice, but I think it's also not a necessity. So this thing's ten charge being run like five or six hundred bucks plus you might have to pay someone to install
it for you. Well, you can literally trickle charge from the three prong outlet in your garage or on the side of your house, and you might find that it's unnecessary to pay for that too. So it's true. Just think about that if you're thinking about upgrading to an electric vehicle. They're great, but charging at home makes a big difference.
I should have been running for Autotopian or whatever we talked about on the show. How when we rented when Kit and I rented at Tesla a couple of years ago out in Colorado. Yeah, when we flew out there and I did the math of the total that we spent with the miles that we drove that we drove and the average cost per gallon out there in Colorado
and it was roughly equivalent. Yeah, that's because I was on the Tesla superchargers, which, yeah, I don't think I was paying nearly at the forty four or sixty six cents per kill a lot hour. But yeah, like when you do the math, it's easy to see how how does you can potentially end up paying.
I went on the road trip, the backpacking trip with a buddy on the West Coast earlier this year, and that, yeah, filling up at the Tesla charging stations was expensive. Like it's still cheaper in California to do that than to go to the gas station, but it's not that much cheaper, whereas if you charge at home it is.
That's the one downside to evs.
Yeah, when you're not driving your car, mat walking, we've always suggested it given me a great way to get rid your bike. Riding your bike to either way, whatever your preference, riding your bikes can be faster.
Episode number one right there, right out of money.
We've been talking about it for a long time, and that's especially true right when you're taking trips in that one, two or three mile range. But it turns out to migrate shock at least most folks they actually don't want
to live in a walkable neighborhood. There was some new research from Pew which found that fifty seven percent of folks prefer to live in it in the suburban sprawl right, which basically means that you need to get into a car to do anything, versus living in a neighborhood that has walkable amenities like being able to walk to your kids' school, walking to a store or a restaurant that you care about.
Walkable neighborhoods are actually also more expensive to live in when you look at the numbers, largely because there are fewer of them. But if you live in a walkable area, it might allow you to ditch a car, making that trade off far less financially harmful.
That's true.
I was just surprised, I guess, because to me it seems so idyllic, and I have always prioritized living in walkable areas, whether it's urban or suburban. And I know that it's it's not always easy to pull that off, but I don't know. For me, it's a quality of life standpoint. I would rather live in a smaller house and live somewhere that's walkable.
See, that's the problem.
Is that people's that's the challenge is to say, how do I actually need all of this additional square footage? Because it's not that folks preferred to not live in a walkable neighborhood. It's that they preferred to have a little bit more space over being able to live in the walkable neighborhood. And so like that is like, that's where the bottleneck is. Is like, Okay, you say you need this more space because it's more affordable, But do
you actually need more space? Could you get by in a smaller place perhaps, and then you are somewhere where that is walkable and it's not costing you more, yeah than being out in the burbs.
You know, they say that cotton is the fabric of our lives. Matt, I think these are like the decisions that make up our lives. And the more we can live in a place that is a little more walkable, man, the way our lives look and what our days look like. The choices that we make tend to shift when we live in a place that's more walkable and bikable. And so yeah, don't think of it maybe just in terms of dollars and cents, although that's a really important part
of the equation. But I think again, there are other potential ways to save money if you live in a more walkable place. Not for everyone, but I think I'm going to advocate it, probably till the day I die.
It's true, all.
Right, Coffee prices they continue to go up quickly. They have risen now to a forty seven year high. This is according to Semaphore extreme weather in Vietnam and Brizi Zill Brizil specifically where they had droughts and then a whole lot of rain, which I guess isn't.
Good for the coffe.
Rain. Yeah, we like washed a lot of that away. That had a lot to do with that. And you know, we're not the don't ever drink coffee out dudes. But as the price for your favorite beverage as it goes up, which it already has been and it's likely going to continue to, I think you might want to consider pivoting
making more coffee at home. We're huge fans of that, because even though your one pound bag of coffee might also cost more, it's going to be vastly more affordable to diy your own coffee as opposed to going out and On that note, I'm proud to say that I recently was at Whole Foods. Recently we've been buying our fancy coffees, specifically Intelligentsia and counterculture. Those are two good ones. And last time I was there, they were on drastic sale.
There you go, and so normally these these little bags of coffee and they go for like over sixteen bucks, Joel, they were like down to eleven dollars. How many would you have purchased if you saw a discount like that, I'm gonna say four about six wow, because I'm addicted to caffeine.
I was gonna say our favorite beverage, bounce on man. People might assume our favorite beverage is beer o contreier coffee. It's more of a if I had to give one or the other up, I would give up beer over coffee.
I would.
We are drinking less these days, drink less beer. It's just good for your health, and coffee makes you a little more productive. But the extent of that discount had to do with the fact that we were Amazon Prime members, and you know, Well almost said Wells Fargo Whole Foods same abbreviation, so they have that partnership with Amazon, and you have to make sure to scan by Amazon.
Oh yeah, that's right. I forget about that.
But if you go to the Amazon app and swipe over to the in store purchase, I didn't realize that there is an actual item that you select and then you can scan the QR code. It took me a second to figure that out because I never go to Whole Foods, but we've only recently started going there.
The Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods has been so good for pricing at Whole Foods. And I don't shop at Whole Foods almost ever, but I've been getting pizza there more often, and they've got these Friday night pizza deal let's talked about like a cheese piece of game. If you sign in or whatever, make sure to get your Amazon Prime discount. And even though I don't chop in Whole Foods much, I'm a fan. We you and I are fans of John mackew started Whole Foods. We interviewed
him I don't know what, like six months ago. We'll link to that one in the show notes. Another price increase, Matt that happened just this week. YouTube tv raised its price by fourteen percent from seventy three bucks a month to eighty three dollars a month. Nobody has really been able to figure out how to make live TV work and make it less expensive.
Sports are a lot of money.
Sports are the main reason, the main culprit behind that, and now live sports is disseminating essentially to all the other streaming platforms too. It's in bits and chunks. So I guess the best recipe to save money on like streaming TV like that is to just not care about live TV, stop watching sports because less that's that's really the thing that's going to like smack you around from a pricing perspective.
So I will say I've recently changed my tune on you know how You to Be is in particular when it comes to the ad breaks across all the different platforms. How there's the more affordable version as long as it's as long as you can you can.
Get hit with the ad breaks.
Well, I still hate it personally, Like if you're watching a movie, Man, I hate it if your movie is broken up by stupid commercials.
It just totally like ruins it.
But I'm more I don't think it ruins it, but it spoils it a little bit, but I am more open to it because, like I guess one of the arguments prior was I didn't like the fact that the kids were sitting there and they're just like, oh, they're getting they're getting.
Brainwashed by the different ads.
But you know what, I think, I've I'm starting to change my tune on that because when our kids like launch out and start their own lives, they're going to be exposed to advertising. I'm like, man, I grew up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons and TGIF on Fridays in the evening, watching Family Matters by step Yeah, yeah, that's that's the
Panga and Corey Corey Matthews. But there's almost a sense of like inoculation and getting exposed to advertising that helps them, I think, to be like well adjusted out in the world. So all that to say, I've kind of changed my tune a little bit when it comes to kids and advertising specifically.
Forcibly, make your children look at all the billboards as you're but.
Like, obviously they see those out there.
But I'm surprised. I'm surprised that you say that.
Culture like there's a certain amount of things that they just learn from watching advertisements on TV, and they're only getting more and more and more sophisticated, like TV ads are probably the least nefarious of the types of advertising that they're going to be exposed to, so may as well kind of get their advertising booster shot a little bit while they're at home.
All the data I've seen too points that the streaming providers want you to be on the ad supported version because they make more money from that you're paying us. As opposed, they make more because the ads combined with what you're paying means they're making more than the non ads supported I believe it.
Joel the Wall Street Journal, they had an article about the uptick in market timing. Their thesis is that COVID that fundamentally changed the way that many folks approach their investments. Folks are treading more frequently and more inefficiently. Were of course, they're attempting to juice their returns right, They're attempting to divine where the market is headed, but then they end
up costing themselves dearly. The author of the article there believed that this ill advised strategy has led to returns that are greater than half a percent lower for those investors than the otherwise would have been, which doesn't sound awful, but it is because like those less robust returns, they add up significantly over time, Like we're talking about, even with just maxing out an IRA over the course of thirty years a one percent difference, you're looking at over
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in returns at the end of that period. So just goes to show that normal humans, as it turns out, that we're not great active investors, which is why setting it and forgetting it the automatic dollar cost averaging approach and paying less attention to media and immediate results that that is so crucial. Getting that money in the market and invested is far more important than trying to get it in at the
exact right moments. It's not about timing the market. It's about time in the market.
Well, then you talk about the fee essentially that's being charged. This is more of like a self imposed stupid fee though than it is a fee that an advisor's charging and the advisor gives you like, oh man, you might be costing yourself a quarter of a million dollars in
returns because of this self imposed fee. At least if you hire an advisor, you're getting some sort of you're getting something for your money, whereas this it's it's literally you trying to create a superior return and what you're doing is you're getting inferior results. There's one thing that could maybe make this phenomena of tinkering with your portfolio worse, and that's access to trading in the stock market twenty
four to seven, all day, every day. Right now. The timeframe is nine thirty to four right that's Monday through Friday. That's been the hours for like a long time. But Robin Hood and Interactive Brokers to different broker's firms, they added twenty four to seven trading of individual stocks last year, and then other companies like Schwab, they're kind of attempting to mimic these startups. They want their traders, their customers to have access to the same And I don't know,
we might be yelling into the void here. I don't think the genie's going back into the bottle and training has gotten easier. I think it's also gotten more enticing, and let's say we make it more frequent as well. The ability to trade whenever you want. I just don't see that as a good thing for individual investors. I mean, we think the right thing to do is to avoid all the bells and whistles when it comes to investing.
No need to stay up late to trade based on breaking news and how you think that's going to impact a specific company or sector. If you're investing for the long haul, did just the auto dollar cost averaging, it still makes sense. So no matter whether these companies, these brokers firms say you can trade whatever you want, you can say, ah, I don't care, I'm just not interested in.
Yes, that's right.
It makes me think of that study I forget who it was where broker's looked at the accounts owned by people who had died and those accounts actually were the ones that performed the best because they weren't being Teamcurtains right.
And in addition to.
That, investors that they're not even doing some of the most basic things well like using their health savings accounts properly. And new stats out there show that HSA users that they're not investing inside of their accounts. Only a fifth are not only funding their HSA but actually investing those dollars for their future. And we've talked about HSA's a good bit here on the show. It's not right for
everyone out there. For some folks utilizing the HSA to pay for their medical costs that year, that is how they need to be using it, but it's not the most optimized and ideal way of doing it. Because if you can fund your current health care needs with cash that you have on hand, well, that's going to allow those tax exempt dollars there within the HSA to grow
for your future in a significant way. But as more and more folks get HSA's which is good, there's still going to be more work to be done to encourage folks to lever them properly for retirement, especially if you are looking for a way to retire early and tap some of your retirement accounts in a way that's not gonna that's not gonna leave you paying an additional ten percent because you're looking to withdraw your funds early.
Yeah.
Yeah, And as we say that, AHSA is the only account that we know of that essentially or that in existence that allows you to forego paying tax on money that goes into that account altogether, Like you never pay the tax man on HSA dollars, which is cool. But the key is growing those dollars by investing them. All Right, man, We've got more to get to on this episode, including a retirement benefit for student loan borrowers. Will get to that and more right after this. All right, buddy, we are.
Back from the break. The Friday flight continues.
Now it is time for the ludicrous headline of the week, which is from USA today. The headline reads, Grandpa, cut up that card hard. Share of retirees have credit card debts. This is disheartening, Joel. The share of older Americans who
are clinging on to debt, it continues to rise. There is new research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, and they found that six and ten retirees have some form of debt, and of those folks, the majority are still hanging on to their credit cards and the debt and the payments that go along with that specifically, which is like there's a big difference between that and let's say, low interest mortgage debt. If that was the case, Like, if you know you're hanging onto a three and a
half percent mortgage, I'm fine with that. I'm cool with the idea of keeping that around. But to have credit card debt, especially in your retirement years. That is a massive problem. And so this is a quick little story, just quick little PSA for folks, especially for folks out there who.
Have parents who might be in a situation like this.
Mm hmm, yeah, I would maybe proud and ask, or if you're assuming that they do, or if you've heard them mention it, talk about the importance of paying it off. You don't want to lecture your parents, right, that's never a good tactic to take. But ensuring that your parents don't have loads of credit card debt or have access to the help they need if they do, is important. But man, it's not not just old people. So I think something like fifty percent of American households have recurring
credit card debt in their lives. And while at Hub just released new dispearting figures on the overall debt load that we have in this country, it turns out that the average household credit card debt has surpassed ten thousand bucks. That's a scary amount of money to have in credit card debt.
I have figures, man, Yeah I don't like it.
And the new record, man, we passed a trillion dollars in overall credit card debt not all that long ago, and now we're at one point three trillion, so it just kind of continues to grow and fester and not going to beat a dead horse. But credit card interest rates are awful. They have not gotten much better as rate cuts have started. Credit Cards can be a great tool, we say this all the time if you use them wisely, but you can ruin your finances if you don't.
Yeah, So for listen out there keeping score. We're still
not fans of Ticketmaster Sherwood News. They detail the many ways that I did not know this, but essentially they own many other businesses that feed into the main ticketing business that you think of when you think of Ticketmaster, and that helps to boost the profits at the expense of their patrons and so uh so when it comes to these these shows, basically the ticketing only makes up a small percentage of their overall revenue, think which they.
Can claim and make it sound like, oh, we're not bad, look at we only make this much money.
From ticket but they're making massive markups on the different parking companies that they own, or like if you go to a show and they've got lawn chair rentals booze trucks things like that. Maybe you're not even a fan of Booze my boos. You mean like forty dollars, margree, if you want to spend that money, that's told that that's on you. But what we're highlighting here is that they have their fingers in all of these different pots and not even I was gonna say not even Booze.
Liquid Death is like the face is the fancy water Like guess who owns the dollars stake in Liquid Death Live Nation charging stations if your phone dies at the show that you can go to and I need to quick charge, Yeah, they own a stake in those companies as well. And the margins on those products and those what seem like independent companies can be fifty percent or more and these prices that they charge are astronomical, and it is a part of the reason that two factions
of the federal government are going after Live Nation. Right now, I gets similar to the airlines we talked about last week, right, like you don't have to partake in most of these different upgrades, but still our gripe is with the monopolistic stranglehold right because it's almost like if you go to our restaurant and you're saying, oh, all these menu items
are so expensive. Okay, well, you don't have to buy those menu items, right, But it's as if Live Nation and Ticketmaster, it's as if they're the only restaurant in town. Like the big difference is that you can go to another restaurant. But when it comes to these venues, these artists, they don't have much choice when it comes to being able to put on a show, and they have to. There is no other choice, and that's where there's a break down in the competition that's out there.
Well, then Live Nation is using different incentives to try to push you towards buying the things inside of the concert venue. So for instance, hey, for a while out you could have brought your own chair in, but now that's disallowed because they have an incentive to promote you renting one of their lawn chairs that's like twenty bucks
for the evening or something like that. So there are all these things that just make your concert going experience so much worse, and so much of it comes down to the fact that there's nobody else in the game except for Live Nation. Now let's talk about real estate for a second. Real estate investors are starting to do what they always want to avoid. It's happening in higher numbers right now. And the thing that every real estate investor doesn't want to do is to sell, especially in
a time where they're forced to sell. And the Wall Street Journal profiled some titans in the real estate industry who have been forced to sell because of kind of new economic realities in the housing market, particularly in the office market, and work from home has kind of torched their ability to make money right now. That's the toughest
part of the housing sector these days. And in other real estate sectors, investors have been forced to sell too because they were over leveraged, or maybe because they made rosy assumptions that didn't turn out to be true, or because they're financing wasn't as good as they thought it was. Real estate can be a great investment, but market dynamics or even just specific personal issues can lead to hard
times as a real estate investor. And so what we have always said and what we'll continue to say is if you opt to invest in real estate, being forced to sell is one of the worst outcomes. And predicting the pandemic that was impossible predicting kind of the trend to work from home. That was also going to be an impossible thing to do, right, You can't. Nobody had that kind of foresight. But having the know how and the financial reserves to back you up if your investment
falls on hard times. Let's say, if rents actually declined year over year for multiple years on end, or you have vake and see in a rental property that you own for longer than you assumed. Right, that is crucial to lasting over the long term. You got to have the financial backup. You can't just become a real estate investor with no money down and no money in reserves like that. That puts you you're living on the razor's edge if that's the route you take.
So the recipe for disaster.
And then on top of the home price growth is slowing and if you were counting on that explosive growth that we have seen over the past few years, I think you're going to be let down. And on a related note, friend of the show, Nick Midjulie, he recently predicted and it's always fun to see folks predict stuff.
Because we'll see if you're right.
Yeah, but he predicted that that us home prices that they won't keep up with inflation in the coming decade. And this is, you know, despite what so many others in the real estate space have predicted. And he might be true, we'll just see. But real estate and influencers, real estate agents, they want to make it sound like buying a home is always a great idea, and it
might be for you. You know, it depends on where you live, depends on your financial situation, which is what Joel just spoke all about, and you need to be in a solid position. It depends on how long you plan on being there in that town, how long you plan on owning that property. But it's certainly not a slam dunk financial moves over the past decade, I know exactly. And that's but people have like that short termism sort of and they see, oh man, hous home prices of
skyrocket over the past three years. I better jump in now while I can. But now we're leveraged to the hilt and we've completely depleted our cast reserves. It leads to a weak position.
We have heard from listeners over the years who found not too long ago even where it's like, oh man, I bought a house because I was told that's what I was supposed to do, and it ended up not being the best move for me. How do I get out of this? And the transaction costs are high in real estate and so it's a difficult thing to get out of without losing your shirt if you're trying to
do it in short order. And Matt, we don't usually throw dissenting listeners under the bus, but we had a Facebook comments or recently in the how to Money Facebook group and he basically said, worst advice ever to tell people not to buy a home. And we're not telling everyone blanket, don't buy a home. We're also not telling everyone blanket do buy a home. We're saying there's a lot of factors to consider. There's a lot of nuance.
Yeah, have a whole lot to consider.
Right, So, yeah, there is, there's not a blanket home ownership is the way to wealth, or renting investing more is the way to build wealth. So much of it depends on a bunch of you know, personal and economic macroeconomic considerations before you kind of hone in on the right path for you.
Yeah, and this is coming from two dudes who have done well in real estate, like you would think like that, we would be on the train that would be beating the drum of like everybody's got to own right multiple properties. But dude, it's not twenty ten, it's not twenty eleven, not twenty twelve anymore. It's harder and harder, not even ownership, when it's even harder to get a deal when it comes to investing in Really, yeah.
We're not going just based on our lived experience in real estate. We're going based on like market conditions, marketing conditions, historical realities, and like potential, the potential future of real estate, which I think Nick Medjulie is sober about the future and not overly optimistic, which I appreciate. And the truth is, we are still suffering from a lack of inventory in this country, which is part of the reason that he
might be wrong about his prediction. And Matt people are actually starting to turn shopping malls into homes that could be one of the ways to increase supply. And it's kind of this twofer because people aren't visiting malls. I can't tell you the last time I visited the mall that's actually not too far away from us. People aren't going like they did twenty years ago. Spencer's a hot topic, just aren't attracting the foot traffic that they used to.
Don't think it has the same ring that it did in ninety five.
No, no, it doesn't.
Well.
And even just like the big stores that were the anchor stores, Macy's, JC, Penny's, Sears right like a lot of this, I don't even think Sears exists anymore. And then jac nobody goes to those other stores. And so those spaces and their adjoining parking lots are being turned into residential units, and other developers are finding other uses for those spaces too, like hey, let's make like a slew of pickleball courts and start charging people to come
play the game they're obsessed with. But as malls are floundering and traditional retailers are folding and more of our shopping does go online, turning malls into apartments and condos, I don't know that makes a lot of sense for me. Let's repurpose these big buildings into something the way people are actually going to use them.
Now, Yeah, I will say.
I think the biggest challenge, though, might be for them to convert these vast swaths of interior square footage into units that people actually want to live in, right, because it's like, think about especially those big box stores on the it's one thing of the smaller stores that connect, you know, like along the balcony or whatever like that connect that like.
The Apple Store or gap. Yeah, like these like, oh yeah, that could be a dope.
Place to live. I live in what used to be the Sunglass Hut. But like when it comes to these giants, just put me next to the spara.
That's all I ask.
Could you imagine waking up every morn in the smell the smell of Anti ANNs. But these big box stores that have so much interior square footage with no outside access, with like no fresh air, Like that's some sort of like dystopian living arrangement right there.
Man.
Like even even in Blade Runner he had a window, you know, yeah.
Not to be smirts the name of the late Charlie Munger, remember when he tried to create that dorm room with like zero windows in it order. You're right, like, you don't want to live in Nobody wants to live there. There's go be a way to pull it off.
This is what they do in like China, like some of those massive building developments that nobody well, I guess they're tearing them down now because nobody like that. They don't have the population, yeah to live there. Crazy to think about, but Jael, let's talk about how more employers are offering a four to one K match even when you don't put any money into your four onin K. How does that work? Well, this is an odd benefit, but it's one that the Secure Act two point zero
that it made a reality this year. Even if you don't contribute a dime to your four win K, but you are paying on your student loans, well, your company can opt to treat those payments as if you're making four wind K contributions, which would allow them to then stock money into your four one K on your behalf. And this is great because I think it's true that there are a lot of folks who have such a high student loan payment that they find it difficult, if
not impossible, to contribute towards their retirement. And this simply ensures that if they, you know, work for an ever expanding group of companies who are going to offer this benefit, they're not going to be completely left behind when it comes to saving up for retirement.
Yeah, yeah, I think this is good news. And Fidelity notes that more than one hundred companies have now made this benefit available to their employees, and they're some of the bigger companies in the country as well. That still really only covers a small percentage of the workforce. But again, this is a new benefit, like this only became law the law of the land starting at the beginning of this year, and we're likely going to see adoption I think go up significantly in the coming years.
It's it's like when the four to one K first came into existence. It's not like everyone all all of a sudden had a four K. It's something that gradually ramped. The same thing with a roth. Ira'sorts are like, who's this name?
That what?
Senator oh, Senator au did this well, slowly over time it became our favorite individual retirement account option. But it takes time for it to gain some state.
And it takes people kind of clamoring for that, asking their employer, asking their HR department.
Hey, which is why we're talking about it, for you to ask your boss.
Yeah, other companies are offering this. My friend works down the street and he's got this or she's got this available where or she works. Can can I get that here? What's going on? And they might say, hey, it's in the works. Actually we know about this, we're planning on offering it. But this is one of those benefits that I think, especially for the younger crowd who has loads of student loan debt like is going to ask to
be made available. And these are the kind of benefits that go beyond just the headline pay number, that make a big difference in your overall compensation package.
So that's right.
Be sure to check and see what sort of benefit your current employee offers, or if you're in the job market, hey, this is something you're going to want to at least note whether that potential employer offers this kind of student loan for one k match.
That's right, but that's going to be it for a Friday flight. We hope everyone has a fantastic weekend, and we'll see you back here on Monday with a fresh set of listener questions for you, buddy. Until next time, Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,