Friday Flight - Forgiveness Reality, Expensive Offspring, & DIY Coffins #558

with student loan forgiveness. But before we get to that, I wanted to mention that your girls and my girls, they have to wear uniforms to school these days, right, all the kids at your school. It's not just the girls. It's just that your girls are at of school where your girls are old enough. My girls are old enough, are you? Boys are are not yet in real school, so they still like boy at the school. When they go to school, they totally dude. Well, whereas our girls

like nice and because uniforms. We see the pictures of them and they got like food all over their faces. They're sure like unsucked. And girls look like they know what's going on. Can I just say, as a parent, it's the greatest thing that ever happened having school uniforms because there's so much less fighting about what they were before the school all for the day thing. I mean, a couple of years ago we started having the girls

light out their outfits the night before. That was helpful, but even still you would still kind of get into some of those arguments even then, even the not the night before. So it made it slightly less stressful because at least we're taking care of this at least not right before you're trying to rush out the door to school. But it didn't completely solve the problem. And in school

uniforms totally for it. They're typically not terribly expensive, unless sometimes the school requires a particular name brand or a specific sort of uniform. Right, But I just wanted to mention that our r P t A had like a used school uniform sale and you could get I think tops for two bucks and bottoms three dollars or something insanely cheap, and so we stocked up. And the next time they have one of those sales, my girls will be bigger by then and so we'll stop up again.

But These are the kind of things man, that that frugal folks like us to take advantage of because they can represent big savings. And you're also like reusing something, right and let go in the trash and sometimes well how did the there's some nice there's some nice stuff like nextually what we would have bought new as well? Yeah, well so how did the PTA get it? Is? Just is this from the lost and found from the previous year?

I think it's lost and found. I think it's donations from other families who are like, hey, we've got a kid graduating, or or we're leaving the school, or it's it's different people who are donating old uniforms too. Yeah,

our school did something similar to that. I think what they did with the lost and found from the previous years, they basically kept some of those uniforms on hand for families who might be in a position where they're struggling a little bit where they could potentially get those uniforms

for for absolutely free. But but yeah, getting these things used, man, that's totally the way to go, because I mean we've got three girls now and forms yeah, I mean three times five, you know, like we're actually gonna have fifteen different sets of uniforms, and ideally, yeah, we wouldn't have to do laundry except for once on the weekends. But we're kind of like, you know what, let's maybe hold

off until the next sale. The next time we come across a bunch of uniforms that someone's trying to unload for cheap, because it's like it's something like ninety percent off or eighty percent off versus what you pay on the store rack. Sometimes getting those things used, which is which is pretty sweet deal. And by the way, this is not a private school in case people wondering these are. These are both public schools public schools, but sometimes the

public schools require uniforms. And I like it. Again, I like it from a housle at home standpoint, but also just while the kids are in school. I am all for freedom of expression and for kids to be able to express themselves through what they wear and stuff like that. But within two MAT's kids have neck tattoos. So there's that DOT is working on getting some I drop tear drop tattoos phrase for every you know, she's pretty hard, no,

but I think it does help. I think it can help within that educational environment as well when it comes to learning. Agreed. All right, Well, while we're talking about education, let's let's get on the Friday flight, let's get through the on that note, most impactful story of this week for at least for folks in our audience, and that is about the student loan forgiveness that just took place.

President Biden announced an executive action on Wednesday afternoon about student loans, and I don't know about you, I was like hitting refresh mat. I was like, what's gonna happen. I've kind of seen a couple of different outlets reporting what might happen, but they're rumblings. Folks knew that was going to be going down. Yep, it has happened, so a couple of weeks here and there, but I wanted to know, like right when it hits, and not because I have any skin of the game. I fortunately don't

have any student loans anymore. But if you, dear listener, if you have student loans hanging around and you haven't heard about what happened this week at this point, I'd be shocked. But there's just a lot of information to cover and you might not be familiar with all the details. So that's what we want to kind of get into today. The big news is that in a three hundred billion dollar push, that's how much it's likelihood gonna cost taxpayers.

All individual federal student loan borrowers with an a g I and adjusted gross income below a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars or two fifty thousand dollars as a married couple are going to receive ten thousand dollars of forgiveness for for their student loans. And interestingly enough, parent plus loans are included as well, Matt. But private student loans, now, if you refinanced into private student loans, there is no forgiveness for for you if you have those private loans.

And uh, in addition to that, folks who had pell grants, which typically out to lower income borrowers, they're eligible for an extra ten thousand dollars of forgiveness. So when you kind of step back out take the big view, something like fifteen million people just had their entire student loan amount wiped out. And even besides that, it's a it's obviously a huge financial relief for tens of millions of other folks too. Yeah, and so this is great news

for all of those folks. And I promise I'm not being a debbie downer here. I know there are a lot of folks who are like rejoicing, you know, who have had some of their student loans forgiven, potentially all of their student loans wiped out. But the reality is this announcement, it's sort of akin to treating symptoms, not the route of what we think is a much larger problem. It's like putting band aid on a gunshot wound. Yeah, exactly,

bleeding will continue. The cost of college it's been rising far faster than the rate of inflation for decades, and just for giving a boatload of the debt that individuals currently hold, it does nothing to address that. Uh. In case some point front of the show, Ron Lieber from The Times, he just wrote about colleges producing graduates that make far less money than their counterparts who only have

a high school degree. And this is even after years of being in the workforce, where you know you've had time to get acclimated. Sometimes those first couple of years after graduating college, you might still be on par with high school graduate counterparts. But you should quickly see six, Yeah you should, You should be making far more crazy. Yeah, so, I mean talk about being behind a ball, you know, taking on debt without superior job prospects because of an

inferior higher education. This is a real problem going to college. It really is a great choice for some folks, but not for everyone. We all need to do a better job thinking through the value proposition of a degree before blindly encouraging folks to pursue getting one. We all need to ask the question, you know, well, the time, well, the money that we are willing to spend equal higher, higher salary down the road and off. I feel like

we asked that, what's the anything else? And unfortunately, this forgiveness, I feel like, isn't going to encourage folks to do that, because there's always that sort of thought in the back of your mind of like, well, there's a chance that something might happen with it. Well, and it also incentivizes colleges to do absolutely nothing when it comes to what they're charging. And there's no institutional reform or kind of soul searching when it comes to what these colleges are providing.

And you mentioned that the inflation rate of of a higher education has outpaced basically everything else. In recent decades, and that is true, and that will continue to be the case if these are the kind of policy measures

that we're taking. But let's let's actually talk a little bit more about what happens inside of the student loan forgiveness and announcement Matt, because one question some folks might have is are their tax implications to this forgiveness, because sometimes there are, right if you're if you're you have debt forgiven, oftentimes you're you tax on the amount that was forgiven. But that is not going to be the case with this. You will not incur any tax burden

on this forgiveness amounts. And and actually there's there's even more in this announcement because in addition to this headline forgiveness amount, the student loan payment pause has been extended through the end of the year. So payments will now maybe potentially perhaps begin in January. It's been Biden says, that's what has been said multiple times. We'll see what

I see. Yeah, we'll see if that happens, But in all likelihood, I do believe that January payments are going to restart, and so how the money listeners should be prepared for the to resume those payments come the new year. The White House also announced new repayment plans that are going to cap your monthly payment at five percent of your discretionary monthly income, down from ten percent under the

previous plans. This is probably my favorite thing actually, UH in the program, because there was like an alphabet soup of income based payment plans before, and now this is going to be the slam dunk repayment plan that's best for almost everyone. It's is gonna be easier for people to understand how it works. And instead of forgiveness after twenty years of on time payments, folks are gonna be able to have their loans eradicated after just ten under

this plan. And so, yeah, there's a lot of details in this forgiveness action, and we'll link to the page on student named dot gov and and we'll actually cover more of this in our newsletter on Tuesday, because because there was more than just me to the eye in UH in a ten thousand dollar blanket forgiveness, Like, there's a lot of moving parts in this announcement, and so we'll do our best to kind of cover it all.

That's right, but overall, this is great news for all of the student loan borrowers out there who are paying down that debt. Joel, let's go ahead and shift gears. Let's talk about TV. We saw that there's new data from Nielsen that shows that streaming has finally overtaken cable in terms of hours spent watching TV for the first time. Uh. And what this tells me is that there are way more people who love cable than I realized, because like I would have said that this would have happened years ago.

The fact that there are still that many Up until recently, up until I guess last quarter or last month, there were still more people watching cable than there were watching streaming. It's partly a demographics thing, right, mind blowing. There's there's still a lot of fifty sixty, seventy something and they have kind of stuck with not all of them, right, but a much larger percentage of those hooks have stuck

with cable. They haven't really made the leap, or maybe they've added Netflix into their life, but they didn't get slowly they've Yeah, maybe they are slowly kind of making that transition, making that switch. Like what I want to know is, like, what are they watching? What content is out there that you can't get it more affordably on one of the streaming c ann Plus is no longer around my friends, So then the only way to get your cn in fix is too is to have a

cable subscription. But they're canceling their shows anyway. Uh. But one of the other things we saw as well is that a lot of streaming services are upping their monthly subscription prices. Disney they announced surprise increase of thirty percent just over a week ago now, and so unless you know you want to watch ads while streaming BLUEI, you're gonna have to pay that increased rate. That's going to be the only way to keep your recurrent monthly price

of seven dollars and ninety nine cents. By the way, Blue season three is out and it is phenomenal. Oh yeah, it's it's it's better than all the other one if you have kids, and even if you don't have kids, it's it's like the best cartoon in the world, I

think right now, it's pretty great. And Netflix they're still likely to raise its subscription price as it introduces an ad supported tier, which makes sense, you know, like some of these streaming companies they're spending huge amounts of money on new content that ends up living only behind their paywalls. We we actually we literally just covered this on the podcast recently, episode five forty two. We talked about streaming and we offered a lot of remedies to the problem

of these increased streaming costs. But one of these considerations that needs to be on the table for money conscious folks out there is to consider eliminating at least one or two of these streaming services from your life. If there are ways that you can be a little more choosy with the content that you are consuming, that is what we're gonna recommend. Plus just watching lest TV generally speaking.

When we did that episode, what was it, something like close to four hours a day the average American watches of TV. How it's how it's a hobby basically. I mean, you consider sleeping hours and TV hours, that's half your life right there. It's insane that we spend that much

time in front of the television. Some people more than that, because that's the average, right, So yeah, watching less TV in general sedentary basically, Like that's the other part is that if you're on a treadmill watching TV it's a different stuff, like, like, what is it? I guarantee it's just the tiny, tiny sliver of those people who are actually walking on a treadmill while watching TV. But I had a first did that just sitting there. I think

it's a perfect way to reward yourself. If you are going to get on the treadmill or something and you are going to work out while watching TV, go for it. Like I like to listen to podcast or music when I'm working out, but it's uh, I think that's a reasonable choice totally. But if your case's dad does that just on the couch, he gets something elliptical and he watches a movie while he just like plugs away for

only and a half, I like it nicely done. Greg, all right, Well, one more thing that we should mention specifically when it comes to watching content is if you prefer to watch movies but then you prefer to watch them in the theater, there's actually a chance you're gonna be able to spend less money doing that in the near future because movie passed. I don't remember that startup you passed. I do. I never joined it because I never really go watch movies in the theater. But it's

coming back from the dead. It's like a zombie company that's coming back to life, and it's set to relaunch in just over a week. And uh, yeah, we have no idea how long movie Pass is gonna last this time because their business model last time around was awesome for consumers, but not so great for movie Pass continuing to exist because they were offering one free movie every day for a monthly fee of which I don't know where you go see movies, but that's less than the

price of going to see one movie theater here. Yeah, that's like totally a steal for a movie ticket. So this was less than that and you can go see a bunch of movies. It just wasn't sustainable. Um, And since the movie Pass collapse, a lot of major movie chains have kind of launched their own flat fee multiple movie initiatives, So maybe a movie Pass isn't gonna be as good of a deal. But they're apparently sets a relaunch with different tiers of ten and thirty bucks. So

I don't know. If movies are your thing and you want to pay less money, we don't know the specifics, but movie Pass might be your jam, that's right. Yeah, just do the math, and it might make a lot of sense for you. It might make fiscal sense for you to do that. And this advice is coming right after we told you to consume lest TV. But like, going to the actual movie, in my mind, is more of an experience. You definitely have to get off your butt. You gotta get off the couch. Maybe you could ride

your bike to the movie theater. Uh. That way, you're not wasting any gas, you get a little bit of exercise, you meet up with some friends there. To me, that sounds like a lot of fun. Also, I think going to the movie theater every single day just because you have that movie pass, because you've got that membership, Uh, sounds very time consuming. You know, like like this is

a young person's game. Maybe the once you get tired of movies after a while too, would she's be like, I gotta go just to make it worried if if I did have movie pass, I guarantee that I'm going to see every single movie. And that comes out just become yourself. Yeah, in the same way crappy ones, it's it's some cost falacy sort of well, it's it's sort of like leftovers. If there are leftovers in my fridge. Even if it's not something I'm super excited about. You

know what, we already paid for that thing. It still provides calories and urishment nutrition to my body. I'm going to eat it. But I've got kids now, and so going to the movie theater isn't something I've done in a long long time. Kids take up a lot of time. They also cost a lot of money, and that is actually a story we're gonna get to right after this break. All right, man, it's time now to talk about expensive children.

This is the ludicrous headline of the week, and apparently it now costs three thousand dollars to raise a child. This this headline was based on analysis from the Brookings Institution, and when I read it, I almost put to my pants because I was like, I've got three children, soilers costs me a million dollars? Right if when you add

those those numbers up one point two baby, right? Well yeah, for you exactly when the average middle class couple is going to spend more than three hundred and ten thousand dollars on a child just raising them up until the age of seventeen. So yes, this number is crazy. Does not include the cost of college in addition to the cost um raising them. That's that's an average annual cost of more than eighteen tho dollars per kiddo. That's basically

it's a mortgage payment, yeah, every single month. And yeah, if you have a few we were talking about a luxury penthouse or something like that. But you don't get the sweet pool to swimming. You just get the love

and affection. But of course, inflation has adjusted this this number upwards significantly over the past couple of years, raising the cost of everything from diapers to groceries and Matt I'm I'm sure how much it costs to raise kids is largely dependent on where people live and just a slew of other factors that a lot of us are actually largely in control of. We see this headline number and maybe it feels disempowering, but I kind of thought

about it differently. I think, um, so many of the things, like whether it's just small ticket expenses like buying name brand snacks, or if you're going to get those used school uniforms instead of the brand new ones, you know, all the way up to bigger expenses like the kind of camps that you're sending your kids too, or if you buy them a car, or if you're choosing to live in a smaller house and and letting them sleep

in the same room. Like, those are decisions you can make that will greatly lessen the amount of money that you're going to personally spend raising kids. You obviously you got to feed them. But I think our suggestion would be to take that three dollar number with a grain of salt. There are things that you can do to ensure that opting to have children isn't going to set you back to that extent. I think people might read that, especially if they're like, I'm on the fence about whether

I want to have children. They'll read that and they'll be like, Nope, that can durish them. Yeah, basically, And I don't think that's good because I think, um, one, it's not good for our society. It's not good for our country when it comes to maintaining that replacement rate. And ultimately we would say that kids um are well worth every single dollar. Is sure you don't have to spend as much as this Brookings Institute study says you're gonna have to spend. There are a lot of ways

for you to curb curb that cost. And either way, man, it's worth having kids no matter what. Well, and it's it's a personal decision that you need to make, right, I mean, like, yes, you need to be wise and and look at the numbers and to do some forecasting and think about what your life is gonna look like were you to have kids and if you can afford it. We are all about potential parents being responsible right when

it comes to like crunching the numbers. But simultaneously, it's not just financial reasons that you do or don't have kids. Um And for all of the different planners out there and perhaps maybe folks who listen to how the money, what I want you to hear is that you will not perfectly be able to plan out what it's going

to look like to have kids. Um you might think, okay, well maybe next year or you know what, we need to have this figured out and this figured out, whereas in reality, being a parent, man, like a lot of times you're just winging it. Uh. Not only from how do I teach my kids how to stop doing this or get them to stop doing this? How do I teach them to be a respectful kid? But also when it comes to the finances of what it costs to

have a kid. You don't necessarily have to have everything planned out, but you will quickly find that you would do pretty much anything in order to provide for your kids, for your family. And so in that sense, a lot of times you're not just flying by the seat of your pants. So you're literally putting the plane together as you're flying it because you know you have to. But like you said, you like, I don't want that to be discouraging for potential parents to hear and think, oh,

this is way too much money. This is not a part of my financial plan. This is gonna derail me from achieving fire in five years. Therefore, I'm not gonna have kids. Hopefully, folks are out there and they're thinking about it from a much more holistic standpoint, all right, Matt, So hopefully we've convinced everybody out there to have at least a kid. Maybe coup more if you're if you're unsure, because even though they cost a lot of money, they bring a lot of joy. If you're unsure, just have

three or four. Give it a go. What's the worst thing could happen? Uh, let's talk about libraries for a second map, because if you're not using your local library, then you should rethink whether you're actually a frugal person or not. Like you, you might be screwing up on this one. Have your frugal license revote. If you're not taking over here, we're gonna take it away from you into the library. Man, you're gonna do that. We've actually had a few guests come on the show, matt And

and they've actually said that their splurge is books. Right. We all always want to know what's your crappier equivalent, what is it that you're spending money on while you're saving and investing for the future. And a lot of them do say, I just buy whatever book I want because knowledge is important. And I'm like, good, I can totally get behind that. I know what you're saying, but I sure hope you're you're not doing that at the expense of not using what's available to you for free

at the library. Um And And sometimes I buy books, especially used on eBay, especially if it's one I want to keep, or if it's one I want to read right away, where there's like a six month wait on the libby app, but the reality is that your local

library system is an incredible resource. And the New York Post just reading an article about Overdrive, which is the company behind the Libby app where you can go get free e books and audio books from your local library, and that app has been crushing it basically since the pandemic began. When more folks started getting their library content via one of those apps, they started getting the digital

books instead of getting the physical ones. Sadly for libraries, though Matt I didn't realize how bad this problem was. Digital copies are a lot more expensive than the physical ones, and the way times can be weeks or month long to grab digital copy of the book you want. Like I've literally been waiting for some books for like nine months, and so I guess I would just say this plan accordingly when you're getting digital copies. I kind of like

to line things up based on the way time. So I'm like always getting fed a book within a reasonable amount of time, But you can't always plan it perfectly. And you know, just I wanted to use this as an excuse to plan the free content that's at all of our fingertips. If you're looking to maybe stream less, like we were talking about earlier reading more is a great way to accomplish that, and there's a way to

do it for free or for super Jeep. Sure, I'll push back a little bit because you said that this is a free resource, but I'll point out that it's not. It feels like it's free, but this is a resource that we have already paid for through our property taxes, through our our local and state taxes. That is what

funds libraries. And so again, I don't want to be like the super tax heavy Debbie down a realist guy during this episode, but I think like it could even potentially be more helpful to think about the library that way. It's not just this free resource that's available. Uh, this is something that you paid for and if you don't go there and take advantage of it, in that case, you're just flushing money down the toilet, kind of like signing up for movie pass and not going to Like

why would you? Why would you do that? You would not do that, and you're already paying for the library, so go take advantage. So maybe this is the mindset shift that might help you to visit your local library, at least even through the libby app. Joel Let's talk about social security. That is a topic we talked about last week along with parent plus loans, how it's affecting the older generations. So let's dig into another topic affecting some of our older listeners, hearing aids. The FDA. What's

that you saying? Man? Somehow, deep down I knew you're gonna do. But the joke. They regulated the sale of hearing aids for decades, uh, and they have not allowed for them to be sold over the counter. And so that means that hearing aids they have been needlessly antiquated and expensive for millions of older adults. And so the good news though, is that the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, they just give the green light for lots of your

hearing aids to be sold over the counter. And that means that prices that they're bound to come down, and it's likely to happen pretty quickly. Hopefully maybe we'll even see some innovation, and maybe we'll even see some superior products come on the market. Uh. And so instead of thousands of dollars for your average pair of hearing aids, in the coming years, you know, we can see folks being able to get comparable quality hearing aids for just

you know, hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. But that being said, even now you can I mean, you can get hearing aids for like a hundred bucks. Maybe the quality isn't that good, but this is one of those there's a huge discrepancy between hearing. Okay, so if you want the good hearing over trying amount the thousands of bucks and yeah, well we were not even anywhere close to needing them mat fortunately, but at least that we

know of. But this is one of those things where the if you cheap out, it's going to be an inferior product. And when it's one of those things where it's pretty necessary. If we're still doing the show and I don't know, thirty fifty years, well that'll be a frugal or cheap that we get to. All right, Jill,

I'm trying out the hundred dollar hundred dollar hearing aids. Well, this is good news because it's an industry that's kind of been behind lock and key, and if you're gonna be able to kind of shop around and just like you would for a whole lot of other electronic items, now that you're gonna be able to do it with hearing aid's gonna bring the cost down and allow more people to get a product that's necessary for them to be able to, like live a meaningful life, like to

be able to hear their loved ones, but and not pay just a ridiculous amount of money to do like it probably would be a cheap move to, like you said, not be able to hear your loved ones, because I know I've read stories where with the onset of hearing loss, the likelihood of dementia increases significantly in older generations, so it's not something you gonna mess around with. And another story that affects the oldest among us as well as

the younger, unlucky ones. People are opting to make their own coffins, like we tease too at the beginning of this episode, and we're not talking about starting from scratch. There are d i y coffin kits that you can now buy in order to save a chunk of money. Because coffins are they're not all that cheap cost uh. I feel like they've probably got some of the more affordable coffins out there, but even still they're pretty expensive. They're like at least fifteen hundred bucks. They don't sell

the base model. They don't sell like like straight pine one. Once all these starts selling coffins, then we might be able to get that sub thousand dollars range. But the d I y kits they can cost half as much,

around eight hundred bucks. But even still, man, I feel like that is a lot of money for something that in my opinion, I'm like, you know what, I'm still going thinking about going the cremation route still cheaper, it's still going to be much more affordable, because yeah, even still, you're like, you're looking at hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a coffin, and especially my opinion, it doesn't it doesn't make any different actually when you shop around for

that cremation, right, And we've talked about that before in the show, that sites like funeralocity allows you to kind of shop around for your burial or cremation services, right, And a lot of people pay way too much for that, and Funeralocity is doing a great service and helping people be able to save money on something that you kind of you often don't have a lot of time to plan for the cost of that, and so it's a great site to kind of look at to see in

your area where you can go, which what what funeral homes charge? Like you're gonna be able to see the price front and center before you make a decision in the heat of the moment. Totally. But yeah, I'm mad enough about death. Let's talk about disc golf. A secantilist, make a nice little pivot here. You got an endorsement one of my favorite sports. You would like your ashes scattered on a disc golf course? That's exactly right, right, honestly,

I'd be cool with that. Uh. And there was a ringing endorsement of disc golf from The New York Times this week. And it's not It's not that we need the Gray ladies opinion on disc golf. I don't need to hear their stamp of approval to know that it's awesome. The Gray Lady, by the way, that's the nickname for the New York Times. But it's fun to see one of the best sports in existence get some love out there, get some major publication love. It's it's not as hot

as pickle ball. I've seen a lot more headlines about that, uh recently. But if you don't do anything else this weekend, we would say, buy a disc or two. You can get them used at played against sports if you've got one in your area, or maybe on Facebook marketplace. But yeah, find a course near you and go throw some disks. Well, we'll actually link to the p d G a Professional Discolf Association course directory on our website, so you can find a course near you. It's free, it's fun, it

gets you out in nature. Like, there's just not many better weekend activities than going to play around a discolf I don't think, especially as the temperatures are starting to cool. Um, maybe you know, I we should go sometimes sometimes today Okay, I'm in. I mean I'll be old to today, not today, maybe maybe next weekend. Okay, next weekend. Alright, let's you gotta play ahead? Yeah exactly, But that is going to be it for today's Friday flight. We hope that you

have a fantastic weekend. We've got a great episode lined up for you here on Monday. We're actually going to be speaking with a professional athlete, not a professional disc golf player, a professional football player, and so we are looking forward to sharing that one with you here on Monday. And no, this is not the Tom Brady crypto episode. Okay, somebody else with much more balanced personal finance views. That's right man. Yep So, until next time, Joel, best Friends Out and best Friends Out m