Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel Matt and today we're talking more potential loan forgiveness, egg fights, and workplace drama. Yeah, and luckily that workplace drama does not include folks fighting over eggs. It's not happening between you and I either, not you and I. We've got plenty of eggs at home.
Actually we've got I don't wanna not to brag or anything, but I'm pretty sure we've got eggs, Okay, Richie rich And it's not that we stocked up either, Like literally, we go through one of those twenty four costco flats like uh, in less than a week. I'll just say, I'm sure. Yeah, we definitely throw it out for a family of your size, I was gonna ask you when you used to go into the office to work, did you ever Speaking of workplace drama, it makes me think
about folks putting labels on different sauces. People don't want other people. I would not put anything in the main fridge because there was like lots of stinky, rotting stuff in there too. After a point, so we had like a we had a tiny fridge. I shared an office with one other person. We had a tiny fridge and we just kind of shared that because that thing locked
down to clean. And then don't let anybody else out their stuff in there because it just you know, you put it too the main fridge or get your own. I like it, man. But yeah, this is our Friday flight, and we're gonna talk about the best stories that we came across this week and how those stories are going to pertain to your personal finances. But Joel, let's let's talk about this, uh, this fancy dance we were invited
to do we love our daughters or not. So a friend of our site shot was told us about it's a this guy, it's a it's a little nonprofit group. I'm pretty sure it's not like he's doing this for profit. And it is a daddy daughter dance essentially this and this is it's kind of fancy. You get dressed up and everything, you wear your nicest clothes. You go. It's in a venue in town that I have shot many times. It's a nice spot. A lot of a lot of
folks get married there. But it's also really stinking expensive. I think it's a hundreds, like hundred sixty bucks for one kid for one night onto the town with your daughter, which is a lot of money. So you and I started to debate this, and we're like, oh no, this is this is a good fodder for the show. But if that's your let me let me hear your argument. What's yeah, where are you on this? If that's your
jam as a dad? And you're like, this is gonna make my daughter feel special, this is what we're into. We like to do this, and I'm gonna budget the money, set it aside to go to this dance, take my daughter to this dance. I think that's great. I will say it's not for me, though, and I don't think it's for my kids. My my daughter, not your jam, my middle daughter. She prefers waffle house. That's what makes her feel special and honestly makes me feel happy to
So I think your oldest daughter, you don't. You don't think she's gonna want to go dance and far you might like it. And even if she did, though, I'd still be hard pressed to spend a hundred sixty bucks on this dance. But I don't know that. I think she might be like, oh that was sweet, but it wouldn't mean more to her than there's a lot of other cool things I could do with her. The lost a lot less money, especially for that much. Yeah, I'm
kind of on the fence. I'm like, let's go. I wanted to take her to a climbing gym soon and she was like, that sounds awesome. I'd rather fun on my dollars towards those experiences than something like this. Totally. Yeah, I feel like we get around a lot of the draw to go to something like this through daddy daughter dates. And yeah, I'm thinking about taking one of our our
youngest daughter to go get her nails done. I'm like, I feel like that's something that she would totally bucks and I would totally do it alongside with her, And I feel like that that would have a even bigger impression on her and that would just be a lot of fun. And the other thing too, And there are also other ways to go party, uh by going to
friends weddings. I feel like weddings used to be this huge thing that folks would change their plans in order to make sure that they were able to attend to see family members, to see old friends. And I think that that could definitely be a way that you get some of that dancing elements, you know, where it is a party without having to fork out that much money. You can spend like a action to that on whatever gift you can get for that couple. I get the impetus.
I feel like it's a sweet thought, and but it's I definitely get that. I think there's a way to do it for hopefully less money. Like that's that's just a lot of money. What you're missing out prohibitive and it's just not my jam anyway. What's cool, though, is being able to demonstrate how you want your daughter to expect someone that she were to go out out on a date with. Sure, you want to be able to
set the bar real high. And so I guess that's the part of it that makes me still consider it a little bit, because it's like there's a whole there's just a formality around it that I want to see shown to my daughters if and when they go to dances or like when they start going on dates. This is in our future to do uh these kind of Yeah, these discussions are in the cards. So maybe we're being cheap.
I don't know how, I don't think so it's not gonna happen for me this year, but maybe in the future, especially if there's a sweet discount come the cuts and half or something like that. But all right, let's move on, Matt. Let's get to the Friday flight in the sampling of
stories we found interesting this week. Let's get that student one forgiveness to right off the bat, because you know, we still don't know what's going to happen with the Biden administration's ten to student loan forgiveness proposal that's still tied up in the courts. The Supreme Court is set
to take that case up, likely in late spring. But there's potentially even more interesting news on the student loan front this week, something potentially even bigger than that student loan forgiveness, and most people being well, what's bigger than just getting a chunk of your debt lopped off? Well, new income based repayment rules could have an even bigger impact on a ton of college grads and the help that they're going to receive if these new IBr income
based re payment rules are enacted. And there are a few different income based repayment plans currently on the books, but this new one is basically going to be uh a lot better than the ones that are currently around. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot more generous. It could cut it's gonna cut in half the payment amounts for borrowers
based on their discretionary income. And so we can see the average payment amount trop precipitously based on these you know, new income based rules loan balances, they wouldn't be allowed to grow if folks are making on time payments. We we'd see a lot more low income folks with a monthly student loan payment of zero dollars, which would obviously
be majorly beneficial for their budget um. And it would also slash the forgiveness timeline from twenty years to ten, so cut that in half two for a whole lot of barbers as well. And so, while we're waiting for the Supreme Court to do their thing, this somewhat quiet proposal. It's it's getting some headlines, but it's not getting nearly the headlines that forgiveness forgiveness was. This could end up making I would say, a much bigger impact than ten
thousand dollars lopped off your student loans. That's right. Yeah, so friend of the show Travis over at student loan Planner, He tweeted Biden just proposed a permanent student loan pause and free college for almost all but no one realizes
it yet. That's how big of an impact this might have. Yeah, exactly, so, I mean it would be an obvious relief to a lot of folks with significant amounts of student loan debt um and even after pay are set to resume, this would ensure that they kind of don't resume for millions of borrowers. Yeah, it's it's like a way to prolong. We're gonna push this out and then after ten years poof, you don't. You're calling it something else, but that's in
effect what it's doing. You're eliminating it. And so yeah, where does this thing stand. Well, it's in this thirty day comment period, but we could see it become an official rule soon after that. And so yeah, one thing that we should mention is that, you know, neither this plan nor the forgiveness endeavor impact the sticker price of
a college education. They're not addressing that head on, and we'd love to see some focus on actually bringing down the cost of college, not just helping folks pay for that overpriced education on the back end. And actually, I take that back I think it will have an impact on the sticker price of college because anytime you have the of a good being subsidied subsidized, what does that then do you? You've you've got the partakers, the folks
who consume that good. They say, oh, well, if you're gonna give me money to buy this thing, I'm gonna go buy more of that thing. You essentially are reducing the cost of college for individuals. And of course colleges, they only have a limited supply of their education, right, Like, there are only so many students that they can have
on campus. And so if they have more folks than ever clamoring to get into their college because it's becoming effectively more affordable for those potential college grads, what are they gonna do to balance out that supply and demand you raise the stinking prices? Like, we only need to look back to the past two or three years to see something a very similar dynamic. Right during the pandemic, we were all wedding on those stemmy checks to show up.
And what did that additional cash on hand? Cause it caused prices of all goods and services to skyrockets. Inflation we're talking about now being called yea general inflation. Yeah,
and so we only need to look back. I mean, we we have a very recent example as to what this is likely going to do to something like we're not learning from that and the reality, Yeah, this does incentivize people to take out more and more student loan debt because you realize, well, hey, my payments probably are going to be that bad even you know, even if I do take on a d k uh in student loans to get that degree, and eventually they're going to
be forgiven, So what's the harm? And it just encourages people to load up on stuff, and we're going to just see the federal government paying hundreds of billions of dollars to more than more than they already are total to subsidize people to go to college. And by the way, this isn't like this, This isn't a political soapbox. This
is just economics. This is supply and demand. Uh. And another note, I mean, I don't blame individuals for taking advantage of that, because if you are going to incentivize a certain behavior, I think it would be foolish to not accept the offerings that are being presented to you. Say, I mean kind of like when you get to two and a half percent mortgage, right, you're like, cool, this is great, and then you don't want to pay it
off when mortgage rates go up. Yeah, exactly. In going back to to the stimy checks, we were all sitting there waiting for those checks to drop, for for those checks to hit our bank accounts. It's not that as individuals we shouldn't necessarily respond to those incent tis. It's just that we feel that the government is going about this the wrong way. Yeah, for sure, And and and again not attacking the problem. We are trying to put a band aid on a gaping wounds, and the root cause,
the root problem still remains unattended. But Matt, you mentioned inflation, and let's talk about egg prices, something that have become massively inflated recently. See more headlines about eggs over the past two weeks. Yes, you have, that's because they've gone up by something something like about in a month. So and uh, my wife Emily shoeing to Costco. You have two crates your lucky dog. But she said they were
completely out of all eggs, even the expensive fans. But do you all have any right now in your fridge? Probably have like eighteen eggs in our friend. If you if you'll need some eggs, y'all, y'all let us know, don't don't worry. I'm coming knocking on your door. It is interesting to see egg prices rocking up in the way they are, like they're even higher in California. The l A time says that a dozen eggs is going to cost you seven dollars and thirty seven cents right now.
And part of the reason there's so much more expensive in California is because law there only allows for cage free eggs, which means there's even less supply, which means, of course, even higher prices. And that is triple the cost of what you would have paid a year ago. It's something like two dollars and forty cents, and now it's seven dollars and thirty seven cents. So we've seen
egg prices just go up precipitously. And apparently there are literally fights breaking out in the egg which sounds like it can actually threaten the precious, preciously loads of five eggs, like no, no, not the egg. Someone gets slammed into the pile of eggs and boom, you just like ruined.
A bunch of one thing if you're fighting ever, like cans of beans, right, but like these eggs are gonna be harmed in the actual still half with like a slightly dented can of beans, but the eggs are just ruined. And it's it's not just your normal inflation trends though,
that are causing the spike and egg prices. It's the Avian flu, which is leading to the deaths of tens of millions of chickens, wreaking havoc on the supply of just the most basic kitchen staple like that everyone has in the fridge or almost everyone, right, And when something goes up in the price in a big way, like the typically matt we would recommend a substitute for someone to say, hey, guess what chicken went up, but beef prices remain relatively stable. You should substitute and and eat
more beef instead of chicken. That typically not how it works, but I'm just saying, like, usually we would say, don't buy the really expensive thing for a while, wait for prices to come down. But when it comes to eggs, there it's just not really any equivalent on that front. So you almost have to grin and merit kind of there is Well, have you ever heard of aquafaba? It's like this, um, it's the water. How do you know about all these weird things? Because my wife is Kate,
and so we talked about food stuff. It's the liquid that's left behind in a can of chick piece and so it's like the starchy, protein laden liquid. And evidently and you can you can whip it and create a meringue, which normally called egg whites. So it's like a it's like a vegan egg white substitute. Basically, what's like, what's the yolk substitute? Matt h caldberry cream eggs. It's a
good point. It kind of makes one wonder if they should like buy some of those chickens, get the jump in on the backyard chicken trend, go back to their agrarian roots. Yeah, Like I mean we did that for a while away back in the day. Another way you can keep from blowing out your grocery budget is by wasting less food, which is what The New York Times wrote about this week. One of my favorite topics. The average household shovels nearly a third one third of their
food into the garbage. Uh. And this article talked about a town in Ohio that's on a mission to do something about it, largely through education, and so much of the waste that that happens obviously, it's it's at the household level. Uh. And so there are a number of things that you can do to reduce food waste. We've got a few tips. First of all, playing your meals. Once you have that plan, make a list, and then shop via that list. Don't go to the grocery store hungry,
and you know, bypass the egg. I'll start walking through all the prepared foods that looks so delicious, that costs so much money. Though. But then on the back end of fixing a meal, make sure that you eat, or if you if you don't eat, freeze your leftovers. I know this sounds super basic, but oftentimes the most simple solutions are going to be the most effective. Usually, the biggest food waste culprit is that we're just scraping those leftovers into the trash trash man. Yeah, and it's not
always easy. I will say so recently, we bought a bunch of like a Costco. It's like three pounds of sliced chicken breast, for the for the kids, and some other cheeps, some fancy provogom that we've never gotten before. Kids didn't like it? Did I throw that food away? Heck no, I've been eating it for like three days straight. I've noticed you're like, I think you like it, but you're also probably tired of it. But but you're pushing through. I liked it initially, I am getting tired of it.
But guess what, it's the weekend, and so I'm gonna toss that in the freezer. I'm gonna revisit those leftovers
sometime next week. So do the same thing. Eat those leftovers if you If you feel like you've had it too much, maybe you're getting sick of it, toss it in the freezer and pull that out in a couple of weeks or maybe at the end of the month and once your grocery budget UH is looking a little more lean, and also maybe dial back on how many unless you're making yeah, going back to the afford them anymore.
We're not experts on the bird diseases out there, so we don't have any idea where the price of eggs are headed. But if I mean if egg prices continue to go up, you might, you know, want to cut back a bit on the consumption of those and also consider, let me make some adjustments to your budget, because you need to make sure that you're spending is reflecting this this new reality. All right, Matt, We got more to
get to on this Friday flight. And we talked just a second ago about one government proposal that could massively impact how much people have to pay on their student loans. But there's another government proposal that might go into effect later this year too that might have an even bigger impact on our economy and on a bunch of individuals. Will discuss that and more right after this the rubber back. Do you think we talked a little bit too much about eggs before the break? I don't want this to
be like, yeah, okay, everyone eats them. It's it's really important, like and it's crazy to see something like that. We're all like, inflation eight percent a year. You're like, oh, that's tough of stomach, but a price has literally been up. It felt like it. And so that being said, we gotta stop because now we are talking. Uh, it is now time for our ludicrous headline of the week doesn't comes from Bloomberg on the headline reads airline stocks dip
as f a A system failure leads to groundings. Basically, you may have seen this earlier this week, but the f a A may have been to the airport and been like, hopefully your airport that the notification system it had an outage on Wednesday morning and that impacted airlines in a meaningful way, causing obviously more delays and cancelations
of flights. And you might be thinking this is kind of a what an odd ludicrous headline, right, Well, it kind of felt like a good way to show that there are all sorts of things that can impact the price of individual stocks, especially in the short term, and many of which are out of the hands of the businesses themselves. You know, this was an an f a A A failure, not the airlines themselves, but still they felt
the brunt of that failure at least for a little while. Uh. And so it's just important to keep in mind that all sorts of things can impact the value of an individual stock or even an entire industry. An errant tweet makes me think back to Elon Musk. Haven't heard from him in a while. What's he up to? Who knows? Hopefully he's back to work. Hopefully he's actually like working yet not less tweeting, more running, doing what he's best at.
But other environmental effects, you like rising interest rates or even going in and exiting a pandemic, you can't predict these things as an individual investor, as smart as you think you might be. And that's why, you know, buying an entire basket of let's say, five D stocks and an index fund is a far better move, we think for almost everyone out there. What are you referring to,
man or three thou that's another approach you can take. Yeah, well, so we had a listener email us last year and he was he told us, Matt, how insane we are for telling our listeners not to invest in single stocks. And he specifically detailed how amazing it's been for him owning Apple and Tesla stock. And he's like, uh, I mean this was probably this was probably nine or ten months ago, and he was talking about how much money he made and how we must be just complete ignoramuses
to not suggest that our listeners do the same. Yeah, Tesla in particular was on a nice rod up to the up to its peak. Yes it was, And I didn't want to dissuade him from doing what he wanted to do. But I'm also not willing to change my take and what we recommend folks to invest in based purely on this dude's experience. And so the question is, like, how are those stocks doing now that we're doing so
well for him a year ago. Well, even though Tesla as a company has had a solid last twelve months, the stock has dropped more than And that's another thing. It's like, it's not like Tesla's massively missing out on the deliveries of the vehicles they said they're gonna make. They've been doing pretty good on that front, but they delivered more than ever at the you know, by the end of two maybe not quite as many as they were shooting for, but still the most pret on close,
and it was the most they've ever done. And yet still the stock has been snake bitten. And so how's that listener feeling now? I don't know, I haven't talked to him in a while, but he's probably not doing not very happy with his individual stock choices, unless he bought that Tesla stock like a bunch of years back. Still, but the truth is that there's just too much data showing how risky it is to invest heavily in just
a few companies. And even if that company is a pretty good one, like a company like Southwest, they had issues, right that we talked about last week, and you never know when a storm or an f a, a failure can hurt that company's stock performance. So diversification, we would say, is the only free lunch in Our suggestion as always is to dedicate no more than five percent of your
overall portfolio to risk your individual picks. And again, Matt, the the story that that you you mentioned from Bloomberg, it's like, this is this is one of those things that that investors couldn't have predicted that there was going to be some sort of failure in this system that impacts the profitability of airlines. But it did, it does, and there's all sorts of things that we can't predict, and that's why it's best for us to do less
predicting and to stick to that basic, boring investing method. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's important to note that basically everyone's strategy failed over the over the past year, right, some just did worse than others. And when you are invested in single stocks, you're gonna see potentially higher upsides, but also you're gonna see dramatic downsides when things aren't looking
so great. And many of the folks who did the worst, they were heavily allocated to individual stocks, often the tech sector. So yeah, we believe that diversification is key. UH and the brilliant investing writer Jason's Wage he wrote this week about how our response to that failure, how it should be to double down. And you know, this might seem counterintuitive, it might seem somewhat crazy, but we believe that he
is spot on or crazy like a fox. Maybe smart UH stocks and bonds they had an awful two will be a lot better. We're not sure. I mean it probably, but it may not. When you look back at the tin worst years for the stock market, the average three year total returns are over thirty two It's I think thirty two and a half percent. That's over ten percent annually.
Not too shabby. But either way, if you are in the wealth building stage of life and you're investing for the long term, doubling down, buying while the market is on sale, continuing to stick money into these assets at the press prices is exactly what you should be doing. The mantra that our friend friend of the show Nickma Julie has coined is just keep mining, and I think
keep bying. I think that's a good one. All right, let's talk about work for a second map, because in specifically, let's talk about something that is happening at Disney this week. What former CEO Bob Iger returned to the helmet Disney. I think it was last month and maybe two months ago and earlier this week. He's he's already making some changes. He called workers back into the office. He staid that starting marked first, every Disney employee is gonna need to
start coming in four days a week. And here's what he said. I wanted to share this quote from Bob Iger. He said, and to creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together, nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors. Bob said, it is my belief that working together more in person will benefit the company's creativity culture and our employees careers.
And I think I think he makes a great point here. You know these are actually the two main reasons why we're likely to see more companies follow suit is because it has benefits for the company and for individual employees and for their careers. We think that that hybrid work is here to stay, at least to some degree, but also don't be shocked if your company or your boss
makes a similar move in the near future. I think there were predictions a few years ago that in person work was going to be a thing of the past. I don't think that's the case, and I think we've seen some massive benefits of hybrid work and the ability for more employees to do more remote work. But there's
also something massively important about in person collaboration. And I think for a company like Disney, for they're gonna be other companies that that see how this experiment goes over at Disney, and then they might try to implement it themselves. They need to get those creative juices flow and all together.
I mean, I think as I think we underestimate the power of UH like real life interactions like I r L. I think that needs to be something that we we consider more, not just from like a work standpoint, And until the menaverse gets better to collaborate and to to work together. But just from a social, like relational level, I think hanging out in real life is under under rated difficure. And then when he said for our employees careers,
I think that's what that is. I think when you are working in person in front of your boss is like your career stands to benefit too. And if you're out of sight, you're almost out of mind. And that's important to note. If you are all if you want to move up the ranks, if you want to get paid more, if you want more responsibility, um, then being in person is probably going to help you in that
endeavor exactly. But also from like a friendship level, That's what I was getting out, like, not just from how is this going to benefit you as an individual professionally, but how is this gonna benefit you as an individual to like make friends at work and interestingly, having a community and having friends at work is it's that's one of those things that can keep you working for an employer to the extent that they wouldn't need to force you to continue to work there with something like a
non compete agreement because so non compete clauses they might be going away soon thanks to the FTC. A new proposal would outlaw these agreements. They would allow workers to to move freely to other businesses in the same industry, and I think this would be a great outcome. We don't like non competes. They depress worker wages, They sty me innovation, And you might be thinking, this isn't something I need to worry about. That's that's not the kind
of industry that I'm in. But you might be applies to like high knowledge professional Yeah, no, it's not just high dollar white collar workers. One in five Americans are subject to a non compete clause, many of whom work in fast food or they work in manual labor. And generally overall, we think that non competes are bad for individuals, are bad for the economy as a whole. So, you know, similar to the new ib R rules, the income based
for payment rules for student loans. This is in a comment period, but it could go into effect later this year. And again, while I you know, we might agree with the outcome, it does rubly a little bit the wrong way, the way in which that this is coming about. I would much rather see individuals taking the responsibility of themselves to decide what it is that what they're going to
sign and what they're not going to sign. You know, it's one thing to you know, if you download an app and they're like, all right, you have to agree to all this and then you can use our app, that's one thing. But signing a contract for a job, I feel like that's something that we should be reading
over a little bit more. I feel like some of the responsibility should be on us as individuals, rather than being some mandate that passes or you know, some dictate from on high that all businesses have to abide by.
I can see why you say that. I don't know if I agree necessarily, because I do think that these many of these um noncompete contracts can be shady, They can be hard to decipher, and they take advantage of people, and especially a lot of people in low paying industries to like security guards or sub sandwich makers, Like a lot of people in non high profile jobs are are being not maybe not forced, but maybe coerced in designing some of these sorts of non compete agreements, and it's
a bad for the economy and it's bad for those individuals. And then also there's I think you underestimate the free will of individual, you know, just the indility. I know multiple friends. I signed one back in the day when I worked for a pressure washing company, and it's one of those things like what's for two years, you can't
go work for another pressure washing company. And I remember like, okay, I remember thinking I probably won't work for another pressure washing company, but the fact that I wasn't then able to once I kind of learned how to do it, maybe like I didn't think, I don't think it's a good thing for the economy. It wasn't a good thing for me personally, even though I was done with pressure
washing at the time. I have another friend who's an optometrist, and it's one of those things where he signed one of those things and now he's forced to commute a lengthy distance after leaving that work for just ethical reasons, um because he disagree with the ethics of the company, and so he was put over a barrel essentially because of this noncompete. I'd like to see noncompetes go away, and I do as well. So I'm just how do
you get rid of them? That's that's so. I mean, we're in agreement as far as whether or not noncompetes are good or not. It seems like they suck just across the board. But how do we arrive at that point? That's the that's the difference though we're not they're not going away. They're actually becoming more influential in our society and they're negatively impacting the wages of millions. So if if this is an FTC mandate, I'm okay with it because they're that bad. So all right, that's gonna do
it for today's episode. You can find our show notes and links to some of the stuff we mentioned up on our site at how the Money dot com and Matt Let's also mention that the people can follow us on Instagram at how to Money Pod. And you and I were going we're taking a four person trip with our ladies, taking a couple's trip to a Bourbon countries. Yea, so we may or may not post some pictures uh to the account if you'd like to keep up with our adventures either way, you can follow us at how
the Money Pod over there on Instagram. And by the way, we've got a great interview lined up for folks UH Monday. We're speaking with the founder of y nab you need a budget, so if you want to learn more about budgeting and budgeting strategy, make sure to look for that one. And by the way, it's not as boring as you might think, because we actually think budgets can awesome. They
should be the opposite of depressing. They should actually make you feel hopeful about your money, and I think Jesse does a great job of helping people connect budgets to the possibilities right that your money can to help you achieve. All right, man, that's gonna be it for this episode until next time. Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,