You're listenings KFI AM six forty the bill Handle Show on demand on the iHeartRadio a F Good morning, everybody. Bill Handle. Here on a Monday morning, November twenty five, we.
Are officially in.
The Pastathon mode and I would like you to donate and help us donate to Pastathon helping Chef Bruno Caterina's Club feed five thousand kids a night, I mean something completely crazy, and so we've been doing this for fourteen years.
So we're going to be broadcasting all of us, all the day parts on December thirtieth or December third, I'm sorry, which is Tuesday, and we're going to be accepting donations pasta, sauce money, and please show up there at the Anaheim white House on the third, and I'd love to have you there also there in the morning, just in the morning, I'm going to feed you. They'll be pastries and they'll be coffee and juice and arting at six o'clock, real jew bagels and shmear and cream cheese.
So come on down. Love to have you at the Anaheim white House.
You can go to Pasta, you can go to KFIAM six to forty dot com, slash pasta fon for all kinds of information. Okay, something rather rather interesting that I'll bet you didn't know, and how counterintuitive this is. California is making so much solar energy that the large commercial operators and farms are forced to stop production many days
during the year, raising all kinds of questions. Because we, the state of California, have a plan to shift entirely to carbon free sources of electricity, and what's the number one.
Of carbon free source solar energy?
But wait a minute, we have so much solar energy that on well, according to study out of Berkeley, half the days, we've got too much power in estate from solar energy. So what's that about? Well, let me give you some facts and figures. In the last twelve months, the solar farms have curtail production of more than three million megawatts hours of solar energy, basically enough to power half a million homes for a year.
More than that, and what do they do with it all?
And by the way, this amount has doubled since twenty twenty one, eight times from twenty seventeen. I mean, we're building solar like crazy, especially solar panels. I bought my house, right, you know, my new place. After I got rid of the Persian Palace. One of the first things I did to put in a solar system, and I had one at the Persian Palace because I have the joys now of living in the most expensive utility in the United States.
You bet you, I have solar. It's gotten now. You used to be able to sell solar back.
That was the tear system that has been establish the net revenue system, which you can't deal with anymore, because it used the utilities used to pay for excess power that was generated during the day. During the day, if you have.
A solar panel, if you have solar panels.
You're generating generally more than you use. I certainly have. So what I used to do is sell it back. They took it back and I didn't actually do anything. I mean, the system does that, and now that's done because there's too much solar energy. And at night when there is no solar energy, now we have battery power which only lasts four to five hours.
But I'm on the grid at night. Well, it's so expensive.
I'm putting in batteries and so is everybody else with a new system. So we just have more power than we know what to do with and the waste that we have, the amount of energy that we don't use. The waste would be even larger if California did not pay other utilities to pick up their ex solar power. Now, we used to sell power to other utilities, and now the cost is so low and we are producing so much power based on these solar systems that we are
actually paying other utilities to take the power. I mean, that is completely crazy. By the way the grid officials worn back in twenty seventeen, when curtailments were still happening, when power operators saying we can't take any more power, we can't produce any more power, especially on hot days. You know, out of UC Berkeley, I said on Sundays, more than half of the power goes to waste. They just throw it away, they give it away, they take, give it to other power companies and pay them to
do it. And that also means that it's costing us more because we are producing more. I mean, there is cost in terms of putting in a solar system, commercial solar s systems, and that is what is that's the basis of them going to the PUC and saying we need more money from the consumer. That's why we are paying so much, and we have so much energy that's going to waste, that's being sold to other utilities or being or paying other utilities to take the power.
I mean, it is cray z.
And according to Gavin Newsom, and we're going way back, California has to be nett net energy, no more emissions, fossil fuel emissions by twenty thirty five. And you know what, the number one way we can do this, the easiest, the cheapest way to produce zero emissions.
Is through solar power.
So using solar power, we're going to be able to hit by twenty thirty five. We're going to be able to hit that level no fossil fuel emissions producing power. But wait a minute, right now, we have too much and we haven't hit we haven't hit that level yet, So how are we going to get there using more solar power? When we have too much solar power that has to be given away or paid for.
To have other utilities do this?
Arizona, they get sixty nine million dollars a year in savings or we pay them.
I mean, it is completely crazy.
We have too much solar. Other states are getting the benefit I'm still paying insane rates for power, which is why I have solar, so therefore I'm not using it. And then I found something. As you know, I have an EV I have an electric vehicle. And so here's what I learned, especially now that I'm living in high end utility land, is I charge it during the day.
That's it.
I don't try to use anything at night because all of us are on the grid at night. So it has it has been reversed. Now, remember when you were told use run your appliances at night, not during the day. Now it's run your appliances during the day and not at night because energy costs are so expensive and we have too much of it and you're paying a fortune. I looked at my bill before I switched over to daytime charging.
I go, how is this possible? This is crazy? This is half a mortgage payment. It's a weird Where do we live in? I want to move over to earthquakes Southern California.
We're hitting a seismically active this year, more so than in decades. And we still have a ton of those buildings that are called soft story apartment buildings, a ton of those, and those are the ones that have carports underneath them, and they have those poles that hold up the building where the car ports where you part the car.
And you know, they're old, really old, and they're.
Not particularly safe. And guess what happens in a major earthquake, Well, they can collapse because they're not really strong. Have you seen on the Hollywood Hills where you see those houses where the poles go down thirty feet and it's maybe a pole six inches in diameter and it's holding up the house. You know, look at that, you go, earthquake comes, they snap. Well, they haven't snapped, but there are some
that have. Nineteen ninety four earthquake, the on oh my god, Northridge quake, and my parents lived right on Partheni in the middle of it at the time, and there was a building I think in receieda a soft a soft building, soft story apartment building that pancaked. Sixteen people died, literally the whole it all came right down.
And sixteen people in there were crushed.
And since then cities have said, Okay, we have to retrofit, we have to make these buildings safer. Now.
Is it easy to do.
Well, it's expensive to do because you put in a much more robust in terms of the posts that hold the building up. And then the walls have to be retrofitted and they have to be stronger. I mean I did that when I bought a house in Hancock Park adjacent I had a duplex there and I had to retrofit the whole thing. I had to pull, I had to put new, I had to put. What did I do? I'm trying to remember what I did. Bolts into the foundation and shore up the walls, and it cost me
a fortune. And therein lies the problem, and that is what does a build building owner do? Because some cities are said, you have to do it. There's laws on the books. La has a law on the book. San Francisco has a law on the books that you have X number of years and that time is here that those soft story buildings have to be retrofitted because in a big quake they go down and people die.
Loma Prieta quake.
If I'm not remembering, if I'm remembering what it was called, Yeah, Loma Prieta nineteen eighty nine, the ground four floor of several apartment buildings.
In San Francisco crumbled and people died.
So there are cities where they say no, thank you, We're not going to deal with it at all. Alhambra, Monterey Park, South Pasadena no plans to retrofit those apartment buildings. Los Angeles, plenty of plans. Beverly Hill, big plans. Matter of fact, Beverly Hills has two hundred and twenty nine of these soft story buildings and only forty two of them.
Have not been retrofitted. I mean, they're going balls to the walls. LA.
We made big progress in the city of Los Angeles, where I don't live anymore, and LA has more than nine thousand out of twelve thousand of these apartment buildings have been retrofitted, and officials experts have known for generations about this structural flaw. I mean they know it, they see it. You know, we know a fair amount about earthquakes. The big issue about earthquakes is figure out when they're happening. They can figure out how deep they are, they can
figure out how long they last was fairly easy. They can figure out how much the earth moves, and it's not hard than to extrapolate how much damage there is going to be. I mean, the information is there, So what are they going to do? Well?
Here's the big problem.
I don't think anybody's against retro fitting. You want a safe apartment building, and these apartment buildings are among the least expensive to rent. These are very old, and they're on these posts with the car ports. They're not garages. I mean, you've seen these all over town and they are the least about there. And this is where people who don't have a lot of money live. So what does the building owner do? Well, the law says that
the owner has to retro fit. What does it cost to retro fit a typical building, a soft story building, well from a low of eighty thousand to one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. How does a mom and pop organization, small company, a couple that have two or three or one up our small apartment building and they rely on that for their income, how do they come up with eighty thousand dollars? And that's exactly what the Apartment Association
of Greater Los Angeles says. These mandatory retrofits are brutally expensive and they get forced mom and pop owners to sell their properties. Now, on the other side of it is saying, hey, you're responsible for putting on new roofs when you need to. If there's a leak, you have to repair it. If there's an issue as to heating, you have to repair it. If there is an issue as to plumbing problems and pipes bursting, you have to repair it. It's the cost of doing business as an owner.
And so is this, well, there's a contradiction. How do you deal with this? Right, it's either a worse or worser situation. You're damned if you do, You're damned if you don't.
So does that mean.
That the only owners of these buildings have to be the big players who then have the money to retro fit, who then have the money and they jack up prices like crazy after a retro fit because they put X number of dollars in and the law actually allows the owners to take money out to charge extra for that.
I mean, there's no easy answer here. There really isn't.
But I will tell you that retro fitting, and I've done this is no fun. You know, the house that I had, the duplex that I had when they built that place nineteen twenty seven, is when the place was built beautiful. The home was not even attached to the foundation. It literally just sat on the foundation. These were raised foundations, they weren't slab, and if there was an earthquake where it just slipped the foot, property's gone, totally gone.
It's totaled. Can't live in it, which is why I had to.
Bolt down, and I mean put in bolts that were a foot and a half by an inch a foot and a half tall by an inch and a half in diameter, straight down through the foundations and really bolt this down and had to fix and shore up all these cripple walls by adding a ton more shoring.
And it was thousands and thousands of.
Dollars, and there were people in my neighborhood that couldn't afford it.
They had to sell the property. No easy answer here, none at all. I just want to make you feel better.
You know, either you're gonna lose your property, or you're gonna go bankrupt, or you're gonna die, or maybe all three that works too. A story I want to share with you, and this comes out of Wall Street Journal, and this is right up my alley. Because first of all, you know, you know, I loved talking about money, and I love talking about economics, and I love talking about and just how we live and how it's changed. So one of the milestones of being adult.
An adult is, if you're lucky, you.
Can buy a house, although those days are much more limited than they used to be. And getting married, well, what's new now, Well, couples decide not to marry at all. A lot of those others say they're willing to delay a wedding.
That happened to me.
I didn't get married till I was thirty six, mainly because it took me a very long time to get anybody who say yes to me. And in reality, buying a home is actually more of a commitment than getting married. Getting married is fairly easy. And we talk about commitment. You know, I love you, I love you forever, you know, the saying, you know, all the vows that people come up.
With, you know, the crap you do.
You know, I found you know, you know, I love your my soulmate. Okay, yeah, day yeah, y dah. Now let's go eat. That's your typical marriage, sitting down and buying a house. Yes, that's serious stuff. And that is what's going on right now. People are waiting a lot of it because they're just waiting. Because you get married older, you just don't want to deal with it. And how about this, you can't afford it when you're younger. Unmarried couples,
let's start with marriage. In general, unmarried couples amount to more than eleven percent of all US home sales. Over fifty percent of kids that are born today are born to unmarried parents. I mean, I'm such I grew up such a conservative. The thought of having a kid outside of wedlock was anethma.
How do you do that?
It never even occurred to me that those are only bad people that did that. Today there are more of bad people than there are of what I perceived as good people getting married or having kids.
Out of wedlock.
And people that are out of wedlock having kids, they're out of wedlock, they're not married. And so the number of people that are buying together and not married has skyrocketed. So here's what couples have to look at the risk the running relationship could blow up, something could happen to one partner, and without that marriage certificate, living situations and
finances are more likely to fall into limbo. One of the things, people that are married stay together more often than people just live together, and it's more complicated when you buy a house, because if you're looking at two incomes and all of a sudden you break up, it gets to be a mess. So couples are looking at the purchase of a house much more.
Seriously than even getting married. Getting married doesn't mean anything anymore. We're very little.
So couples that even are getting married first look at the house, and a lot of these couples ask for down payments for help financially in lieu of traditional wedding gifts. Now, I always told my daughters that I would help them with their down payment on their.
House when they wanted to buy something.
The cost of housing is so expensive, mortgages are so expensive. I'm getting the credit for helping them, and I never will have to help them. This is the elevator philosophy of life that I have told you many times.
You're in an elevator by yourself.
Someone is running to you as the doors close, and you start pounding on the panel with your finger so they can see that. And of course you don't actually press the elevator door open.
Of course that's out of the question. So here's what happens.
The door closes and you get credit for trying to keep the door open, which you never have, so you get all the benefits and not only closing the door in their faces, but getting credit for being a good guy. That is what I'm doing with a mortgage with my children. Of course I will help you. I have the money set aside, knowing there is no chance they will ever qualify for a mortgage, so I'll never have to worry about coughing up the money, which means that the money that I have saved is going for.
Vacations for me. Thank you.
It is a real thing with people looking at their finances. Also, the cost of weddings have gotten insane. I just threw a little wedding for my daughter who wanted a wedding and she wanted the traditional going down the aisle dance with their dad, you know, get dressed up with it at the Anaheim White House, which is spectacular, and Bruno put that together, actually Silvano the general manager there, and it was absolutely lovely. I told my daughter, this is it.
You will never have a birthday present again. You will never have an anniversary adversary present, you will never have a holiday president that present. This just did it for the rest of your life. I mean, it is completely insane. I'm not a big fan of weddings. I'm hoping my other daughter. What I'm going to offer her is tell you what the money that I spent for your sister, I'll cut that in half and write you the check.
Okay, I'll start negotiating with her. Now do you.
Want the money or do you want the marriage? Which door do you want? Door number one? Door number two? And I think she's smart enough to say, you know what, Dad, I'm going to get married in law. I'm going to Elope, go to Las Vegas and have an Elvis impersonator marry me.
Now there's a problem there, and you know what that problem is.
There are no more Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas marrying people because the Elvis estate has put a stop to all of that. Has destroyed the Las Vegas marriage business.
It really has.
By the way, that's just an aside, which you know, what does that have to do with the story?
Absolutely nothing. But then again, hey, welcome to the Handle show in the morning. Okay, we're done. I think we're done with that one. Okay.
Now I love talking about this so security because so security is one of those issues that when it first came out in the middle of the depression and FDR puts social security into effect. The fight over social security was extraordinary. The conservatives, the Republicans in Congress went nuts.
This is socialism and it is how do we do that?
Well?
Today it's the third rail.
Can you imagine can you imagine a politician running we have to get rid of of social security? Try that one on for size and so security and it's a different way of looking at it. People that are our age, baby boomers and millennials, security is a given.
We're gonna get our social security.
We're a little upset that instead of sixty five, we now retire at sixty seven. All right, that's no fun working two years longer before retirement kicks in full retirement.
But we know we're gonna get it.
We know we're going to get our adjusted so security check every year for inflation.
Except that the Social Security.
Fund is running out of money and they figure it's going to go broke by twenty thirty five.
We've done this before, Well it's going to go broke.
So they are only three ways of dealing with SoC security so it doesn't go broke.
It's only three.
One is to increase social Security taxes. It used to be pennies. Yes, now I mean it is a chunk of money.
Okay.
So one is raising your so scurity taxes. The other one is retiring even further on, which makes a lot of sense because so Security when it was created, you retired at sixty five, okay, and you died at sixty six. People didn't live past sixty five. Today people live forever. My mother lived till she was ninety eight years old.
She retired early.
On Social Security because she decided she was going to pull her Social Security, so she retires at sixty two, which you can do. So it was sixty to thirty four years. Thirty six years of her monthly check. That cost us me, cost you a fortune, and she didn't even have the good grace to die a few years earlier to help us out. I asked her, I go, mom, do us a favor. Okay, you're costing me a fortune, die already.
Nope.
By the way, she literally she should have lasted until she was about ninety three medically, but she lasted until she was ninety eight just to screw with me. And she did a brilliant job, I might add, all right, So cut those security taxes, or retire at a later age, or decreased benefits, one of those three or any one of those is going to help. And the problem is people now and it's sort of a realistic view for us.
The thought of Social Security benefits being cut is an ethma to people that are moving up, realize, you know what you can't rely on, soise security. Although the amount of money that people are saving for their retirement keeps on decreasing. And this is ten pounds and a five pound back.
Because if the.
Benefits are going to decrease, which are probably not, if the retirement age is going to go far longer, which I think it is, something's going to give and people don't think of what they need to retire. Just to give you an idea, okay of retirement and what you need. If you're getting a normal return on investments, you are now making fifty thousand dollars a year, Let's say you're making seventy five thousand dollars a year, and your Social
Security then kicks in when you're retire. And let's say a really good retirement, let's say reasonable retirements three grand a month if you've been working your whole life and have gotten you know, a reasonable living. So let's call it three thousand, let's call it twenty five hundred dollars a month. Social Security checks, well, that's thirty thousand dollars. So now you have to make up forty five thousand dollars to make up to live on the same level
as seventy five thousand. You have to have a million dollars in the bank or investments, kicking off enough percentage four and a half, five and a half percent to where you can still keep that amount in the bank throwing off investment dollars, throwing off income, and even that is going to get swept away by inflation. You do that for twenty years and you're gonna be able to buy one bucket of KFC with your money.
But you have to start at a million dollars in the bank. Yeah, who has that?
Not too many people, Not too many people. So we have a very skewed look at social security. Which is why one of the businesses that really good growing business is you buy old dumpsters. You clean them, I mean you really have to scrub them out, you know, so they're really clean.
You put in some.
Piping and they're you have housing for so scary recipients.
Welcome to the world. How I made you feel better? Because I really work on that a lot.
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