Navigating a High Rate Market: Buying a Home, Preparing for a Recession and Where to Put Cash with Ben Carlson
Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life,
money, and travel.
I'm Chris Hutchins, I've kind of lost my voice, but I'm excited to have you here today.
Now you may already know that I'm a big fan of the Animal Spirits Podcast, which is all
about the markets and investing, and in light of everything that's been going on recently,
I wanted to invite the show's host and my friend Ben Carlson to join me again today
on the podcast.
Ben's also a financial advisor at RIDHULTS Wealth Management.
He's the author of four books about saving, investing, and money, and he's become one
of my go-tos for questions about investing in personal finance.
If you want to check out our last conversation, it's episode 42, but today we're going to
talk about the state of the market, the regional banking collapse, interest rates and inflation,
and what we should all be doing about them, including anyone who's looking to buy a home
right now.
I am really excited about this one, so let's jump in right after this.
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Ben, thanks for being here again.
Glad to be back.
There is a lot going on in the economy right now.
We're recording this on May 18th.
Seems like everyone I know, both now and for the last three or four years, has been saying,
oh, there's a recession coming.
We got to prepare for it.
I feel like I keep hearing this message.
Maybe that's just what everyone is always saying, but how would you describe the current
state of the markets?
It'd be the most telegraph for session in history, right?
If and when it happens, everyone can say I predicted it because that's what everyone's
been doing for a couple of years now.
It's a weird time because the economy remains stronger than anyone could have imagined
with a Fed going from 0% to 5% on rates.
If that happens, which this is like the fastest rate hike we've seen in history, most textbooks
would say, okay, the economy is going to slow down.
And it's that much harder to borrow and rates go that much higher in such a short period
of time.
The economy has to go into recession.
And the Fed has wanted people to basically lose their jobs to slow things down a little
bit.
And it hasn't really worked as much as they would like.
The unemployment rate has actually fallen since the Fed started raising rates, which is not
what you would expect.
So the economy is way stronger, I think, than anyone would have imagined in terms of people
still wanting to spend in the unemployment rate remaining low.
It's as low as it's been since 1969.
Everyone's waiting for the next shoot to drop, but as of right now, things remain okay, especially
considering the environment that no one would have expected things remain this strong.
Yet here we go.
And without context, why is the Fed acting so aggressively right now or has been to raise
rates in an unprecedented speed?
They just don't want inflation to be entrenched.
That's what happened in the 1970s.
Inflation was here for a while.
It had started rising in the 60s.
And then throughout the 70s, we had like this 15 year period where inflation was basically
above 4 or 5%.
It got as high as 15% in the early 80s.
And the problem is once the psychology of inflation takes hold and you start to think things
are going to be more expensive in the future.
So I'm going to buy stuff now and I need more money through my employer.
So there's like this wage price spiral where people need more money, which then pushes
up prices more and the Fed doesn't want to get into that sort of psychological situation.
They're just terrified of a 1970s repeat.
There's a lot of reasons.
I think what those fears are a little overblown, but high inflation hasn't happened in this
country for the past 70 years.
That's like the one period we can point to, right?
The 1970s and the early 1980s.
So they're just deathly afraid of that situation happening again.
So they want to stop it before it gets really ingrained in our psyche.
Has it worked?
Is that risk off the table or is it still looming?
So inflation is still higher than most people would like.
It's still running at 5% or so annualized over the last 12 months.
The Fed wants it to be at 2%.
I think it's going a lot slower than they thought.
But if you look at the past inflation doesn't just all of a sudden go from 9% to 2% to
10% in a straight line.
It takes some time to work this stuff off.
And so I don't think it's as easy as most people would like it to be.
The Fed seems to think they'd still have a little bit of work to do because they're
keeping rates higher and potentially rating them even more.
I know there's been a handful of things on a macro level.
There's been this debt ceiling conversation.
There's been regional banks collapses.
How much are those totally separate factors or part of all of what's going on?
It's one of those unintended consequences thing.
The Fed raised rates because they wanted to slow the economy and that would have maybe
thrown some people out of a job and that would have slowed demand.
That's the idea.
They want people to spend a little less.
So the prices stop going up.
The unintended consequences.
These banks all purchased bonds at ultra low rates.
The generation of low rates we saw 10-year treasury yields were at 1%, which is as low
as they've ever been.
And banks bought them and the Fed raising rates is high.
Basically messed up the balance sheets of these banks.
So that was one of the unintended consequences of it.
It seems like we've learned some lessons from 2008 and that we're not just going to let
contagion happen from that sort of stuff.
This is a completely different situation from that and that we're not dealing with a bunch
of credit problems and people overextending themselves in the housing market and that
sort of thing.
So this isn't 2008, but I do think if you put some truth serum into the Fed officials,
they'd be surprised that this is the way that it played out.
We have a banking crisis before the economy slowed and they've been able to clean it up
so far without many huge problems.
Yeah, I mean, as an SVB customer, I could say that they were like four days of angst
and anxiety.
Yeah, you had a bad weekend, right?
But like at the end of the day, everything was there by more who just still with SVB,
or I guess with First National, I think, or whatever the name of the new bank is, but
it kind of all worked.
Well, I'm going to ask you, what's that like now?
Is it just the same thing, basically?
Do you feel like anything has changed?
It's interesting because SVB was kind of a reputational bank.
Like the reason most people banked with SVB was that they just had great relationships
in Silicon Valley.
And it wasn't actually the migration from SVB to First National that made me think,
okay, maybe this isn't the right fit for me anymore.
First citizen, sorry, I just remembered.
First citizens.
There's a lot of first something things.
I know.
I know.
One thing I gave that by the way is that people wanted to be the number one ST at some point
in the phone book.
And then they were like, well, now that that doesn't matter, we don't need to spell it
with a number.
But digression, people that I've heard that work at SVB are now, and this is very anecdotal,
but like kind of not treated like first class citizens at the new institution.
I like so.
Which we've kind of heard from a few people, which led me to say, look, if this new bank
isn't going to treat their employees great, like, how are they going to treat their customers
in the long run?
So we were kind of benefits of the JP Morgan Chase crazy weekend of let's go steal all
the SVB customers.
So we took the bait there and moved over.
There wasn't really any incentive other than moving over.
And so we still have our mortgage there.
I still have an auto ACH three days before the mortgage payment to move the mortgage payment
into the SVB account so that it's ready for the mortgage withdrawal.
But other than that, I think we've kind of fully migrated away.
But not for reasons that I'm worried about the money.
I'm not worried that money's going to go away.
They've done a good job showing that up.
And people worried about, oh, we're going to lose faith and trust in the whole banking
system.
Probably not.
It's probably more these bigger banks are just going to get bigger.
And you're probably not going to see as many perks as you were getting at an SVB kind
of bank as you would have in the past.
And I think that's probably what the knock on effects are going to be of just JP Morgan
and Bank of America.
People are just going to feel safer having their money at one of these bigger banks.
And I think that's probably what's going to happen.
But no, like the FDIC thing I'd never been through or witnessed what happened when a
bank collapsed, it blew my mind that in what seemed like 24 to 48 hours, a bank effectively
collapsed was protected and funds were made available.
If you'd asked me with no context, how long it would take a government entity to solve
that problem, I would have said months.
And then when it was like over the weekend, it didn't even take one full business day.
They almost snapped their fingers because they could see it.
It was a social media bank run.
It happened so fast.
The old story from back in the day, the panic of 1907 was JP Morgan told his bank tellers
to count the money out as slow as possible to stop a bank run.
So people couldn't get their money out fast enough.
And obviously you can't do that today because people can just push a button.
So the Fed has to act that fast, I think.
That's almost one of the positive externalities of the 2008 crisis is they realize this stuff
can happen so fast that we have to step in right away.
We can't let contagion spread and go from bank to bank because that's just chaos.
I was still surprised.
No matter how fast they bought, they needed to act.
I was actually surprised that they could act.
Yes.
The government entities are not known for their speed.
Yeah, they're not handcuffed.
But what's the average investor right now supposed to do any differently after watching
regional banks collapse?
Do we change anything?
Probably not.
And 1% of bank accounts across the country have more than $250,000 in cash, saying in
a bank.
And if you have that much money sitting at a bank and it's earning the 0.1% that you
can get at a savings account at a brick and mortar bank, then you're making mistake before
this.
That was something that should have been remedied before this whole thing happened.
So I think now you've seen a huge shift, a bunch of money is going into money market
funds, in treasury bills, in online banking accounts.
That's the big first step people should have been taking for years is don't have your money
sitting in a savings account at a bank because they're not going to pay you anything.
You have to have it somewhere else.
In the past, you might have been able to earn 50 basis points or 1% or something like that,
which no one really cared about.
But now we're talking 3, 4, 5% because short-term rates are higher.
That's the only thing people need to worry about is just if your cash is sitting in a
checking account earning nothing, then it's way easier now to earn some sort of yield
that you couldn't in the past.
I want to come back to that yield.
But what about from the market standpoint?
You've been saying rates are rising.
The goal is to potentially create even a small recession to curb inflation knowing that's
something that the Fed's trying to do.
Are you doing anything differently?
Are you advising clients?
Do anything differently with their investment portfolio?
The hardest question to always answer about the markets is what's priced in.
We had a big bear market last year where the S&P 500 felt 25% and NASDAQ 100 was down
well over 30%.
Was that bear market pricing in a recession already?
Has the market already sort of digested this?
We already expect there to be a mild recession or was that just we were dealing with higher
rates last year and higher inflation and that made the equity markets fall?
So that's the hardest question to answer.
And even if we do go into a technical definition of a recession, which is all these different
checkpoints that the National Bureau of Economic Research creates, by the time we actually
know we're in a recession, it's probably going to be too late in the stock market all
the bottomed anyway.
I think that's the hard part about timing of these things is that especially during a
slowdown, the stock market in the economy are never going to fully line up.
And the weirdest thing could be we could go into a recession and the stock market looks
over that valley and sees, listen, we've already had all this pain from higher inflation and
we've already priced in a slowdown and the stock market may just take off before any
of that even happens.
That's the hard part here.
Obviously, the other side of it would be the economy slows more than people are expecting
because the Fed went too far and we have this hard landing and the stock market does roll
over again.
It's not as a possibility, but I think you could see some sort of counterintuitive situation
where the stock market actually does fine even if the economy slows because we've already
priced it in.
It's why I haven't touched anything in my portfolio really for the last handful of years, if not
decade because I don't know.
I just, every time I've tried to catch a falling knife or make a bet that I thought was going
to do well, if it wasn't something I really felt like I understood, I've always seemed
to regret that decision.
My general guiding principle is the stock market usually goes up but sometimes it goes
down and that could be for any number of reasons.
I think the stats that I've used are over any one year period, we're up three out of
every four years on average.
It doesn't follow that exact pattern, but that just means if you were a strategist on
Wall Street and you had to predict every year what's the stock market going to do, 75%
of the time, if you decide it's going to go up, you would be right.
I think the people get stuck constantly trying to predict the downside and what's going to
cause it.
I think if you just let yourself understand that I know the downside there is going to
happen, but most of the time the stock market is going to go up, corporations are going
to make more money, they're going to pass those profits along in terms of share buybacks
or dividends or profits or all these things instead of trying to think through the next
recession.
I think people are probably better off preparing for personal finance as opposed to their
portfolios when it comes to recession because that's way more impactful.
What does that mean preparing your personal finances for recession?
Well, whether it's a recession or not, if your income is impacted by your current situation
and you have a problem for most people losing your job, that's not a recession, that's a
depression, that's a huge impact on your whole life.
Just understanding what your prospects are and how safe you feel at your job or how steady
your income is.
You have a fixed salary earned, you have a variable income that could change if things
slowed down.
I think understanding these things, what is your fallback in terms of not only emergency
savings but any sort of other liquid cash that you could tap?
Is all of your cash tied up in your house or in a mortgage or do you have other ways
of accessing cash if something should go wrong?
Because we've seen in the past you being on the west coast notice better than anyone,
technology went from being just bulletproof as an industry and things were going great
and then all of a sudden the tech sector seemed to be the only place that was in a recession
and people were losing jobs and trying to figure out what it all meant.
I think having that fallback plan is always a good idea regardless of whether the country
is in a recession or not because the economy as a whole can impact you but a lot of it
is personal in terms of what is impacting you and your day to day and your own personal
economy is a lot more important.
I have a couple thoughts there but I want to ask about the tech recession if you will.
I know a lot of people were holding stocks that were down 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 close to
in some cases 100% not quite there.
I've heard a lot of people say I don't want to sell all these things that are down 90%
because when things get a little bit better they're going up.
My response to them has been yeah but if you could erase the middle and look at how
have they performed over five years it might not actually look as bad as you feel it is
right now.
If this company is a mess and their stocks down great but with the entire tech industry
down is that a reversion to normal or should people still be holding out hope that it's
going to kind of correct?
Well that's probably one of the biggest biases we have especially when trading individual
stocks is anchoring and you say as long as I just break even then I'll sell or especially
this a lot of people are looking at the higher watermark and assuming that means break even
but that to your point you had massive gains for some of those.
If you've been in it for five, seven years you had massive gains running up to that and
one of the hardest things to understand about catching a falling knife or just holding a
falling knife is a lot of stocks just never come back.
Cisco peaked in 2000 and still hasn't come back to those same levels.
General Electric was the biggest company in the world through the whole 90s and is now
down 75% from those levels.
I think the number from a JP Morgan study a few years ago called Agonyne Ecstasy said
that like 40% of all US stocks going back to 1980 experienced a 70% draw down or worse
and never recovered.
So even though the stock market as a whole will continue to charge higher because the
new winners will come up and make up for those losers a lot of stocks just never come back
and I think that's the hard part to understand and it's an impossible question to answer
like am I being disciplined or am I being delusional?
You think I'm being Warren Buffett because I'm holding here but then you don't know like
well wait a minute this stock is down 80% and I can't tell if I'm being delusional or
disciplined so I think the first part is just having it so that one stock or that handful
of stocks aren't your whole portfolio.
You're not so concentrated that it's going to ruin you if it never comes back and you're
just sitting there like waiting and waiting.
So I think just position sizing and having those individual bets be not your whole portfolio
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That's part of it is just not being overly concentrated.
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So on one end of the spectrum you hold one stock it's down a lot like you said there's
a decent chance that stocks not coming back.
On the whole market side if you hold VTI you hold even the S&P you could probably feel
reasonably good that it's coming back.
How do you feel about an industry like tech in this example like if you were holding a
basket of 100 stocks or an index fund focused on tech that's taken an outsized beating do
you treat it more like a stock or do you treat it more like the market?
Probably somewhere in the middle for sure but you can have a sub sector like the energy
industry for the whole 2010s was just getting slaughtered because oil prices were coming
down interest rates were low inflation was low and as the stock market took off the energy
industry was just doing horribly and tech was doing great but you could have been in
energy industry and just gotten crushed.
Same thing if you picked a sub sector like regional banks for the past 10 or 15 years
right you've made basically nothing even though the market is up three or four hundred
percent.
So I do think that the tech sector is so much bigger now than it was in the past it's
not a little piece of it like the regional banks are right.
The fact that it's so much bigger and just part of our lives would give me a little
more confidence there that if you're holding the sector but we saw after 2000 it took the
NASDAQ I don't know 12 or 13 years to completely come back and that was after an 80 percent
crash so that was way worse than this one but there's nothing that says focusing on a
whole sector means you're going to be okay and totally diversified.
It's not like a sector is going to go out of business so that's different than holding
an individual stock.
If you work in the tech sector and you have 100 percent of your money invested in the
tech sector that's a double whammy potentially and I think having some diversification outside
of it for your investments is a pretty good idea.
That makes a lot of sense.
I also wonder at what point we stop calling it the tech sector because it seems like is
Peloton a tech company is Zillow a tech company like there are all these companies that have
websites and people interact with them online but I would actually love to see someone like
abandon the concept of the tech sector and bundle these companies into their kind of
more normalized sector maybe their sub sector now just become the major thing and then all
of a sudden I wonder how this looks.
That's the thing is like Amazon is I think technically considered a consumer company
right in the way that they break out their gig sectors of the S&P and Facebook is a communications
company not a tech company so yeah the way that they've doing it it is kind of mashed
together.
I think really boiled it down I think if you included those kind of companies I think
it's probably more like 40 percent of the S&P 500 is made up of tech companies to your
point that's a pretty good chunk of the pie so the diversification maybe is a little bigger
than it has been in the past.
I think it probably would have helped earlier if we had done it because there would be companies
that I think were getting these valuations and multiples because everyone assumed they
were tech companies and then once you kind of peel back the onions you look at earnings
they're going public you're like wait was lift a technology company or was it a transportation
company because it was valued like a tech company maybe it shouldn't have been and once
that kind of all corrected my unfortunate belief is that the small portfolio I have of
some individual tech stocks I'm not waiting for it to kind of correct as much as it declined.
In some ways I'm kind of in the process of just getting out and maybe one of the ways
to answer that question in terms of holding these things again because there are going
to be some of these companies that fell 60, 70 percent or whatever Facebook is a good one
that's already come back quite a bit but some of these are going to look like unbelievable
buying opportunities in the future you're going to look back and you go man I could
have bought that stock down 70 or 80 percent from the highs.
I guess a good way to frame this for yourself is would I be willing to put more money in
now or if I was starting today from scratch and I'm all in cash 100 percent of my portfolio
is in cash would I buy these stocks again because that's the opportunity cost thing
that you're always asking yourself is there a better opportunity out there in terms of
investable assets and if you wouldn't buy those stocks again today or you wouldn't start
into them because you're coming from cash maybe that's a good way to answer how disciplined
you should be in terms of holding them.
And when it comes to that opportunity cost there's something that I've really been struggling
with processing lately and I'm hoping you can guide me and anyone else with a question
historically for at least the last I don't know five ten years no one's really ever thought
of cash as an asset that would even come close to the kind of long term portfolio you'd
expect from the markets but I worked a wealth rep for a while you kind of talk about the
was it five to ten who knows what you want to call your portfolios long term expected
return there's risk of volatility in that number but with cash at such a high rate right
now is there an argument that should actually be a part of your investment portfolio instead
of just the place you park some emergency funds on the side.
The way I think about this is what part of your portfolio are you talking a young person
with 100 percent invested in stocks and they're going to say I'm going to take a certain percent
of this and put it in cash because it's earning five percent and it's way less volatile and
it's just easy money I'll clip that five percent or do you have a fixed income portfolio where
you're in an 80 20 portfolio right your 80 percent stocks and 20 percent bonds and does
it make more sense to take that 20 percent of bonds and just put it on cash that's an
easy one for me like that you could go from bonds to cash I think that's a pretty simple
decision because you're earning more in cash because the Fed is Jack's short term rates
up so much and long term rates haven't followed suit by going into cash or short term whatever
you know money markets or CDs you take away the interest rate components so any sort of
variability in movements because if rates rise even more bonds will get hurt still right
so if you're in cash you don't have that interest rate risk if you're in a bond piece
to cash that's an easy decision for me that's a no-brainer but if you're going from stocks
to cash now that's hard because now you're really sort of timing the market and the problem
is let's say we do have this recession everyone is predicted in 12 months or so we go into
recession by that point the Fed's not going to leave rates at 5 percent the Fed's going
to lower rates let's say they bring rates back to 2 percent your cash yield immediately
goes from 5 percent to 2 percent when the Fed lowers rates right so now you're sitting
there and okay I took 20 percent of the stocks and I put it into cash it was way easier of
a decision at 5 percent now it's two now what do I do and I think that's the hard part about
trying to time it with money that's in risk assets is I think you have to figure out what
your exit plan is and maybe it's well if stocks fall 10 percent I'll buy some more from cash
and I'll leg back in or whatever it is but I think you have to have an exit plan to determine
is this money going to be in cash for a long time or is it just for a short-term trade
and I think that's the hard part is determining how long that money sits in cash for you let's
say I make a rule right now I'm like okay when rates drop below 3 percent I put it all
back in the market do you think that there's going to be some type of correlation positive
or negative with if rates do drop from 5 to 2 percent is there something that's likely
happening in the market at the same time or is it you know who knows that's the worry
if rates fall and people decide okay the stock market's more looks better to me in the stock
market front runs it and you miss a 25 percent gain in three months or something that's the
problem and then the hard part about sitting in cash and market timing in general is first
you have to be right twice you have to get out at the right time and get back in and getting
back in is usually harder and the funny thing is it's hard in both directions because if
the market falls 20 percent from here in your city and cash you're patting yourself in the
back and you're going who I miss some of that with some of that cash I'm sitting on I'm doing
great but then you become wedded to that cash you think to yourself well it's just going
to get worse right to your point you have to have rules in place otherwise you're just
going to sit in that cash forever you're never going to go back I can't tell you how many
people we talked to in 2013 2014 15 who said I went to cash in 2008 I thought it was a
genius I never got back in that's the hard part is getting back in the other part is the
stock market goes up 20 percent and you see it getting away from yourself and you go oh
shoot I miss that now I can't get bigger now I got to wait till falls and whatever keeps
going up more right so that's the problem it's just a psychological game so if you're
going to do that then I think you have to have some hard and fast rules in place ahead of
time I'm going to put half of this back in if the stock market falls 10 percent from
here 20 percent or if the market rises from here I'm going to dollar cost average once
a month for six months or whatever it is I think you have to have some hard and fast
rules because otherwise it's going to play head games with you but it does sound like
historically rates drop people think borrowing is cheaper companies want to spend more the
market goes up I'm not going to say you're going to be certainly correct but if rates
do drop to 2 percent historically more often than not the market goes up and if you miss
that then getting that extra few percent for a handful of months or even a year is probably
not worth missing out on that swing the good news is unless we have a calamity event it's
not like the Fed is going to go overnight from 5 to 2 right they're going to go down in a
stair step approach they might go down in bigger increments if things get really bad but it's
not going to go immediately from 5 to 2 it could go from 5 to 4 and a half to 4 it would
take some time unless something really gets broken in the economy does that mean that
like you said unless something really gets broken we could probably expect these rates
at least in the let's call it 2 plus percent for at least another year or how are you thinking
about how long we might have rates or could it be 10 years it's the Fed keeps saying higher
for longer but obviously that all depends on the economy but I think going back to a
0 percent world seems pretty far fetched at this point that was coming out of 2008 crisis
trying to get that back up and running again and then the pandemic really brought rates
to levels that we didn't think were possible so I think a world of 2 to 3 percent rates
would make more sense to me for something that's normal if that is a thing as opposed
to going back to 0 percent I do think that makes a little more sense assuming inflation
and falls and that's the other thing here if you really wanted to get technical with
it someone would say great you're giving me 5 percent nominal rates but real rates are
zero because inflation is 5 percent so if I just it for inflation it's 0 percent anyway
so what am I really getting here and that's the problem is if inflation falls you'd expect
rates to come down with it eventually it's unfortunate you're not going to earn 5 percent
if inflation is that too it's probably not going to be that good of a deal so if inflation
falls rates probably fall too.
Okay and we're talking about these rates we've talked about a couple examples of where to
put money I bonds were all the rage when you're locking in these really high rates we still
have some inflation but given the rate hikes for the Fed is that even a thing that you're
seeing people get excited about anymore?
The yields aren't nearly as juicy as they were they get up to as high as what over 9
percent I think they based on the previous 6 months worth right and so now the yields
are 4.3 percent and you can get more than 5 percent in T-bills you can get well over
4 percent at a lot of places in terms of online savings or cash management so yeah I think
the I bonds had their day in the sun and I think a lot of people were willing to go through
the hassle of using treasury direct which was a website that felt like it was from 1994
and I know a lot of people told me they had problems and you were capped at the amount
of money you could put in and there was penalties if you pulled the money out early and all these
things it was worth it to jump through those hoops when you could get 9 plus percent but
at 4.3 percent now that we're back on par with other things it probably is not as advantageous.
The way it worked was you locked it in for 6 months and then it reset based on whatever
was happening so and I believe if you take it out within 5 years you get a 3 month
penalty but you have to hold it one year so given the where the rates are now I got to
go look at what rate I'm currently locked into but I think as soon as I hit about 3 months
past a rate under 5 percent I'll probably be pulling all the I bonds stuff out myself.
It made sense but it was a flash in the pan kind of thing I think you know I've seen high
yield savings rates anywhere from there's not you know still you're going to chase you're
getting nothing but you know in the 4 to 5 percent range but with T-bills and tax treatment
for them is there any argument to not be putting all your cash there in some form?
It is higher yields and I've had a lot of people asking me how do I buy actual T-bills?
Let's ask how you buy it isn't even worth it or just buy a short term ETF.
I think ETFs are probably easier because the way it works is a T-bill because it's
so short term it could be 1, 3, 6, 12 months you don't actually get any interest payments
you buy it at a discount and then you get it at par so let's say you wanted a thousand
dollars you would pay 900 or whatever if it's 5 percent maybe pay 950 and then in 3 months
or 6 months or 12 months you'd get a thousand dollars right but there are T-bills that are
already out there that are not new so you have to kind of check the pricing and unless
you've done it before and used a broker to buy bonds like that it's probably a lot
easier to just hit a button and buy an ETF and go that route that's what I've decided
to do.
And the ETF just pays out the dividends from the fact that they're constantly buying
and selling these in that format.
Yes, it's just much easier the rates are pretty low.
Any Vanguard, I shares, Charles Schwab, all these places Fidelity will have short term
treasury bill ETFs.
And the tax treatment whether you buy direct or in the ETF is you still get that advantage?
Yeah, so it's the same deal.
I do think online savings accounts have some benefits as well.
I find it easier to move money in and out of them.
I mean, it's not a big hassle but if you're trading T-bills ETFs in a Roberta Broker
county and you need the money you sell it then you have to wait two or three days for
the money to settle and then you can pull it out.
And so I think there is a little bit of an advantage to an online savings account of
that if you really need the money in like a day or two it's much easier to get.
Yeah, but if you live in California, if you live in New York and you're getting hit with
7, 8, 9, 10% tax rates or higher it seems 5% short term treasuries plus the tax rates.
That's the tax benefit.
It seems hard to beat.
It's not a bad deal.
You're right.
As long as you have money set aside, we talked earlier about the way to prepare for recession.
Maybe it's not as much in your portfolio as your personal finances.
One thing that I've been thinking is, okay, depending on how stable your income is, right?
Like my income now as a creator is based on sponsor revenue and affiliate revenue.
And so the market really does take a turn.
That stuff cuts quick.
Yeah, brands are we're not going to spend anymore budgets are cut.
And so I'm thinking about emergency fund in a way that I didn't when me and my wife both
had employment.
We had jobs where we were probably less likely to get let go just on a whim.
And if we did, we'd probably have some type of severance is emergency fund the kind of
main tenant of preparing your personal finances for that.
And do you ratchet up that number the more you feel like your job's less certain or how
do you think about that?
I think that makes sense.
If you're in an industry where you think it's very cyclical and could have an even bigger
downturn, it's kind of like looking at different between stocks and bonds.
If you're a teacher, you know that you're pretty safe in your job.
You're pretty solid there.
But yeah, if you're in a cyclical industry, like technology or energy or any sort of variable
income stream, maybe it makes sense to have a bigger buffer there or understand where
other sources you could pull from in the event that something goes wrong.
You have a home equity line of credit you could tap to other areas where you could pull
some money out of it.
I think that makes sense to just have that parachute just in case if you're comfortable
in the past with six months worth of savings in emergency fund, maybe you go up to nine
months or 12 months because it gives you a little bit of extra buffer if you have to
make up for that spending shortfall if you stop making up with money.
One thing I try to remind people is you might know how much you spent and you might track
your spending.
You might have a good sense.
And by all means, if you want to maintain that lifestyle in the circumstance that you
lose your job or lose your income, you can.
But I try to say you could also price your emergency fund as if you made some cuts.
If every year you're the kind of family that takes $20,000 worth of family vacations or
whatever the number is, you could probably cut that to zero if you lost your job.
So your emergency fund doesn't necessarily have to be if it's six months, six months
times however much you spend in a year, it could be six months times however much you
would spend in a year if you made some cuts.
And for some people, there's not a lot of room for cuts.
For some people, there might be a lot.
Yeah, if you lose your job, I bet it's pretty easy to figure out those areas of the variable
spending where you can cut, right?
Okay, this streaming is gone, this streaming is gone, the gym membership, there's probably
ways that you can figure out pretty quickly.
Yeah, those places that you're going to cut back because it just doesn't make sense anymore
in your new situation.
Anything else you think on the personal finance side that people should consider thinking
about in light of what could happen in the economy and the markets?
I think especially for young people, it's never a bad idea to always have some conversations
going in terms of future employment opportunities and talking to people in other areas of industry
and just having a foot in the door if you need to have that conversation because the
whole process of finding a job sometimes can take a lot of time.
So just having conversations, especially if you know that you're not completely locked
in and this is my dream job, I'm going to be here forever.
If something does happen, I think just having those lines of communication always open for
future employment opportunities is a good idea.
And it's a lot less pressure to have a conversation with a company if you're not trying to actively
find a job.
Exactly.
When you're like, hey, I'm looking for a job.
It's like, we're not hiring for this right now.
But if you're just like, hey, I wanted to connect with someone in the industry building
that out, someone's going to build a cool personal CRM for job searching that kind of
lets you do this more proactively in advance.
You probably just asked Chetchi PT to do it all for you now that I think about it.
All right.
Okay.
You mentioned HELOC as a potential thing you could tap.
Let's talk about the other side of the equation.
Rates are high when it comes to buying a home.
I think that people like myself who kind of, I have only been in the market for a home
buying in an incredibly low rate environment for the last decade.
I know lots of people in my peer group that are like, I can't buy a home now.
Rates are so expensive.
Like I got to wait for them to come back down.
Like you got two points something.
I'm not going to pay four or five something.
Is that crazy?
Should people just adjust to the new normal?
Are they so anchored that they'll kind of live in stress for the next 30 years if that's
their at mindset?
Yeah.
Unfortunately, so much of financial success is out of your hands that these sort of things
were luck and timing plays such a huge role.
If you bought a house pre 2021 and had pre 2022 rates, you're in a very good position financially.
Right?
If you bought in any time in the 2010s or prior, you're doing wonderfully in terms of home
equity and having the ability to refinance or have a low rate.
If you're buying now, affordability has never been this bad before.
If you combine housing prices up 40% since the start of the pandemic with mortgage rates
that have doubled off their lows to six to 7%.
And the problem is that I think the Fed assumed if we raise rates and mortgage rates come
up, housing prices have to fall.
Right?
Because if we're combining this insane run up in prices with these newer higher mortgage
rates, the monthly payments, it just for a large percent of the population doesn't make
sense affordability wise.
I'm double whammy of higher prices and higher rates.
The monthly payments alone disqualify a lot of people to be able to afford it.
Plus you have to come up with a much bigger down payment.
And unfortunately, I think a lot of it is probably based on demographics and the fact
that we had all these people with 3% mortgages, the prices aren't coming down nearly as much
as people would have thought.
Again, in a textbook scenario, rates go up prices should come down because so many people
like us are sitting on 3% mortgages going, there's no way in hell I'm getting rid of
this mortgage.
I'm sitting in this house and I'm going to stay no longer.
So what we've had is just all the supply on the market has just vanished essentially.
And so we now have higher prices.
They've come down a little bit in certain areas more than others, but they haven't rolled
over.
Some people were expecting, we're going to see a 2008 type 20% crash in housing prices.
It hasn't happened yet.
Maybe if mortgage rates go to 8% and stay there, it'll happen.
But it hasn't happened yet.
And I think part of that is because all the supply has been sucked out of the market,
anytime there is a house that comes on, there's still all these millions and millions of
millennials who want to buy, who missed their opportunity or just weren't ready and the
timing wasn't right.
They still want to buy and because supply is so low, now it's still hard to buy a house
because the pool of buyers has grown because they've been waiting, but the supply of houses
is down.
So it's almost harder to buy a house now.
I definitely feel for people who are in that situation and trying to buy.
And unfortunately, I think what's going to happen is if rates do fall, say they go from
6.5% to 5% or 4.5% or whatever, I think that's just going to bring more people off
the sidelines.
And maybe that'll be a good thing.
It'll bring out some sellers too.
But we're in a very bad place in terms of if you're a first time home buyer looking to
buy.
If you're someone who's lived in a house and you have all this equity, sure, it'd be
hard to trade up from a 3% mortgage to 5 or 6.
But at least you have that equity to use as a down payment.
If you're coming in completely free and clear of any housing asset, it's a really tough
situation and your only hope is really, I'm going to buy now and then I'm going to refinance
if and when rates fall in the future.
That's the hope.
To me, if I were buying right now, it seemed like the strategy to lower your mortgage payment
would be to do a short duration adjustable rate mortgage because there doesn't seem to
be any benefit to locking in today's rates for 30 years.
Is that right?
Same.
You probably get a little bit of a better rate on adjustable rate and then again, you can
hopefully, if rates fell, then you could refinance again at a lower rate.
That's the hope.
You're rolling the dice that that's going to happen and in that case, a recession, unfortunately,
you'd probably be cheering one on because you'd want lower rates from that, which is
a weird place to be.
I feel for people who are home buyers right now, it's a really, really tough situation
and I can't imagine the stressor under constantly looking and having no inventory in higher
rates and higher prices, it's tough.
Is there anything to do other than the strategy you talked about?
I don't know.
It's really difficult.
I think you just have to make sure you're ready and that you can handle those payments
and some people are going to have to maybe grow into them.
That's a good thing is most people's income goes up over time.
The payments are fixed.
You can grow into them a little bit and hopefully refinance over time if and when rates fall.
That'd be the only silver lining.
Now, I know in the past, we've ended up in housing situations because people want to
buy homes, we want to make it a little easier, let people do these kind of interest only
mortgages with giant balloon payments and things that pop up at years now.
Is there any world where that happens and people start to get really aggressive or banks
not kind of getting as aggressive as they used to to kind of hold back in that situation?
And for context, there was a time where you could put a very little amount down and you
could get an interest only mortgage, but five, 10 years later, you'd have to start paying
the principal and in many cases, your mortgage payment could 2x.
Yeah, big balloon.
So your bet was, oh, my salary is going to go up, but many people's salary didn't go
up enough to support a 2x mortgage payment.
So I'm just curious if that's a strategy that someone could use or whether banks are even
comfortable with that anymore.
That's the biggest difference between now and the 2008 situation and the run up in the
2000s is you were getting these ninja, no income, no job applications.
And now we've never had better credit scores for people who are buying.
Right, so the people who are buying houses who bought houses in the last three to five
years have had much higher credit scores.
We're not talking about subprime lenders or borrowers.
We're talking about people with high credit scores and they were not doing these adjustable
rate mortgages.
They were locking in 30 or fixed rates.
And so the housing market from a balance sheet consumer perspective is really, really
strong and about as well as a place as it's been.
So they're not those problems.
And that was why you saw fire sale prices in 2008 through 2012 as the housing market
creator is people just couldn't afford their payments anymore when they lost their jobs.
It was a double whammy and they had to get out of houses and that's why prices fell.
It would be hard to make a case that prices are going to rise substantially from here
after we've pulled forward so many price gains.
But it's pretty tough to see how housing prices could fall substantially because we don't
have that situation where people are forced out of their mortgage because they're underwater
because even if you're in into trouble, people have a ton of equity in their home, right?
Because prices have risen so far.
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And so if you're on the other side of this and you're like, you know what, I locked
in one of these great mortgages, but circumstances have changed.
I want to move.
We need a different house.
Families grown, family shrunk with such a low rate.
Is it crazy to do anything other than kind of keep it and try to become a landlord?
I feel like people would be faced with this.
I don't want to give up my 2.75 or 3.25% mortgage right now.
Is there any creative way that you can keep that mortgage and like somehow do some kind
of weird sell to own kind of situation?
The running thing is something I think a lot of people did during the pandemic because
they could go from a 3% and then borrow for another 3%.
It's a little harder now because the payment in a new one would be so much higher.
My prediction is I think if rates stay high, one of these banks is going to let you port
over your 3% mortgage to a new one.
I would love to see that.
I don't know how exactly that would work, but I wouldn't be surprised if rates stay
high or if someone tried that as sort of gimmick at least.
But unfortunately, there's not much you can do.
I think eventually life gets in the way and we've had this supply shock where supply
in the housing market is completely dried up.
People get married and they have kids and they die and they move and they have a career.
All the life happens and that's why people move.
I moved in 2017 because my wife and I had twins on the way and we just totally outgrow
our house immediately.
We didn't plan on moving.
It just sort of happened.
The housing market will eventually get to a better steady state because life gets in
the way.
Again, I think people will just sort of plug their nose and move.
I think the number from the Wall Street Journal I saw the other day was people on average
have an extra $270,000 in equity above what they had going into the pandemic.
It would sting to move from a 3% to a 6% mortgage, but if you have that equity built-in that
you can use for it down payment to lower what you're going to have to borrow in the first
place, I think eventually people will say, you know what?
If this is going to make my life easier, I can move to a better school district or a
bigger house for my kids with a backyard or I move somewhere where I'm going to be happier
and I can live somewhere else because I can work remotely.
All these things eventually that will happen.
I think that you're probably in a much better position than someone who is a first-time
buyer right now.
Yeah.
I mean, I go back to what you said earlier about anchoring.
This is what the rates are.
You could dwell on the fact that they're not as good as they were before and harkens
all those times where your parents were like, I used to be able to buy that thing for a
nickel, but at the reality is that's just not the circumstance we're in now and life
needs to move on.
And I did this great interview with Bill Perkins who wrote this book, Die was Zero.
Love that book.
And it's really just changed my perspective of like, look, money's purpose should not
be to just grow money at all costs.
It should be to help maximize your net fulfillment.
If you need a bigger house for your family to be happy, it might cost a little bit more.
You might be paying a higher interest rate, but the end of the day, if you don't have
the money, of course, that's not a good option.
But if you do have the money, think about what's going to maximize your net fulfillment in
life.
We mentioned the heloch before.
Another option is you have to pay 7% now for heloch, probably 7 or 8%.
But if you could pull some of that equity out of your house and do an addition or something,
right?
If you really didn't want a movie and wanted to keep that mortgage, you're going to be
borrowing money just maybe not as much.
You pull $50,000 out of your mortgage or $100,000, remember it is, you add that third
toggle rod or that extra bedroom or fix the backyard up or whatever it is and stay where
you are and remodel a little bit using some equity that you've built up.
Yeah, there's a bunch of companies, I can't remember all the names of them that have
made like ADU, the most like easy process.
We will drop ship a container that is exactly a perfect setup ADU in your backyard.
So if you only have to borrow for that instead of have to get a new loan for something else,
that's actually a really great option.
I like that.
I did an episode with the host from the BiggerPockets real estate podcast.
It was yesterday or two days ago.
I don't know if it'll come out before after this, but we talked all about optimizing the
home buying experience.
We talked a little bit about doing it in this market, renting things out if you can't.
So either go listen to that or expect it, depending on whether it's out.
What was their advice?
Their advice right now that I think is probably the most relevant thing is to not focus on
the hot homes.
It's like there are homes out there who have crappy pictures, who are in a weird place
that's not the most obvious place that everyone wants to be.
Look for something that's been on the market for 30 days.
Maybe it's on the market for 30 days because the kitchen is completely closed off and has
a door.
Well, guess what?
Moving walls is not that expensive, but there are a lot of people that walk into a house
that are like, I don't like this layout.
They just leave.
And so it is so much easier to fix a few walls than it is to compete for the hottest home
in the neighborhood.
Yeah.
Figure out how to not get in a bidding war.
Look for something that's been on the market for a while because those people will probably
be desperate to sell as well because they've probably been sitting there wondering is this
going to happen for me.
Just like you said, now might be a good time for renovation.
The big takeaway I had for people right now is you don't have to necessarily buy a plot
of land and build a whole house, but maybe you could buy a house that's not exactly what
you want and the amount you'd have to put into it might be net total less than what it
would cost otherwise.
And so that was their advice.
But the building thing, if you can, is actually not a bad idea because that's where you're
getting a lot of the breaks now is the builders.
They're not in the position to sit back like us with a 3% mortgage and just wait it out,
right?
The builders have this land that they need to build.
So they've been offering incentives where they'll buy your mortgage rate down for you.
So if you have the money to build, you could be more like a 5% mortgage because the builder
wants to get that done and get it off their books where they'll buy it down from 6.5
to 5.5 or 5 and offer some incentives for you to build as opposed to buying something
that's already there.
I don't think I know anyone who's even bought and built.
So I don't know anything about that process.
It's not a fun process because there's a million things that to pick out, but whatever.
You get a new home out of the deal.
You mentioned HELOC rates going up anything someone should be doing if they have other
kinds of loans right now with rates up, student loans maybe.
Well, the big one is probably auto loans right now, which I think the average is like 8%
on an auto loan.
And that's another place where prices have risen.
So if you could hold out on buying a new car now is about, I mentioned that it's a really
bad time for a first-time home buyer.
It's a really bad time to buy a new car because they still haven't figured out the supply
chain stuff because of a lot of the parts coming from overseas.
But if you drive by a car dealership, you'll see that there's still a lot of empty slots
where cars should be, right?
And with 8% rates and used car prices high, it's not a great time to buy a car.
So if you can make your car last a little longer, try to wait it out in the extra 12,
15, 18 months if you can, that's not a bad idea because going into a new loan, you know,
you're getting three or 4% car loans back in the day too, right?
Now we're talking 8, 9, 10% sometimes for an auto loan.
So if that's something where your car can still make it, but you really want a new car,
it's probably best to wait it out at this point.
It's wild.
I'm looking at the credit union that we got our auto loan from right now and it's at
7.99%.
I will say, do please shop around for auto loans.
Yes.
It is absolutely crazy how much of a better rate you can find looking at a ton of credit
unions all over.
I scoured the internet.
There's this crazy spreadsheet that some Tesla enthusiasts created with like all the
rates from all the credit unions.
I found a diamond in the rough.
And I'm actually looking, we got our loan June last year at 1.99%.
Yeah, and credit unions are a great place for that too.
You don't have to be a member of a specific credit union.
You can almost always find some way to join them.
There was one credit union.
I remember that I think it was the Christian community credit union that had the best possible
rate when we bought a car five years ago, but you needed to submit evidence of tithing
to one of their member churches.
I was like, okay, that one, I can't, that one.
I was like, I would just not feel good trying to meet those requirements across that ethical
boundary for me for many other ones you need to just join or maybe in Palo Alto, the Stanford
federal credit union, you can join by making a $5 donation to the Palo Alto library.
In student loans, is there anything someone who student loans right now needs to be thinking
about?
I don't know a lot about how student loans function in kind of fluctuating rate environments,
but I figured I'd ask.
Well, people in the student loan, they've been able to basically put off their payments
for so long because of the pandemic.
So that's something that's probably just coming back online for people is making their payments
in because they had the ability to put off those payments because of the pandemic.
So I think that's something that the delinquencies for student loans is on the floor right now,
because most people weren't paying them through the pandemic and now they have to put their
payments back on.
So that could be kind of a shock to people that they put those payments on hold for a
while and now they're coming back.
So that's probably the bigger thing as opposed to the rates is people just having to make
payments again at all.
Okay.
I got one question from a listener about something related to investing that I wanted to ask
you or at least read to you because I feel like you could do a better job answering it.
So Daniel said, how do you estimate risk and potential upside?
He says, personally, I always calculate the risk as a potential loss as a percentage of
my net worth.
I do the same with the potential upside helps me kind of quantify the potential impact of
the best and worst case.
What do you think?
It is way easier predict risk in something like the stock market than it is to predict
returns.
I think because you're pretty sure that in any given year, you're probably going to have
a correction every three to four years, you're probably going to have a bear market and then
maybe once every 10 to 12 years, you're going to have a crash.
You can't really set your watch to it, but that's pretty darn close that that risk is
there.
But if you look at over time, the different decades, the first decade of the century,
the stock market went nowhere.
The second decade of the century, we had huge returns.
The 80s and 90s were these huge returns.
The 70s was a terrible decade.
60s was okay.
50s was awesome.
30s and 40s were terrible.
And so it's much harder predict because of the like unforeseen things that can happen that
could cause things to be worse than you would assume.
So I'm much more of a fan of trying to predict risk at a time than return and sort of being
surprised on the upside.
But I think you can look at the historical range of results and understand that over
the long term corporations grow their earnings by whatever, five or six percent and dividends
grow by four or five percent per year and sort of get a good estimation of the long run
returns.
But unfortunately, in the short term, it's basically impossible to predict what the stock
market is going to do.
That's one of the reasons that I think you're able to earn such high returns there is because
it is so unpredictable.
I wish I had a better answer for you, but it really is difficult.
And going down to the individual company levels probably even harder.
The last thing I was going to ask you before we wrap, you have a segment on your show,
which I'm a regular listener.
We both released on Wednesday morning.
So every morning I'm like, I got mine out.
Now we go listen to animal spirits.
You do a lot of recommendations.
You focus those on books, movie shows.
But I did want to ask if you had any recommendations for people that are interested in the personal
finance, the investing side, are there any services that you use, whether it's tracking
things or modeling things or following earnings reports that you think are cool things people
should check out?
The funny thing is, is when it comes to personal finance apps, I'm pretty old and stodgy where
I still track everything like an Excel spreadsheet.
I never got into any of those tracking services.
99% of my spending is on a credit card and I feel like I just kind of can track it that
way.
I'm going through the credit card and that makes it easier.
I was joking with my, I saw my parents this past week and my mom still had a checkbook
and was balancing her checkbook, which I thought was just the most antiquated thing I've seen
in my life.
But I never got into too many of that things.
On the investing side of things, one of the new apps that I've been using lately to pay
more attention, if this started off for the podcast just to be more informed and ended
up becoming an investor in a company that was called Quarter, where you can listen to
company earnings calls on an app, like you're listening to a podcast and you can listen
to it at two times speed and they give you a transcript and you can also get the reports
and they have a button where you can skip all the CEO and CFO and mumble jumble and
just go right to the question and answer from the analyst, which is pretty cool.
If you don't want to listen to all that, I have a handful of companies that I listen
to and it just gives me a good sense of what's going on in certain markets or just specific
industries and I feel like that's a pretty good macro gauge to hear how things are going
from the horse's mouth.
And what about when someone's like, oh, how is XYZ stock performed over the last year?
That's your default website to pull up that chart.
So I have a lot of subscription things because of my job in milk management.
So I use Y-charts for most of that stuff for charting.
That's a subscription service, but there are free ones out there like Koyfin, which is
pretty good.
I still think Yahoo Finance is not bad.
I remember Google Finance was really good for a while and they kind of just didn't do
anything.
I don't know a few years ago kind of shut it down and just made it worse.
There's also good like back testing tools if you wanted to like back test an asset allocation
portfolio like there's portfolio of visualizers always one of my favorites that you could
back test specific ETFs or mutual funds or asset classes to see how performance would
have been if you want to kind of test out a portfolio.
Okay, that's helpful.
Awesome.
Ben, this has been awesome.
Thank you so much for coming and I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, this was fun.
I really hope you enjoyed this episode.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,
I would really appreciate it.
And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me or just want to say hi, I'm
Chris at AllTheHacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter.
That's it for this week.
I'll see you next week.
Bye.
Bye.
.