Friday Flight - Returning Rags, Debt Ceiling Standoff, & Gold in the Attic #672

Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all-new story of Betrayal. Ashley Litten was helping her husband set up a business fan mail account when she discovered a terrible secret. I saw a hidden folder, and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? Listen to season two of Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you there was more to the story behind game-changing events? Get ready for my new podcast, That Moment with Damon John. Every Tuesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network will jump into the personal stories of some of the most influential people on the planet, from business moguls and celebrities to athletes and artists. Join me every Tuesday for that moment with Damon John on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to get your podcasts. On Queen Charlotte, the official podcast, we're stepping behind the scenes and the drawing boards of this team to experience the life breathed into the Bridgerton prequel. Listen to the leaps executive producer and series director Tom Baraka took to capture the feeling that puts that lump in your throat, and you've got to catch creator Shonda Rhimes. She's dropping gems, diamonds, and mics. You can listen to Queen Charlotte the official podcast every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt. And today we're talking returning rags, debt ceiling standoffs, and golden the attic. That's right buddy. This is our Friday flight where we're gonna tackle. We're gonna take on multiple different stories that we came across this week, and we're gonna discuss how they specifically pertain to your finances. Joel, so before we get to that, are you ready to reveal to the world your recent big purchase? Yeah, that you made. Let's do it. So I, for me, a big purchase, a new use car. A vehicle is, that's a big purchase. No matter what, across the board. Well, it was not something we were planning on. Homer sadly bit the dust because of a fender bender. Are you gonna carry over the old name? I don't know. Do I need a rename? I don't know. It's the new Homer. The new and improved Homer. 2.0. So I had a 2006 Honda Odyssey. Now I have a 2013 Honda Odyssey. Yeah, so I think you can totally carry the name. Keep carrying the name over. Interestingly enough, it is, it's so hard to find a good use car in the market right now. And obviously, it's been well documented. You and I have talked about this on the show just how prices have escalated in the used car market. But then again, interestingly enough, like at the my 2006 Odyssey was was totaled because of just a minor fender bender. But I've got paid more from the insurance company than I paid for the vehicle like three years ago. There you go. So, I'm putting the advantages of seeing prices go. That's the bright side. But then I paid more than I ever expected I would for a 10 year old vehicle. I think my my final price, finally found an individual selling the car 12,700 bucks. Not too shabby. That's a great price. But I'm hoping we're a 2013 10 year old vehicle. A really nice one too. It's a great condition. Hoping this one's going to last us, you know, seven, eight, 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got Homer. We're going to refer to your van, your Odyssey as Homer and we'll continue to refer to mine as how. And we haven't pulled them up next to each other yet. But we're pretty sure it's the exact same color. Yeah. They're basically identical. Because your old one, it was the older body style. It was like a powder blue powder blue. It was before the remodeled it or what do you call it when they do the upgrade body style change? Yeah, about a body style change. But the one you have now, these vans are identical. I know. We do too much. That's the same. Mars is the 2012. And we were joking about this actually as well. I've got like 4,000 miles on you. I'm we're at like 145 or 126 year at like 141. But man, like the amount that we drive now taking the kids to school, I don't think there's any way that you're going to catch us. You guys drive a lot more. Hopefully, yeah, yeah, hopefully we'll have that thing for another 100,000 miles. But we had a flexible budget. We were even looking at potentially like $20,000. But I really didn't want to do that. That to me as someone who hates spending money on cars, I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible how much we spent. Well, and especially if you end up getting a second vehicle, that's yet to be determined. Which we might need to at some point. We've talked about when my wife starts working more. But I will say my friend Megan, she just she just mentioned to me that she she has a strict budget for her used car purchase, which I appreciate. But she said like every time she would go talk to somebody, they kept trying to force her or get her to spend more money. They're like, well, yeah, what an extra few thousand dollars. And she's sticking to her gun. She's like, why are these people trying to tell me to spend more? And I love that. I mean, I think it is yes, it is hard. And you might be shocked if you find yourself in the used car market about how much vehicles cost. You're likely going to be super surprised at just how much these vehicles are going for. Yeah, if you haven't purchased a new vehicle in the past three years, you're in for a shot. Yes, I was in for sticker shock myself as I was looking around. But still stick to your budget. Don't blow the budget in order to get something a little bit nicer, a little bit newer, anything like that. I mean, I think feels like a brave new world of car pricing. But yeah, know what it is. It's you can afford and stick to that. Don't let somebody else talk you into spending more than you should. Yeah, don't let somebody else talk you into their goals. What it is that they are projecting on you. But yeah, I hope you get to hang on to the new Odyssey for many years to come. Me too. All right, let's hit our stories, our Friday of flights. And you know, there's been a lot of talk about the US debt ceiling negotiations that have been taking place this week. We actually wrote about that in our how to money newsletter earlier this week on Tuesday. And just so you know, we're not going to get political here. But by the way, all of our previous newsletters, they actually live on the site. So you can still read that newsletter if you aren't subscribed yet. But it's not just our says yet, because you're going to go subscribe, right? We want you to. Yeah, how to money.com slash newsletter. So it's not our just our national finances that are facing a bit of a debt crisis is also our personal ones as well. As a nation, we've broken our own record. And we now have seven over $17 trillion in overall household debt. Credit cards, they were a contributing factor is typically credit card balances. They decline in the first quarter. People paying off that Christmas debt. Exactly. Yeah. But this is the first time in 20 years that that didn't happen. They stayed flat, which you see that it stayed flat and you think, Oh, that's a good thing. No, no, no, that's actually a bad thing is normally it goes down, but it doesn't stop there because delinquency in serious delinquencies, that's where payment is over 90 days late. Those are also up. Out of loan delinquencies are also up in a big way as well. So this is all kind of bad news. Yeah, not all is rotten in North America. And I'm sure that these numbers, they would be far less drastic if you were to just pull our audience. But this still doesn't bode well for the American public as a whole. Not all debt is bad, but the way that our country handles debt, it's messed up both at the federal as well as the individual level. And again, based on the fact that we didn't see balances go down and Q1, I think this is unfortunately going to be the year that we see credit card overall credit card debt reached that $1 trillion mark, which that's not a prize that you want to wait like, right, it's likely a trophy that we're going to receive, even though it's not one that we should be striving for. Yeah, it's interesting to see how our government handles money and how we handle money as individuals. And it feels like this is this collective cultural catastrophe, really, that we've got going on that we've got brewing. And at least we can't control necessarily what our what the politicians are doing or how they're handling this. But we can control, at least in some regard, we we have a lot more control than we think lots of times over what happens to our own personal debt situation. And I think it's just become normalized. It's normal to take on debt for all sorts of things. I could have taken on debt to buy a new car, right, or to buy even a newer used car. But no way, Jose, like that's that's against everything I stand for, right? And so yeah, I think it's good to see some of these stats and see that things are getting worse. And then just hopefully it awakens all of us to the fact that we can and should be taking a different tact. Because if we're handling our finances, like everybody else is, we're also going to be behind the eight ball, just like everybody else. But one thing we've got in our favor, Matt, is that egg prices are beginning to come back down to earth. I was glad to, glad to see that. Something that said heading in the right direction. Right, exactly. And I'm sure everyone out there has noticed that egg prices are not what they were like six months ago, even if they're still a little bit higher than they were pre pandemic. But the average wholesale price, that means before they get marked up at the grocery store, are down to 78 cents a dozen from $5.30 at the end of last year, which is ridiculous. It's not like eggs make up this huge percentage of the CPI or anything, but it's one of those things that we all notice when we go into the grocery store, egg prices and milk prices. It makes up a large part of the CPI in our hearts. Exactly. And inflation is slowly but surely calming down. We've had 10 consecutive months of declining inflation. Another big price drop we've seen over the past year in the kitchen, by the way, Bacon, which I was also glad to see. Bacon eggs, they pair so well together, but it's, Bacon is nearly 10% more affordable now than it was last year. So stock up all the, well, it's getting good. Breakfast is cheaper, baby. Breakfast for dinner. I mean, that's always one of the best dinners you can do. Fast Company, they published an article about how different tech companies out there, how they want their users of the free services that they offer to start paying for their services. They're not going to be offering them for free anymore. These free tier plans are slowly coming to an end paying for the blue check on Twitter. Like that's, it's infamous at this point. It's been subject to a whole lot of consternation. A lot of people upset, especially celebrities on Twitter who are like, how dare you? Now let's how dare you remove my blue check mark that I earned. It's not just Elon, though, who's opting for these tactics. There are other tech companies and they're taking the same approach. So for instance, Zoom, they have further limited the amount of time that you can spend on a zoom call for free mail chimp. They slashed their free plan pretty significantly last year, and this year as well, peacock. They no longer have a free streaming tier as well. And one that impacted us, Hootsuite, I always say Hootsuite or whatever, but we used to use that. It was a free social media publishing, planning software or whatever. But then they, they stopped offering their free version. So that's something we no longer use. Although I wanted some stuff to continue to go out while we're in Scotland. And so I signed up and gave him my credit card info because there's a free 30 days. There you go. But of course, we got that canceled date on the back in time. Yes. Yeah. We're okay with you paying for services if you get value out of them, but just realize there are fewer of those free services that are going to be available. And we want you to be proactive when it comes to the different subscriptions that you're paying for. Sure. And these tech companies, they have the right to charge for the product. Yeah, absolutely. More power to you. The freemium model. I love that it exists. But if a company says, hey, guess what? We want to either downgrade the free tier or not offer one at all. I mean, more power to you. You've got the right, you spend money creating this, creating this tool, and you're trying to make it profitable. That makes sense to me. But we as the consumer, we also have the right to say, yeah, not worth it to me. No, thank you. Thanks. Thanks, but no, thanks. On the opposite note, though, Matt, of getting charged for technology, a new tech company is still playing by the old model, actually trying to give you something you're likely to be interested in for free. But it comes with a catch. There's some fine print involved. Yeah, yeah, free in quotes. Yes. So that's really free. Right. Right. There's this new company called Telly, and they want to give you a free television, a free TV in exchange for personalized data. You give them basically data about yourself through your viewing habits. So they can serve you highly tailored ads on a second screen that comes attached to the TV that they're giving you. So, yes, there's a 55 inch screen that you get for viewing your shows. And then there's a sound bar, and then a nine inch screen for full time ad displays that they can show you whenever they like. So you got to pay attention to the fine print, though, because, yeah, you're also sharing your viewing data with Telly. And if you say, actually, I've changed my mind, I don't want to share that with Telly anymore. They're going to charge you 500 bucks, which is really more than the cost of a 55 inch TV these days, just because you opted out, right? And so it's interesting. I think it's, Telly said they have like 500,000 TVs, and it comes from the guy who started Pluto, which is a pretty cool free streaming service. But this guy is the king of free TV. Yeah, he wants it to be like, I think he might make a killing with this. He might do well with it. And the truth is, a lot of our viewing habits are already being tracked. Like Visio has admitted to this before. But I don't know, man, like a TVs are relatively inexpensive. I think my last one was like a 65 inch that I got for 230 bucks. And a 55 inch TV can be had on Black Friday, probably for like, I don't know, you could get a one 55 inch TV in Black and White Joel. I love to see companies kind of trying to do something new. And Telly is definitely doing that. Oh, yeah. But you just also have to be aware as a consumer, if you're like, I want the free TV. Well, you had to be cool with putting up with the ads and also with kind of the data intrusion at the same time. Definitely. Yeah. And you described it well, like there's a sound bar at the bottom, but the nine inch TV screen or whatever doesn't do it justice, because it's the screen on the lower portion, it goes all the way across the entire width of the TV. It's just like the off to the side. There's like a nine inch equivalent screen. That's where they're going to display the ads. Like the rest of it, there's like widgets, like weather, maybe stocks. And like, you know, kind of like the widgets on your phone or whatever, that kind of thing. But I agree. I think he actually might do like this could be really popular. Hey, like it really looks kind of cool. Like the dual panels kind of thing going on. Telly, I feel like it's a cool name, the sound bar, like I don't even have, I don't have a sound bar. Yeah, I'm kind of like, Oh, a sound bar. That's pretty cool. And even the camera, I saw that you can do like video conferencing video calls with it. I don't have the video or like a little camera on my TV. But that being said, like he said, the cost of TVs has gone down. And it's not like it's if TVs were two, $3,000 to get a basic television, I might be like, Oh, I might actually have to consider that. But given a where prices are currently, but then be that just the privacy concerns, like I just don't like the idea of there being a camera potentially monitoring me. I feel if I was a single dude, I would do it. Yeah, because I feel like I'm resilient and I can like fight off the temptations that might be. And just like the onslaught of ads, but I don't think my wife would be down with it. And like, and we neither one of us would want to subject our kids to they're constantly just being our type of just like one of my friends, like a billboard in our in our living room. When my friends said, what if you just tape something over the place where the ad goes? And I was like, yeah, I guess that's one solution. Physically, yeah, just like something over it. So, but yeah, there's always going to be trade offs in life. And I think for some folks, there are some frugal, entrepreneur, listeners out there who might be thinking, no, you guys are crazy. Of course, I'm going to get the free TV and more power to you if if you can resist for sure. Yeah, we'll link to the site where we're telling where you can sign up to try to get one of these. Again, they got to think they have 500,000. So it's a lot of TVs. All right, so there's a chance that you might have some gold in your attic. So it's still spring. And if you haven't done any spring cleaning yet, now might be the time. And one random thing to look out for is your old VHS collection. So the story, I guess, is maybe for like, you got to be like our age or older, like, you have to be like a Gen X or basically where the grandpa millennials, Gen Zers are like, what is a VHS? Please explain. I know what it is. But no joke, like, if you have some VHS tapes in your attic, they could actually be worth some money. Because Kiplinger, they report that demand is rising for still wrap classic movies. And in some cases, they're going for thousands of dollars on on sites like eBay or like different auction sites that specialize in collectibles like that, especially if they're in like mint condition. And so if you've got Star Wars, like Superman, Rambo, the Goonies, this classic, but those are some of the VHS titles that are in high demand. I guess there's folks out there who are just willing to pay that. But I wouldn't count on them necessarily continuing to go in value. And obviously most of your the standard VHS tapes that folks have laying around like your Disney movies, ones that are already open, they're probably worth pennies. Yeah, your unwrapped Aladdin is worth like $4 maybe and most of your opened everything are worth like three cents. But there are a select few where you might get lucky or you might be at the thrift store and say, Oh, no, but Rambo, I just like buy that and see if you can make some money on it. Yeah. Yeah. And again, going back to the whole us being geriatric millennials, I feel like you and I are just old enough to have remembered walking through a blockbuster. Oh, yeah. Like with your dad on a Friday, after work, picking out a movie that we're all going to watch together. Those are the good old days. But for everybody else, you can disregard this. Right. Well, just really quickly, you mentioned eBay and selling stuff on eBay to make money if these old VHSers. But let's say you're buying stuff on eBay that there are a few methods I've noticed recently, Matt, that have saved me some money. And what did you buy? A marino wool shirt? No, I didn't. Okay, I didn't. Not trying to be like you in every single way. But like one, I shall convert you one way that I've noticed that you can that you can save more money when you're buying something on eBay. First off, you're buying used, hopefully, right? So you're able to get something at a discount already. But if you make a reasonable offer on an item that allows for offers to be made, that's a way in which you can save money. So if the price of the item is 45, when it says make me an offer, I don't know, make an offer for 20% off and then see if they take it. Does it show how long that listing has been up there? Like days on market? Usually with real estate, because if that's the case, then that should be a signal to you that like, hey, there's some weakness here that they just want to unload that thing if they've been sitting on it and they realize that there is not much demand. But yeah, I do. I totally agree. I think just that additional amount of friction is enough for most folks just to pass over and just be like, well, I'm not going to mess with buying that. I'm not willing to make an offer and just giving it a shot. I love the make an offer thing. One other thing you can do is just giving it a shot. I do. If it's something I want and I'm like, but I'm willing to walk away from it if it's not the right price. Also, add it to your wishlist or your watchlist is what it's called. If you click that button, they might proactively make you an offer, which I've had this done a few times where you just add it and then you wait and see, the seller is notified that you added it and then they might say, hey, here's 15% off if you want to buy it right now. That's one way to do it. I just saw the study and researchers, they studied at 25 million eBay transactions and they found that 45% of negotiation attempts were successful. Even though the item might be discounted already because it's used, it doesn't mean you still can't get it for even less. I love seeing that and that's been my personal experience too. Yeah, man, whether you like it or not, your actions are being watched and with that retailing gets a notification that there's somebody who's interested in their products. I think, yeah, that's a great suggestion. If they want to move that product, they'll send you discount code and you can get that thing discounted even more. We've got several other stories that we're going to get to on today's Friday flight. We're going to talk about coffee. We're going to talk about homes, the cost of housing. We're going to talk about all the different things you can potentially buy with your money and we'll get to all of those stories right after this. Last season, millions tuned into the betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Ashley Litten was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I scrolled down and that's when I saw a hidden folder and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? I was scared that he was coming home. What Ashley discovered that day was a secret so dark, she feared for her life. She was like, oh my god, I got to get out of the house. He's going to find out that I've seen this. He's going to come kill me. Listen to season two of betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Chelsea Handler and I'm Katherine Locke. We are the hosts of the Dear Chelsea Podcast where we give advice to real-life people. Chelsea, we're going into season four, which is very exciting. Oh yes, sometimes we have celebs on helping us with that advice. Sometimes we have experts. We've had guests like Ross Matthews, Matthew McConaughey, Bob the Drag Queen, Julianna Margolis, psychic mediums, drug czars, all kinds of people. We want everyone to leave the show with a little bit more support than they had coming in and we encourage people to live their lives truly, fully, honestly, and bravely. We answer questions on anything from drugs to relationships. People talk about their terrible mothers-in-law and we encourage them to separate from those people. I mean, Chelsea, we've even broken people up. Yes, I take a lot of credit for breaking people up and ending relationships. I am a relationship wrecker. Lots of family drama, lots of relationship drama, and just personal motivation, really. Sometimes people just need a kick in the ass and that's what I am, a big kick in the ass. Listen to Dear Chelsea, I'm the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. The day before Steve Lick ties high school graduation, two of his best buddies paid him a visit. They told him that the people he thought were his parents were really his grandparents, and his sister was really his mother. How did they know the whole town knew? Everyone but him. Sasha Rothschild's father was slipping into dementia and one day he casually mentioned another woman, his wife's best friend. His shocked family discovered he had been living a double life for decades. These are just some of the stories we've told on family secrets. Each episode explores a long-held family secret that has finally come to light, usually with powerful consequences. Find out what keeps millions of people tuning in to hear astonishing stories about the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and yes, even the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to season eight of Family Secrets, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, the Friday flight continues. Matt, let's keep talking about the stories we found interesting this week in the world of personal finance. And of course, we always got to get to our ludicrous headline of the week. Listener David, he sent us this one. By the way, if you have something you see that reeks as you're reading the headlines, as you're scouring the internet, and you see a ridiculous article that you think we would like to skewer on the ludicrous headline of the week segment, send it our way. We would love to see it. But David sent us this one. It comes from Business Insider, and here's the headline, parents are returning entire wardrobes worn out children's clothing to target. And I thought that was really interesting. And this is just another example, really, of people abusing a generous return policy. Yeah, move over LLB. As we've noticed, it's not necessarily a lack of standing behind their products. It's the fact that customers are using these return policies in abhorrent ways that these companies didn't foresee. And so what's happening here with Target now ensures that this return policy, this generous return policy likely isn't going to be around much longer. Right? Yeah, being forced into the exact same position. Yes. Yeah, Target apparently has a one year return window for target branded clothes like Cat and Jack. Like that's one of those like target brands. They're decently inexpensive clothes. They're kind of cute. And so parents, they're going hog wild. They're returning used, stained and ripped clothes to their local Target store for a full refund. And yeah, don't get me wrong. I like a generous return policy as much as the next guy. It's one of the reasons I love Costco. Matt, we talk about specifically shopping at retailers who offer healthy return policies because that is a good sign. They stand behind their product and they're not going to hassle you right for making a return. But even Costco has had to become a bit stingier. Like for instance, it's 90 day return window on electronics now. I think they did this five or six years ago due to some pretty insane return attempts and them losing a ton of money because of it. Some folks have even tried to return tires at Costco. I've read stories about that, which is just like, hey, I've used these for 80,000 miles, taken back and paid me back the full. It's even worse than the whole Target, the Cat and Jack thing. Yes, exactly. Because you're talking about years worth of use. That's right. I love the Target standing behind their store-brainer clothes to this extent. But to all of our listeners out there, just because it's this TikTok trend to return your kids heavily used clothing, don't return those items 360 days after you bought them just because you can. Yeah. That's cheap. It's approval. And it's that. It's the timing thing, right? Because it's okay. I think one of the reasons they stand behind their clothes is if it tears or something, right? It's not the fact that a pair would return clothes that are torn. It's the fact that their kids have been wearing them for 11 months. It's that part of it because if you get a pair of shoes or pants and a seam blows out after the first time the kid wears it or the first time you wash it, I'd be like, oh, what the heck? I want to get my money back for this thing. That's not necessarily how it's being abused. Like you said, it's social media. And as we've seen with TikTok trends, a lot of people participate. Like the Tide Pod challenge or the milk crate. I can only imagine that because of this. It's not like this is just insider writing about this. This is blowing up on social media, which then is going to lead to a store like Target having to rescind, pull back on their guarantee, right? I would not be surprised if they also do something where they shrink it from a full year down to three months or something seems a little more reasonable. Yeah, it was like when we had that influx of online mattress sellers, right? And everyone came with a one year like guarantee. You could send it back and get all your money back. Some people were taking full advantage and they were just like, I'm going to order me a new mattress every 364 days and just makes and send it back right before the return window expires. And to me, that's just taking advantage of a generous policy. Don't like it. You're just ruining it for everybody else out there who might legitimately need to make a return because something didn't hold up well. So another story that goes hand in hand with Target, quite literally Starbucks, because Starbucks in almost every car. There is, isn't there? And it smells like popcorn, like you walk in there. It smells like popcorn. You see the Starbucks and then you go shopping. But it wasn't that long ago that we talked about Starbucks significantly devaluing the points that their customers have been accruing via their loyalty program. Well, now they're charging you extra if you don't want ice in your drink. And you might be thinking, well, that's a weird. That's a weird, like, why would they be charging you more? Well, it's because not feeling that cup, you know, up to the brim with ice, it means more that sugary expensive liquid inside your cup. You know, Starbucks fans, they're not happy about this. I personally prefer going light on the ice myself because I'm like, I don't want that just on all that ice to melt down. And you got this really watered down, you know, quote unquote, ice cold brewed coffee that just tastes like, you know, not good. So I get it. But I also get how no ice would also cost Starbucks more money, right? Like it where it would necessitate that upcharge. But as prices go up and perks go down, this is a great time to reassess, just like we talked about earlier with a different freemium tech platforms out there that are starting to charge their customers. Do you actually still need that fancy Starbucks drink on the reg? Maybe you don't. But honestly, this kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit too, because it seems like just a dumb move on on Starbucks is like, it feels like they're just nickel and dime the customers. It makes me think of like the airlines that charge you for every single piece of clothing that you bring onto the chair. Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, you would like to have a water during the flight that's going to cost you is shortsighted. It seems shortsighted unless that's just your new target audience, because it's used to be in my mind that Starbucks was like this premium product, like you're going there for the experience. But now if like if you were going to start charging folks for small little things like this, it feels like a race to the bottom, as opposed to just providing a high quality coffee drink, by the way, it is full on cold brew season. I make I make my own, and I bring it every day to work. I haven't switched over yet. Have some in the afternoon. I thought it was earlier, but it kind of cooled down. But we're not for long. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're about start baking is going to hear in the south. It's going to get really hot. Yeah, but I think that's just an important thing. Like if Starbucks is just your habit, maybe this is your perfect excuse to get out of the habit. So start start making your own to start bringing your own from home. You're going to save a lot of money and not deal with the annoyance of all these like silly upcharges and the fact that you can't accrue points as quickly and all that stuff too. All right, let's talk about bikes for just a second. There's been a surge of discounts in the biking space, rad power bikes, which I've got a rad wagon myself. They've cut the price meaningfully on a few of their models, Woot, which is owned by Amazon now this massive discount site where they're liquidating things all the time. They even had eBikes for sale this week for less than $400. You might even still find them on there. I'm not sure, but it's it's not just electric bikes that are costing less. It's traditional ones too. So bikes of all shapes and sizes are now heavily discounted. That's guys like supply chains. They ramped up to produce the influx of bikes that we all wanted and kind of needed during the heart of the pandemic. I remember just seeing like everyone smiling in my neighborhood riding bikes, especially in like late 2020, right? But now normalcy has kind of resumed. People are biking a whole lot less. And if you're in them unfortunate super unfortunate, I'm not biking less, but most people are. I just picture all those formerly smiling folks. I want to say to them, Hey, this could still be a part of your life. You could still be just as free with the wind blowing in your hair and where it's not costing you any money to get to where you need to go. We don't need you're choosing not to buy. Don't need social distancing to force you to get on your bike. Right. And if you're in the market for for a bike, by the way, now's a great time to be looking in both both the new and the used market. Bikes Direct is a site that we've talked about for a long time for buying a discounted new bike. And Facebook is a great place to search for used bikes near you. But it's kind of one of those things where their loss is your game. If you a lot of people probably trying to sell it for not pennies on the dollar, but you might find a half price bike that's barely used because the markets flooded with them. I totally agree. Yeah. And also, just a heads up, if you order from one of the different online sites that we recommend, like bikes direct and we have no relationship with them, they're just a good company. But you do need to be prepared to handle some assembly. I was actually talking to a friend at the gym recently. And I was telling her about that. I was just like, yeah, you know, you're probably gonna have to put the pedals on your you'll have to attach the handlebars. And she looked at me with a very incredulous look like crazy. What's I'm not going to do that? She's like, yeah, how about I call you over and you can take care of that formula now. But like, it is not that difficult. If you have ever purchased something from Ikea, you can handle putting together a like if you can put together a Billy bookcase, you can attach some pedals to a bike. So don't be afraid to actually dig in a little bit and learn how to put one of these things together because it'll it will actually save you money because you're going to find the best deals online is there are likely going to be some deals that you'll be able to find at a local brick and mortar. But when you have the ability to comparison shop online, that's definitely where it is that you're going to win. Joe, let's talk about housing because the the home buying market is still a bit bonkers depending on the market that you're where you're looking. No longer are buyers getting like 50 plus offers, you know, and selling for $200,000 over asking price, but supply, it still remains pretty tight. Prices are remaining sticky in a lot of markets and rates specifically. I mean, they are most definitely cramping affordability. This isn't good news for want to be home buyers out there. But here is some even more bad news. 67% of millennials who want to buy a home have zero dollars saved for one. And 18% of those folks had less than $10,000 banked. So yeah, this is bad news. The survey didn't specifically show whether these folks were actively looking or, you know, they're just kind of perusing Zillow, just hoping that maybe eventually one day, they might own a home years down the road. But saving up for a home down payment is far from easy, especially these days. But if it's a significant goal of yours to actually own a home, this is a crucial part of the process, you know, actually saving up that down payment. So what you need to do is come up with a plan for how much you're going to need to start setting aside, like pick an end date. If you know that in a couple years that, Oh, hopefully we're not still renting this apartment, plan backwards. You got 24 months between now and then figure out how much you're going to need to have on hand it. And also make sure to include other expenses as well, like closing costs, the cost to actually move. These are all things that you want to consider as well. Yeah, not just 10% of the cost of the cost of the home or anything like that. There's additional costs that come your way when you're buying a home. And ideally, we'd love for you to have 20% to put down. But that's obviously not an easy task. And if the task has gotten even harder, right in recent years, but it is an admirable goal for sure. For sure, agreed. But at a minimum, without a specific goal in mind, you're going to flounder when it comes to saving up that down payment. So yeah, take a long hard look at your budget. How much can you shovel towards that down payment fund each and every month? And who knows what's going to happen with the housing market in the coming months or years? And again, yeah, partly what happens in the housing market depends on what's happening, where you are in your local housing market. Because I think I saw a map that the average down payment in Mississippi is like $7,000 in the average down payment in California is like $110,000. And so depending on where you live, that's going to have a massive difference on how much you need to or how much you're likely going to have to save. But if you want to own a home and you want to be ready to pounce, come over the plan, start saving now, and tend to your credit score too. Because that's yeah, boosting your score is going to mean significant savings month in and month out by getting that lower interest rate too. Most deaf on another housing note, a decent chunk of folks are starting to downsize for a surprising reason. And that is utility bills, utilities, that's just another monthly cost that is going up for most folks around the country. More than three quarters of Americans have seen more of their budget going towards utilities over the past year. Joel, even here in our state of Georgia, our Georgia power, they got to go ahead to do like a 12% rate height increase starting next month. Yeah, not looking forward to that one. A lot of people are going to be shocked. Yes. Especially as the bills get higher in the summer anyway here. Oh my gosh. It's a double whammy for sure. But swapping homes just because of utility prices is kind of like getting a brand new Prius just because gas prices are starting to creep up a little bit, right? Like there are probably going to be better ways to handle this problem. But for home buyers out there for folks who you don't have at home yet, just remember that more square footage is going to mean more heating. It's going to mean more cooling here in the summer. Joel. So last summer when we moved to where we are, we pounced on a house, specifically because the location was killer. We love the house. That being said, it's not the biggest place. There are six of us. Two of our girls are sharing a bedroom. And so we're kind of like, oh man, it'd be nice if we got a place that had a little more square footage. But anytime we have that, we start having that conversation, I just think about some of these additional costs that accompany a bigger place. I think about, oh man, the property taxes are going to go up. Oh man, it's going to cost more to furnish this thing. But also utilities as well. There's something comforting about having a nice compact, efficient space where you don't have all these rooms to heat and cool in the furnish. I mean, you and I, we've talked about the reality of secondary costs with every purchase. Yes. And most people, we just don't factor it in on the front end. And that is one of those things where yeah, you got to factor in the higher insurance taxes and heating and cooling costs, the utility costs of a bigger home. Yeah, it shouldn't necessarily be the primary reason that you move or don't move or decide to stay put or whatever. But you definitely need to make sure to consider that and try to find ways to lower those costs. And also one of the ways you can do that is by making your home more efficient, more green. Don't forget there are tax incentives out there to make your home more energy efficient. We actually cover those in detail back in episode 656. We'll make sure to link to that one. But basically a lot of improvements that you can make to your home. They're basically 30% off. That's the credit that you're going to get back from the government. If that was something that you were already planning to do, you definitely don't want to miss that. But it might even be enough to sway you might that might be like the, you know, the straw in the camel's back that causes you to say, oh yeah, now is totally the time for us to get some insulation in that place. By the way, I can firsthand speak to how wonderful insulation is. Oh my god. Because the ceilings and the insulation have been ripped out of portions of our house. We haven't moved out yet. But I've talked about how the tree fell through my house and we're going to have to get their repair. We're kind of living in it right now. We won't be for much longer because construction is about to start. But for the time being, there's no insulation and no ceiling. And so it's like literally we're looking up straight at the roof. And it's some of the holes in the roof with a tarp over them, granted. But yeah, it's amazing how much hotter it gets with no insulation. You feel in the heat. So I'm just like, this sucks. The insulation is pretty, pretty incredible thing. It can save you a lot of money and it's pretty inexpensive to make it happen. And yes, the federal government will pick up part of the bill for that new insulation that you want to install as well. So, all right, Matt, that's going to do it for this episode. For folks who want show notes, they can find those up on our website at howtomoney.com. And we're looking forward to to publishing an interview, a hang with our friend Brandon, the mad scientist. We just got to record an episode with him when we were in Scotland. And you can check that one out on Monday. That's right. Yeah, it was essentially a field recording because normally we just record here in our nice little studio, but you'll just have to listen here on Monday to find out why it is that Brandon did have a microphone there in his house in Scotland. Oh, before we release you to your weekend, we want to make sure that we give a shout out to Josh H. This is for the newsletter referral shout out. Josh shared the newsletter with a bunch of his friends. And so if you have not yet subscribed to the how to money newsletter, go to howtomoney.com forward slash newsletter. And there you can sign up for the best personal finance newsletter in the entire country. Joel guarantees it. That's going to be it, buddy. Until next time, best friends out. Best friends out. Last season, millions tuned into the betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception. I'm Andrea Gunning, and now we're sharing an all new story of betrayal. Ashley Litten was helping her husband set up a business Venmo account when she discovered a terrible secret. I saw a hidden folder and I opened it. What the hell did I just see? Listen to season two of betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you there was more to the story behind game changing events? Get ready for my new podcast, That Moment with Damon John. Every Tuesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network will jump into the personal stories of some of the most influential people on the planet from business moguls and celebrities to athletes and artists. Join me every Tuesday for that moment with Damon John on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to get your podcasts. Hi, this is Chelsea Handler, and I'm Katherine Law. We are the host of the Dear Chelsea podcast where we give advice to real-life people. Sometimes we have experts, sometimes we have celebs on helping us, guests like Ross Matthews, Matthew McConaughey, Juliana Margales, Gwyneth Paltrow, and so many more. We answer questions on anything from drugs to relationships. We've even broken people up. Yes, I take a lot of credit for breaking people up. I am a relationship record and just motivation. Sometimes people just need a kick in the ass and that's what I am, and we encourage people to live their lives truly, fully, and bravely. Listen to Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.