Afford Anything - Fed Keeps Interest Rates High; Jobs Grow for 40th Consecutive Month

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

#502: The Fed met earlier this week and elected to keep interest rates at a 23-year high, in an effort to wrestle inflation closer to its two percent target. Despite this, the April jobs report, which was released today, shows that jobs grew for the 40th consecutive month, and unemployment remains under 4 percent, an historic low, for the 27th straight month. The 12-month inflation rate is 3.5 percent, based on March CPI data. Stocks remain on a tear, but performance is lopsided, with 10 companies driving 85 percent of this years’ gains. We cover this and more in our First Friday economic update episode. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode502 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The big economic news this week is that interest rates are staying high. Interest rates which are at a 23-year high are going to remain that way for quite some time. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors met just a couple of days ago, and on Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern made the announcement that they are holding interest rates steady. Now, the Fed meets eight times per year. That's on average once every six and a half weeks. But they are widely expected to hold rates. study at their next several meetings. In fact, there is speculation that interest rates may not

decline until late in the year. How far in advance can we reasonably make these predictions? And what does this mean for your wallet, for your mortgage, for your car loan, for your credit cards, for your finances, and for the businesses that you run? Or the jobs that you apply to? What does this mean for you? We're going to tackle that in today's first Friday bonus episode. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast. You can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off. And this is a show about optimizing your limited resources, including money, time, focus, and attention.

I'm your host, Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia. And I help you cut the noise and focus on what matters so you can lead a wealthy life. On the first Friday of every month, we broadcast a monthly economic update. So welcome to the May 24, First Friday, Economic Update. The big news right now is that statements made by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, particularly his most recent statement, which he made on Wednesday, has led many analysts and investors to pair back their expectations

of how soon interest rate cuts will begin and how many interest rate cuts we are going to see this year. previously, towards the beginning of this year, many analysts thought that we would start to see interest rates come down this summer. There was even a debate. Is it going to be Q2 or Q3? That was what people were arguing. But inflation has not come down as much as people had hoped, nor is it coming down at the rate at which people hope. So the Fed's target rate for inflation is 2%. We're not there. Everybody knows that we're not there. That's not news. is notable is that the rate of decline has slowed, meaning inflation isn't coming down towards 2% as fast as analysts had previously hoped. On top of that, hiring is still strong. Unemployment

is at a near 70-year low. Consumer spending is strong. And so it looks like rates are going to stay high for a while. The goal of high interest rates, of course, is to slow down the economy. And that happens because when capital becomes more expensive to access, both producers and consumers borrow less. Producers borrow less money to reinvest back into their businesses. And consumers borrow less money to spend on goods and services. And so in both directions, economic activity slows down. But what we've been seeing so far in 2024 is that despite the high interest rates, we have such a strong economy with such high levels of employment and lots of cash on household balance sheets that accumulated during the pandemic. That cash, of course, is declining, but

it's still in play. And certainly it has been for the first half of this year. And as a result of all of that, the slowdown in economic activity that people were expecting to see as a result of the rate hikes is taking some time to move through the economy. So quoting directly from a statement that was released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, the statement says, quote, in recent months, there has been a lack of further progress toward the committee's 2% inflation of objective. So those are the keywords, a lack of further progress. And the statement reiterated the Fed's goal of returning inflation to its 2% objective. That's a direct quote. So the federal funds rate will remain at between 5 and a quarter to 5.5%. That is the rate at which commercial

banks borrow and lend their extra reserves to one another overnight. What does that mean? How it works is you deposit your money at a bank and your bank deposits are what provide that bank with the money that they need to be able to give out loans. But the bank is also required to be able to keep a certain percentage of their total capital in reserve. Basically, they have to have cash reserves in the same way that it's a good idea for you and me to have an emergency fund. They also have to have, in essence, an emergency fund. They have to have their own. cash reserves. But the amount of cash that they have fluctuates day by day as deposits come in and go out and as loans are approved and repaid, right? So the amount of money that they have is really

volatile. And so what that means is that sometimes in order to meet those reserve requirements, banks have to borrow money from other banks, but just overnight. It's not a long-term loan. It's just an overnight loan. The rate at which banks borrow that money overnight, that's the federal funds rate. And so when I say that it's between 5 and a quarter percent to 5 and a half percent, that's the upper and lower bound. It's going to fluctuate in between those two upper and lower bounds. Now, because banks are borrowing money at 5 and a half percent, when they lend money, they need to have some kind of a spread. And so right now, As of May 1st, the national average for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage is 7.75%.

That's according to USA Today blueprint. Interestingly, the gap between jumbo loans versus ordinary non-jumbo loans, that gap has closed. Typically, there's some distance, some decent distance between the two numbers. That was certainly the case in 2022 and 2023, but right now, a 30-year fixed rate mortgage is 7.75%, a 30-year jumbo is 7.72%. So that's at least a smidge of good news for those of you who live in very high cost of living areas. But all that said, returning to the main point, there does not seem to be any interest rate relief on the horizon. your mortgage rate, your car loan, these are likely to be high for even longer than we expected. The good news is that the prediction that was made two months ago by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers

does not seem to be coming true. Now, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who is a renowned economist, he's also the former director of the National Economic Council and the former president of Harvard. Two months ago, he went on Bloomberg television and stated that there is a meaningful chance that the Fed might hike rates. In other words, he thinks that there's still room for interest rates to climb. Now, to be fair, he did not predict that that would happen. He simply stated that it is not outside of the realm of possibility, but he did float that as a as one of many possible outcomes. Around the same time that he made those remarks, he also indicated

that he believed that there was about a 15% chance that the Fed would not lower rates at all this year. And so that 15% chance, of course, could encompass the Fed either hiking rates or keeping rate steady. So even if we were to accept the premise that there is a 15% probability that rates either rise, or stay steady for the remainder of the year, that still, even in his estimation, gives us an 85% probability that rates would come down at some point this year, although by now it's pretty widely agreed upon that it's likely to be later in the year than people had previously expected, and there are likely to be fewer rate cuts this year than people had expected. Now, we've talked about what this means for mortgage interest rates, but what does this mean for home prices? Well, according to a report released by Redfin on Thursday, home prices are up 5% year over year in almost every major U.S. city. So what we see is that in spite of the fact that mortgage interest rates are closing in on 8%, about 7 and 3 quarters of a percent, home prices, are still rising and they're up 5% year over year. Now, why is that? In one word, supply. Not enough new

homes are being constructed. And homeowners who have existing fixed rate mortgages that are under 5% have a golden handcuff scenario. This is referred to as the lock-in effect. But it's essentially the golden handcuffs of mortgage interest rates. Existing homeowners are disincentivized from selling which means there is even less supply coming onto the market, which further pushes up home prices. Now, this makes it incredibly challenging for first-time home buyers to enter into the housing market. And that is something that the current Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen,

said during testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, first-time homebuyers are facing three challenges, low inventory, high mortgage rates and high house prices. There are fewer homes available. They're expensive, and you have to pay even more money to borrow to get them. For those of you who are currently struggling with this problem, if I may, and this is Paula editorializing right now, house hacking. Get a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, or a single-family home that has a guest house,

an in-law suite, a separate autonomous basement unit. I could easily do an entire episode on house hacking, but that would be a different episode for a different day. So I'll just leave this as a very quick tip right now. And if you do want to learn more, go to afford anything.com slash VIP list. It's no cost to you. Just sign up at afford anything.com slash VIP list. Shoot me an email.

Ask me any question that you have. If you are a subscriber to the VIP list, I am answering your questions. If you email me a question, I will answer it on a live. stream on YouTube. I've done two live streams this week already, and I'll be doing a couple more this weekend. So afford anything.com slash VIP list, no cost, subscribe there, once you've subscribed, then you get a VIP list email, just hit reply, send me your question, and I'll answer it on YouTube. But for this episode, let's continue to focus on the data, because while the stats that I just gave you are about home prices nationwide. It's important to remember that every market is local.

And there are specific local markets, particularly in the south and in the west, where prices are starting to slip a little bit. So in Dallas, in Phoenix, in Miami, in those areas, in the short term, the housing market has seen a very slight decline. In the month of March, that was a decline of less than one half of one percent. It was 0.4% in Miami and Phoenix and 0.3% in Dallas. Negative. So there is a bit of a softening of home prices in the west and in the south, but that may be because those areas also saw some of the biggest increases over the last couple of years. There's also the added concern that in some of the Gulf Coast areas, rising insurance rates is starting to weigh on homeowners. And so in Florida in particular, there is some additional inventory

that's coming on to the market. Certainly in the Tampa St. Pete Clearwater area, which is the area that I've looked most closely at in Florida, it's not right now a good time to sell in my own personal estimation. Now, I talked a bit about the golden handcuffs, the lock-in effect. I have a hypothesis that that feeling of a lack of mobility is contributing to the negative economic sentiment that a lot of people are feeling. So in a recent Gallup poll, only 24% of adults in the U.S. described current economic conditions as either good or excellent. The other three quarters of the population described it as fair or poor.

So 32% described it as fair, 44% described economic conditions as poor. I've talked before on some of these first Friday episodes about the delta between popular sentiment and economic data. Because we have record low unemployment. We are at a 70-year low in unemployment. It has never been easier to get a job. or to switch jobs, at least speaking in the aggregate. Obviously, there are disparities inside of industries and inside of specific geographic locations. But in aggregate, this is the golden era of employment.

And on top of that, the bull market is raging, which the majority of Americans, nearly six out of 10, Americans, participate in the stock market, typically through a 401k or a 403. B or some other type of retirement plan. So we are at nationally all-time highs of the percentage of Americans who participate in the stock market and who own stocks. Meanwhile, the stock market itself just keeps climbing. All of the major indices are doing well. And yet when people are polled about how they feel about the economy, the sentiment is largely pessimistic. And the best, I mean, I know I just cited a Gallup poll, but the best resource for this in my estimation is the University of Michigan, which puts together a consumer sentiment index. Since January, consumer sentiment has stayed very, very stable. It stayed within a 2.5 index point range, which means that any variation in measured sentiment is not statistically significant, which is just a very long and complex. way of saying consumer sentiment is stable. It is unchanging. It has plateaued. And it is low.

Consumer sentiment is remarkably and significantly much, much lower than it was in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. Of course, it was lower in 2020, but actually not by much. I'll put a link in the show notes where you can see the charts. And so what's interesting to me is that even as markets have risen even as inflation has abated, consumer sentiment has remained constant and constantly low. And I believe that there are a variety of factors. Of course, the most common explanation is everything's more expensive and people feel the pinch. True, but wages have also grown. Unemployment has shrunk. Portfolio balances are higher. For people who do own homes, home equity is higher. But for people who own homes, mobility is lower.

due to the golden handcuffs lock-in effect. So if you own a home, your mobility is reduced. And if you don't own a home, it's really hard for you to buy a home. So you have a situation right now where both homeowners and renters feel stuck. Homeowners feel stuck because they have golden handcuffs. Renters feel stuck because of the trifecta of low inventory, high housing prices, high mortgage rates. So both groups feel stuck. One suffering from scarcity and the other suffering from abundance.

I mean, the Golden Handcuffs problem is a problem of abundance. So it's the opposite problem, but it's the same. It's the same. It's that feeling of stuckness. It's that feeling of lack of mobility. And my hypothesis is that that has an effect on this low consumer sentiment that we are seeing, this pervasively low sentiment. And unfortunately, there are only two things that can be done about it.

Inflation needs to come down. And housing supply needs to increase, both supply and density. That's a big part of why I, again, going back to house hacking, a big part of why I encourage my students in my course to retrofit their single family home into a two unit, right? section off the basement or section off heck section off the garage and renovate it and turn it into an autonomous unit with its own ingress and egress because by virtue of doing so you are number one contributing to the solution at a societal level and number two making money that's going to offset your own expenses so that's a bit more of my editorializing but house hacking i see as

the solution for a lot of the issues that we are facing right now. And it's one of the elements that I don't hear coming up in mainstream discussion, which is why it's important to me to emphasize this on this platform. Oh, by the way, I know I've kind of casually mentioned that we're living in a golden age of employment. What I have not mentioned is the April jobs report Today, the first Friday of the month, Friday, May 3rd, the April jobs report came out. This report, which is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was not as good as people had expected. It's a bit of a mixed bag. You see, yesterday, Thursday, May 2nd, analysts were expecting that April's job report would reflect 241,000 new jobs. Now, that's non-farm payroll jobs.

That was the expectation. That was the scuttlebutt, if you will. And by the way, if you want to independently verify that, just look at the articles that were published yesterday. Look at the articles that were published on Thursday, May 2nd, as experts predicted what the jobs report would say. Compare that to the actual report that came out today, Friday, May 3rd, and you'll see the disparity. On Thursday, people were expecting that the jobs report would reflect 241,000 new jobs. Today, the actual report, came out, and it reflected 175,000 new jobs, meaning the expectations were a little overly optimistic. Let's put this in context. The April jobs report is the 40th consecutive month of job growth. It is also the 27th consecutive month in which unemployment has remained below 4%. So, historically speaking, it's quite strong. But what is significant about the expectation of 241,000 versus the reality of 175,000, is that that differential means that unemployment ticked up by 0.1 percentage points. Unemployment ticked up from 3.8% to 3.9%. Essentially, the expectation was that unemployment would remain steady at 3.8% as it has for the past several months. The reality is that it ticked up to 3.9%.

What that signals is that the job market is cooling just slightly. It is still robust, but it is also cooling slightly, which is what the Fed wants. The Fed wants to cool the economy to bring inflation down to 2%. So the fact that new jobs are being added, but they are being added more slowly than expected, maybe a sign that the economy is finally starting to see the effect, of the higher interest rates and is finally starting to cool slightly because there has been a bit of

a lag time between when interest rates rose and any type of cooling effect. The economy has remained surprisingly robust despite these high interest rates. And we're living in, if we zoom out, a very unusual situation because we had a zero interest rate policy era called the ZERP era, zero interest rate policy. And that that era gave way to a period of dramatic inflation that led to a dramatic interest rate increase that happened quite suddenly. And that juxtaposition has created this incredibly strange set of economic circumstances. The fact that we are currently living in an era in which the APY on your savings account could be higher than your mortgage interest rate if you got a mortgage. two years ago or three years ago, right? The fact that you could arbitrage between your mortgage and a savings account, that is incredibly unusual. And that is the result of going from the ZERP era straight into the current interest rate environment.

So we're living in this weird time where for millions of people, it makes more sense to hang on to your mortgage and keep the money in a savings account. That's weird, but that's the reality right now. We're also living in this weird time in which interest rates are high, the cost of accessing capital is high, and yet the economy remains robust. That's not supposed to happen, and yet it is. And so the fact that the number of new jobs added in April fell short of expectations, the fact that unemployment ticked up by 0.1 percentage points is an indicator that maybe the cooling is starting. just slightly. But we have a long way to go before inflation comes down to 2%, a long way, unfortunately. In March, the CPI rose by another 4 tenths of a percent, seasonally adjusted,

and prices rose 3.5 percent over the last 12 months. Now wages, average hourly earnings, rose 4.1 percent over the last 12 months. That's as of March. And that can sometimes lead to what economists refer to as a wage price spiral, where wages and prices both rise in tandem because each one has to support one another. Employers have to raise their prices in order to pay workers higher wages. Workers need higher wages in order to afford the higher prices. And so the wage price spiral means that everything just rises in tandem. And so the economy is going to need to cool down a little bit in order to pull us out of that spiral. It has been, even in spite of the high interest rates incredibly resilient for a long time. And so the April jobs report

indicates that we might just be beginning to see some of that cooling. Now, these first Friday episodes are dedicated to bringing you news about the economy and how it affects you and bringing you that information at no cost to you. So I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsors who make that possible. The holidays are right around the corner and if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared. Maybe you need bedding, sheets, linens, maybe you need servware and cookware. And of course, holiday decor, all the stuff to make your home a great place to host during the holidays. You can get up to 70% off during Wayfair's Black Friday sale. Wayfair has Can't Miss Black Friday deals all month long. I use Wayfair to get lots of

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That's your commercial payments of fifth third better. Welcome back. Let's talk about the stock market. And let's begin by zooming out big picture and taking a look at what happened last year in 2023. Because as we know, the S&P 500 rose 24% last year. Massive, massive stock gains. But what we can easily forget is that last year there was a regional bank meltdown. Remember Silicon Valley Bank, signature bank, First Republic? Remember a year ago at this time when people were genuinely nervous about whether or not the FDIC would ensure their deposits?

Right? There was a bank meltdown a year ago at this time. We were living in a high interest rate environment. people were worried that we were going to go into a recession. And a lot of the chatter at the time was around, how do I flee into safety? Just think back to this time a year ago. I think one of the most enlightening things that a person can do in order to understand the economy and to understand the markets and in turn investing is to look back on what the headlines were in the past. I alluded to this earlier when I said, you know what, compare the jobs report data today.

Compare today's news to yesterday's news, right? Compare the actual jobs report which came out today. Compare that to the expectations which came out yesterday. Just do that side-by-side differential analysis, right? At the day-to-day level, I think that's really informative. At the year-to-year level, it's also informative. So look back on what people were saying a year ago at this. time in May of 2023, it's all in writing, it's all documented. Take half an hour to reacquaint

yourself with where our headspace was because that creates a deeper understanding when you have the benefit of hindsight. A year ago at this time, with the collapse of regional banking, with fears of a recession, there was, broadly speaking, in aggregate, there were a lot of people who were seeking safety. How do I make sure that my money is secure? How do I protect my deposits in the event of a institutional collapse? How do I protect my retirement funds in the event that we go into a recession again? Should I be buying more bonds?

Should I be putting my money in CDs? What if I put my money in CDs in the banks collapse? This time one year ago was an era that was marked with a lot of fear and a lot of pessimism. And yet what we know in hindsight was that that was a huge misread because we in fact had one of the best stock market performances that we've had in recent history. So how do we take that lesson and develop better judgment about the markets moving forward? And let me put a little disclaimer here. Quite obviously, if you know me at all, if you've listened to me for any amount of time, you know that I do not advocate market. speculation. I am a believer in a long-term buy-and-hold approach. However, I also recognize

that behaviorally, humans are prone to rationalizing market-timing-related decisions. And people don't say, oh, I'm going to market time. What people will say is, you know what, I'm reconsidering my asset allocation. Anytime I hear that, it's not a red flag, but it's an orange flag. Because while in a vacuum, sure, it's healthy to think critically about your asset allocation. If the decision to do so, if the timing of that is motivated by external factors, that can sometimes be market timing in disguise. And so the reason that I'm having this discussion is because I believe that it behooves us to take a sober look at how widely popular sentiment a year ago at this time misjudged the markets. and what can we learn from that as we process through our feelings about the market moving forward?

So lesson number one, if I may generalize, is that volatility makes people afraid. A year ago at this time, interest rates were rising so rapidly that people didn't quite know where they would stand, how long they would be there, how much they would go up. Now we have some interest rate stability, but then we had quite a bit more uncertainty. that level of uncertainty can be unsettling, and that sentiment, that unsettled sentiment, can sometimes permeate into our overall feeling about the markets. Lesson number two, big headline-grabbing calamities, like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,

can sometimes so overwhelmingly dominate our consciousness that we do not notice the quiet progress that's being made in, quote-unquote, boring sectors. But that is precisely where a lot of forward momentum is driven from. Number three, do not underestimate AI. The millennial generation is characterized and defined by the fact that we are the last generation who remembers what life was like before the Internet. We are the last generation to have experienced a.

childhood that was pre-internet. But it works both ways. Not only are millennials the last to retain pre-internet era memories, we are also the first to experience the internet during some portion of our late childhood or adolescence. We were, at the time the internet became ubiquitous, we were its youngest users. In that same regard, Gen Alpha is likely to be a little bit of going to be characterized as the AI generation. They will be, similar to millennials, Gen Alpha will be the last generation to remember what life was like prior to the ubiquity of AI.

And conversely, they will be the youngest generation to adopt AI in their daily lives when it becomes widespread. We are currently living in 1999. and learning about this new technology called the Information Super Highway. That is where we are right now with AI. And if you want to invest in it, buy a total stock market index fund. I'm serious if you want to invest in AI by a U.S. total stock market index fund because the future of the U.S. economy and the growth of AI move in lockstep.

Now, the same cannot necessarily be said for many other international markets. It's notable that prior to 2008, the European and U.S. stock markets more or less tracked each other. Since 2008, they've diverged. Look at a side-by-side comparison of the Europe 600 versus the S&P 500. The divergence is enormous. And you can clearly see convergence right up to the world. through 2008, 2010, you know, right up through that great reset, the worldwide recession, and a massive divergence from that point forward.

We could do a whole episode unpacking the multitude of reasons why, but for the moment, let's stick to the primary point, which is that if you want to invest in AI, buy the U.S. Total Stock Market Index Fund. Now, with that said, let's unpack the performance of the overall market, because in 2024 year-to-date, 10 stocks have accounted for 85% of the market's growth. In fact, InVIDIA alone, just that one company, accounts for nearly 2%, 1.95% of the growth of the entire stock market. So these 10 companies, it's Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Eli, Lili, Microsoft, GE Aerospace, Broadcom, ExxonMobil, and Berkshire Hathaway. these 10 have driven the overwhelming bulk of the growth, not just year to date, but since the market bottomed out in October of 2022.

Now, there are two elements of this that are simultaneously true. On one hand, it is unusual for large cap stocks to outperform short cap stocks in the long term. It's unusual to have this type of a run. And so there are analysts out there. who will argue that the best valuation, particularly right now, comes from both small-cap stocks and value-oriented stocks. So if you're going to make any type of sector-specific asset allocation play, exposure to either a small-cap index or a value fund might be strong valuation plays right now. That being said, however, it's also true that these runaway large-cap performers have significant economic moats, which is likely why they've been able to maintain such an impressive run for so long, with no real indication that it's going to end.

But again, that's where exposure to a total stock market index fund comes into play, because these behemoths continue to drive that growth. Real estate is a tricky sector right now, for those of those, of you who don't want to buy rental properties directly, for those of you who prefer to get your exposure to the real estate sector by virtue of buying reits or other publicly traded funds in the real estate space, be incredibly careful because there's a huge difference between commercial real estate and residential. And even inside of the commercial umbrella, commercial is a blanket term that encompasses everything from office spaces to

warehouses to mobile home parks. I will say the real estate sector in April was one of the market sectors that broadly had losses. The majority of real estate stocks, publicly traded real estate stocks, pulled back in the month of April. And that's to be expected because the performance of real estate stocks is negatively correlated with interest rates. But it's also true when you look at the fundamentals that office spaces in particular, within the commercial umbrella, office spaces and especially urban office spaces are, in my estimation, unlikely to recover. There's going to be some serious, serious pain in commercial real estate generally and in office spaces in particular. And that will have some spillover effects in the financial services sector to the

extent that it impacts the institutions that made loans to those companies. So if you are going to invest in real estate assets, publicly traded real estate assets, I would stay away. This is not investment advice, but personally, I am staying away from anything that has exposure to office spaces. by contrast, if you want exposure to real estate that is tied to either health care facilities or warehouses, those in my estimation could be value plays. And again, none of this is an investment advice. This is simply my assessment of where value opportunities might reside based on stock performance so far this year. I will say personally, this is why I also strongly, strongly favor direct investment in residential real estate. Because the residential real estate market and the commercial real estate market are influenced by a completely different set of factors.

They are in no way comparable. And there is a lot of strength in the residential market right now. And all the fundamentals are in place for the residential market to continue to remain strong and grow. And so I don't really like to mess around with the commercial real estate market too much because why would I bother when residential is so strong? With that being said, we are reopening our doors to your first rental property, which is the class that I teach on rental property investing. Now let me say up front, please do not enroll in this class if doing so would create a financial hardship for you. please don't. We have an enormous library of no-cost content about real estate investing. It's here on the podcast. It's on our website at afford-anything.com. It's on our YouTube channel.

We have a no-cost newsletter. All of that is available at absolutely no-cost. So if you want to learn about real estate investing and if enrolling in a class would create a financial hardship, please don't do it. Please use our no-cost material instead. For those of you who could enroll in a class without enduring hardship, the benefit is time. The benefit is time, convenience, everything is packaged together in a very cohesive manner so that we walk you A through Z through precisely how to analyze a property, how to find a property, how to finance it. We give you checklists, spreadsheets, all of the tools that you need. We even give you word-for-word scripts that you can use when you're talking to

property managers and contractors so that you know exactly what email to send or what to say on the phone. There are flowcharts, there are quizzes, we have TAs who are all alumni of the course, who are available to guide you through our study halls. So there's the accountability, there's homework assignments, there's enormous support. It's a very white glove experience. So if that's something that interests you,

go to afford anything.com slash VIP list, and we will send you loads of information about it. If you want to look at more detailed information, you can go to afford anything.com slash enroll. Now, we only offer this class typically twice a year, sometimes only once a year. Last year, 2023, we only offered it once. The year prior, 2022, I think we also only offered it once, but the year before in 2021, we offered it twice.

So it varies. We offer it between one to two times a year. But this year, we are going to open our doors for enrollment on Wednesday, May 22nd. So if you would like to enroll in the class, Wednesday, May 22nd, our doors reopened for enrollment. on Friday, May 31st, the doors close. So the next first Friday episode that you hear a month from now, our doors are going to be shut. That's your window if you want to enroll. May 22nd through 31st is the window.

And then class begins the following Monday. It's a 10-week-long class. You can take it on demand if you choose or you can go through it at a cohort pace if you choose. The analogy that we like to use is, you're a wolf. You can either be a pack wolf. You can run with a pack or you can be a lone wolf. And we see that a lot of our students often oscillate between the two. When you're in a space where you really want the camaraderie and the accountability,

you run with the pack. And that's always available for you. But if you're in a space where you're responding to other demands in life, sometimes you're a lone wolf and that's okay too. We've set it up such that you can do both. So again, afford anything.com slash VIP list. you a lot of information. You can reply to any one of those emails with any questions that you have. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the first Friday monthly economic update episode.

I so appreciate you being part of this community. Thank you for your commitment to financial literacy and to the pursuit of financial independence. Please support our show by following us on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And come check out our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Afford Anything. Give us a follow there as well. Thank you again for tuning in.

My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast. And I will meet you in the next episode.