Afford Anything - The Crypto Crash, the Housing Market, and Hot Takes on the Latest Economic Headlines

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

#416: Crypto is tanking. Household debt is climbing. Student loans are tangled up in the court system. And the house market…did what?! Today’s bonus First Friday episode takes a look at the latest economic headlines, with analysis, commentary and hot takes. Enjoy! For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode416 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, good morning. This is Paula Pant from the Afford Anything podcast. It's the first Friday of the month and it's the last first Friday of the month in 2022. Welcome to the December 1st Friday episode. For those of you who are new to this podcast, we are typically a weekly podcast. We air a new episode every Wednesday. But once a month, on the first Friday of the month, we air a bonus episode. We've just wrapped a special. series that we did, season one of Invest Anywhere. We've been airing that for the last several first Fridays. But now we've come to the end of the year, closing out 2022. And it's been a while since I've talked to you directly. And there's been a lot happening in all of our lives. A ton that's in the economic and business news, a ton that's happening behind the scenes with me. So I thought that for this bonus episode, today's bonus episode, I'd bring. format a bit and share with you thoughts on what's happening out there in the economy, as well as a glimpse behind the scenes of what's happening with me. So again, this is not our usual

format. If you're a new listener or you're new to the community, just know that this episode is not representative of what we usually do on our normal Wednesday episodes, every other episode, we interview a guest, and on the episodes in between, we answer questions. But the first Friday episodes are fun. They get to be experimental. We try new things. We try new formats. So let's give this a go. First, let's talk about what's happening in the headlines. Total household debt climbed in the last quarter. This continues a trend of household debt increasing significantly. Since the end of the pandemic, there's been a 15% year-over-year increase in credit card balances. And right now, households have the largest

aggregate credit card balance in more than 20 years. The bulk of this rise in household debt is attributable to two factors. People have more mortgage debt. People have higher credit card balances. Auto loans on the personal balance sheet are climbing relative to where they used to be, but they don't comprise overall a large percentage of household debt, not in the way that mortgages and credit card balances do. What does this mean? The fact that debt is climbing? Is this something to worry about? Are we in a consumer credit bubble? The good news is that despite the climbing debt, the total number of households overall that carry debt is not as big as it used to be. And among those fewer households that do carry debt, they tend to be more credit-word.

and have fewer delinquencies than previous eras that we've seen in the past. Prior to the Great Recession, which was the last major credit bubble to pop with dire consequences, prior to that, more households had debt, and on balance they were less qualified to be taking out those kinds of loans. So that's the good news and the bad news. Debt is climbing, but it's affecting fewer people, and it's affecting, those people who are best equipped to handle it. Now, one interesting piece of the puzzle that we have not yet seen how it will shake out is what's going to happen when the pause on student loan payments ends.

Student loan payments have been paused since the pandemic. They continue to be paused. And so all of those accounts are marked as current. They're marked as paid on time because no payments are due. So how will that change once federal student loans need to be repaid? again, only time will tell. But there is some good news here as well. Average student loan debt at graduation expressed in May 2021 dollars to keep it consistent for inflation, that average student loan debt has actually fallen between 2020 and 2021, which is the most recent year for which we

have data. We don't yet have 2022's numbers. So that average debt balance has fallen from 31,500, in 2020 to 31,100 in 2021. It's a small shift, but it is directionally heading in the right place. When adjusted for inflation, 2012 was the peak year for student debt at graduation. So both are immediate year-over-year numbers as well as across the past decade, how have we been doing? When adjusted for inflation, the trajectory is slowly improving. That said, of course, the big student loan-related issue that's dominated in headlines is the proposed debt forgiveness plan, which is currently being tested in the courts. Obviously, it is unwise to make any predictions as to how that may go, if the courts will uphold

it or not. And for those of you with student loans, the best course of action is to be prepared to resume payments on June 30th when the Paws and federal student loan repayments is lifted. The deal's never done until the ink's dry, so in the meantime, have the cash on hand, have it in your budget, be ready. Better to be prepared to resume making those payments and then not need to than the other way around.

And again, those payments don't resume until June 30th of 2023, so you've got some time for those of you with federal loans. Turning our attention to the housing market, Here's a question for you. Because I'm betting a lot of you over Thanksgiving probably heard some anecdotal doom and gloom from some neighbor who's like cherry-picking anecdotes from their subdivision. So here's my question for you. Do you think year over year that home prices have risen, fallen, or stayed the same? What do you think?

Between this year and last year, better, worse, the same. All right. Follow your answer in your head. Here's what the actual data says. Home values rose by double digits year over year. There are two reporting agencies. One calculated an 11.9% seasonally adjusted year over year rise. The other calculated 13.1%. So the full data, the federal housing finance agency is the group that found the 11.9% year-over-year rise. That's in their seasonally adjusted purchase-only house price index, which measures single-family residential homes, and that data comes from an August-through-August comparison. Now, a different index called the CoreLogic Case Schiller 20-city home price index, estimated an annual gain of 13.1

percent, again, using August numbers. By the way, the reason that we're using August numbers is because this report came out in October, and the October report contained August numbers with a two-month lag. We are still waiting for the November report to come out. But what both price indices have found is that year over year, despite the fact that mortgage financing has become more expensive. And remember, the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates in April. Despite that, the home price data, which is based on real estate sales contracts that were signed in late June and July, with subsequent closings happening during August, continue to reflect double-digit rise. Now, there will be the doom and gloomers at Thanksgiving who will either cherry-pick specific

single-case anecdotes, or who will point to month-over-month volatility, which is not the framework that any buy-and-hold investor would use. If you're rapidly flipping houses, sure, you might care about month-over-month data. But if you are either a homeowner, a residential homeowner, or a buy-and-hold long-term investor, you don't care about month-over-month data. You care about year-over-year-over- data, or ideally decade data, but we're going to at least monitor what's happening year over year. Just as in the world of stock investing, if you're a long-term investor, you don't care what the market is doing month over month, you care about what it's doing, how it's doing in years.

You care about the long-term trends, the trajectory, because you're not planning on flipping something in three months. You might flip it in three years, but that's no longer a flip. That's a multi-year hold. More data from the world of housing. Builders are clearing out their inventories and not building more. So the inventory of homes for sale for new construction rose, but for existing homes fell. So year over year, there's been a 23.2% increase in the inventory of new construction

homes for sale, meaning that builders and developers have... noticed the fact that home prices are rising and have responded by building new homes and flooding the market with these new homes. The inventory of new construction homes that are for sale nationwide would support 9.2 months of sales at the current pace of sales. That is more than what we usually have. The long-term average for months supply of home on the market is typically six months. So we have more new homes for sale, new construction homes for sale, now than we usually do. By contrast, existing homes for sale currently only represent a 3.2 month supply at the existing pace of sales. So builders, those who study the market have noticed this double digit year over year rise.

They've responded by creating new inventory. but that has fallen to the slowest pace since May of 2020, since the pandemic started essentially. So new housing starts, meaning new construction homes that are just beginning to get built, that is now at the lowest it's been since the pandemic began. Total housing starts are down 7.7% year over year. Some of the constraints around new construction starts include uncertainty in the market due to fluctuating mortgage rates, high construction costs based on supply chain issues, and labor shortages.

All of those are constraining home building. Builders have, however, began to turn their attention to multifamily. new construction starts of multifamily housing is up 16.5% year over year. Now, for those of you wondering, all right, what do I do with this information? What does all of this mean for me? Here are the takeaways. We are in a housing shortage. We have been for over a decade. There is a major, very well-documented, well-established deficit between the number of housing units that we need

and the number of housing units that we have. Freddie Mac was putting out warnings right before the pandemic about this housing shortage, and the pandemic, of course, only made it worse through both labor and supply chain shortages. Builders did resume building for a while and are continuing to resume building in the multifamily sector, but they're feeling a little gun-shy

about continuing to build new inventory in the single-family home. sector, which means the inventory shortage, especially in single-family homes, is likely to get worse. And that's going to continue to put pressure on the price of single-family homes to continue to rise. It's supply and demand. It's also clear that existing homeowners are, understandably, many are reluctant to move right now because many have locked in a low-interest-fixed rate mortgage and know that if they move, they'll have to sell their home, meaning they'll get rid of that locked in fixed rate mortgage, and they'll trade up to a much more expensive mortgage, which is likely why there is such a difference between the volume of existing homes on the market.

We have a three-month supply at the current sales pace versus the volume of new construction homes on the market. We have a nine-month supply. It's a major difference. So with builders creating fewer new construction homes and with homeowners more reluctant to move and with an existing housing supply shortage, there are many indicators that point to the supply shortage being a persistent and worsening problem, which is why I'm not surprised at all that year over year, home prices are continuing double-digit growth despite the higher mortgage rates.

Now, again, I'll reiterate that all of this data comes from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's October report. they have not yet released their November report. But given that today is now the first Friday in December, it's December 2nd, we're all eagerly awaiting that November report, which should be out soon. So I don't know how you spend your mornings,

but I'm leaping out of bed, checking us see if the November reports out. And of course, we'll have more updates, fresher updates on the housing market once HUD releases that data. Let's go next to Chris. Cryptocurrency, let's close out this first section with the latest in crypto news, because it is... Wow, what a poop show.

This morning, BlockFi filed for bankruptcy, a major crypto lender and platform. BlockFi has crumbled in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. The FTX story, by the way, I know it's been in the head. lines a lot, but not nearly as much as it ought to be, given the scale of what this story really is. This is Enron Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, all wrapped into one. And I'm not suggesting that Sam Bankman-Fried is Bernie Madoff. I'm not suggesting that this was a Ponzi scheme. I'm simply talking about the scale, the magnitude of how much money is at stake and how many people were impacted and what kind of reverberations the FTX collapse will have is having on the rest of the industry.

And Block Fai's bankruptcy announced this morning is further evidence of that. It's an example of how the collapse of one major player, a player that in a different market might be considered too big to fail, that player failed. And it brought down, like an earthquake, it brought down a lot of structures around it. Sam Bankman freed, by the way, he spoke against the advice of his lawyers. He spoke quite candidly, quite openly at the New York Times Steelbook. summit on Wednesday, essentially communicating three things. First, he said that he screwed up and made mistakes, but he didn't have any intent to commit fraud. He didn't have nefarious intent. He just didn't handle risk management as well as he should have. He said that the regulatory process took him hundreds, if not thousands of hours of meetings and ended up going nowhere. So he felt as though, even in the loosely regulated world of crypto, he had to spend far too much time

and energy dealing with the regulatory process and licensing. Those were his statements. And he confirmed that his personal wealth, which had peaked at 26 billion, is now down to 100,000. So there's a lot to unpack here. The FTX collapse, the Sam Bankman-Freed story very much deserves its own episode. But for those of you wondering what to do with the information, what it means for the future of crypto, my recommendation would be to zoom out and take the big picture of you. This is the fourth crypto collapse in 14 years. And every time that crypto collapses, the doom and gloomers, claim that this is the end,

chicken little, the sky is falling. And yet, crypto continues to come back every time. Again, this is the fourth collapse in 14 years. And crypto continues to make a rebound. Why? Because the underlying technology, blockchain, is revolutionary. Blockchain will only continue to become a bigger structure in our lives in the coming years and decades. Blockchain will fundamentally, mentally change every industry. And digital currencies are one of many significant use cases for blockchain technology. Digital currencies are absolutely here to stay. And yes, there is a distinction between digital currencies and cryptocurrency, but crypto isn't going anywhere. Crypto is here to stay. Now, which specific cryptocurrencies will be the winners? Nobody knows.

What is it going to be Bitcoin or Ethereum? No one knows. But crypto as a whole is a valid and important use of blockchain technology. And it's not going anywhere. If you want a deeper dive into the basics of crypto, listen to episode 325. That's afford anything.com slash episode 325, where we explain the history and purpose of blockchain. we introduce Bitcoin, which is one of many use cases of blockchain. We explain how Bitcoin is created, what mining means.

We give an introductory primer to understanding this complex and important subject. So if you want to be rooted in that understanding, listen to episode 325. And if you want the quick takeaway in terms of should I invest in crypto, I will say now exactly what I said then. You know, episode 325 came out in July of 2021 when everyone was irrationally exuberant about cryptocurrency, and what I said then is exactly what I'll say now. Do not conflate cryptocurrency with stock investing. Instead, think of it as analogous to foreign currency exchange. And here's what I mean by that.

A stock or a bond or a piece of real estate, any asset is valued in two ways. There's capital appreciation, and then there's the dividend or the income stream that it pays. And that capital appreciation, by the way, is based on expectation of future earnings. That is how an asset, any asset, is valued. Foreign currency, on the other hand, the conversion of U.S. dollars to British pounds or Thai bought, or the Nepali rupee, foreign currency exchange is done simply by looking at the relative value of two different. forms of currency and trying to arbitrage the difference, shuffling money around between dollars and euros in order to, ideally, arbitrage off of those price differences.

That is what, quote-unquote, investing in cryptocurrency is. It is not an investment in an asset like a stock or a bond. It is a form of currency exchange. And when it's viewed through that lens, then the answer to how should you handle it within your own portfolio becomes much more clear because the amount of relative weight that you would want to give to cryptocurrency would be analogous comparable to the amount of weight that you would want to give to currency arbitrage within your portfolio, which is to say, A, make it a small portion of your portfolio, and B, remember, the fundamental different. between buying an asset in which you are gauging the present value of future earnings

and asking yourself, is this asset priced fairly, versus exchanging one form of currency for a different form of currency? The former is an investment. The latter is an arbitrage. So I said, and again, listen to episode 325, exactly the same thing that I said at the time that cryptocurrency was peaking. and everyone was excited is exactly the same thing that I am continuing to say when cryptocurrency is crashing and everybody is panicking.

These are the core principles of how to frame, how to understand what crypto is, how it relates to U.S. dollars, and subsequently the role that you want it to play in your own life. So that's my recap of the latest headlines. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors, and then when we return, I'll talk to you about what's going on in my own life, share some behind the scenes, reflect on the year that we've had, and on the year that's ahead. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology, built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size. But they also have the fintech hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine.

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If you've been listening for a while, you know I tend to talk about the subject at hand, money, personal finance, financial independence, and only kind of briefly mention myself. I don't want this to be the Paula show. But there's been a lot. And I just kind of want to talk to you guys about it. To start with, and I know I've mentioned this in sort of at the 30,000 foot view level. In September, I started a fellowship at Columbia University. It is a fellowship in business and economics journalism. The way it works is that every year, 10 mid-career journalists are accepted.

into this fellowship where we come and do intensive study, specifically in how to report on business, on finance, on the economy. The 10 of us who are selected for the fellowship are all established business journalists. In fact, when I look at the roster of the peers around me, I get massive imposter syndrome because they are all real journalists with careers at the BBC and Forbes and Business Insider. They are incredibly talented, accomplished business journalists. And then there's me. I started my own show and Afford Anything has grown

and we have almost 25 million downloads at this point. Our newsletter has 75,000 subscribers. I was recently in a Netflix. documentary. I'll talk about that in a moment. But, you know, so sure, I've done some things. But everything I've done has been journalism adjacent, but not journalism itself per se. I used to be a newspaper reporter before, long before I started to afford anything. I was a newspaper reporter for three years, although that was a small town paper and only a very short time span, only three years.

That's not long in terms of a career. But those three years provided me with training and insight that I found to be incredibly significant when I began afford anything. Because there are certain basic things. I mean, it is not intro to journalism type of stuff that I've done from the beginning that I see other content creators not doing. And I think that has been one of the distinguishing characteristics that has allowed afford anything to pull ahead.

And that was part of why I wanted to embark on this fellowship because my thinking was if those three years at a small town paper were that valuable in terms of training, then what would going to the best journalism school in the nation, and becoming part of a very selective business and economics fellowship inside of that institution. What would that do? And so I started that in early September. There are three different tracks that the fellows can choose from.

Two of the three tracks have the fellows taking the majority of their courses in the business school. And the third track, which I've chosen, has me taking a bigger course load. I'm taking the equivalent of 18 credit hours this semester at the graduate level. In fact, I'm taking such a high course load that we culminate this year in a master's, a master's of arts in business and economics journalism. But with the courses that I'm taking, a handful of them are, you know, we study accounting, corporate finance. I have an overdue statistics assignment that's weighing on my mind that I should have turned in last Monday. So a handful of our courses are in that realm. And then a lot of our other

courses are seminars, journalism seminars, on how do we talk about these economic and financial topics in a way that's approachable, not jargony, nuanced, big picture? You know, how do we really deeply understand the subject matter and then translate that for our audience? And so the courses have been excellent. They've been very different from what I expected. I was expecting, I think going into it, I was anticipating more training on the nuts and bolts of how to write a story, how to conduct an interview. You know, I was going and thinking about those basic skills, imagining that this training would make me very, very good at the basics, a master of the basics. So I was imagining that, for example,

I would deliberately work on improving the craft of conducting an interview, which is something that I've been wanting to really hone for a long time, given how many interviews we do here and afford anything. But the classes are not that. There's a different program, a Masters of Science and Journalism. They do that basic stuff there. The MS program, the MS kids are all like 23 and they're straight out of undergrad, and they're the ones who are learning the basics. But, you know, for those of us, it's a much smaller program, the MA, that program, they only accept experienced journalists. You have to have a specialized concentration. There are only seven of us who have the MA business and economics journalism concentration. Only seven of us. And of the

seven of us, I am one of only two Americans. The other five have come from other countries. One was the senior editor at Forbes India. For example, we have, we have those very experienced journalists from around the world. So at this level, they know we know the basics. They're not going to rehash that again. Instead, we're taking in our classes a very deep look at how to produce news pieces, which is another way of saying how to interpret the data and communicate it across a wide variety of economic topics, everything ranging from the jobs report to inequality and social mobility, from mergers and monopolies and antitrust law, to immigration and labor force participation and tax policy and consumer spending and retirement.

Like, we're very deeply sinking our teeth into all of that. As a journalist, or I guess as a former journalist who now has her own platform, it's been transformative, but in very different ways that I expected. And I think at least so far, if I were to walk away with one major key takeaway, at the big picture level, it's that going into the program, I was focused on writing, on style, on, you know, that surface face of communication. being inside the program, it's clear to me that 95% of the job is the reporting, the research, the interviews, the reading court cases directly rather than relying on secondary sources like other news articles to summarize what happened, reading laws directly, right, going to those primary sources, talking to the policymakers, talking to the executives, right? the reporting is 95% of it. And then the presentation, the writing, the structure, the style, that's almost an afterthought. Yeah, a good editor, and granted good editors are hard to find, very hard to find.

But a good editor can help you structure how you say something, but none of that matters if you don't first have something original to say. And that original thought only comes from deep and heavy reporting. That's something that you don't get in the content space, where most of us, we rely on secondary or tertiary sources, which means a lot of the data that we're looking at has gone through multiple levels of playing telephone. there isn't an ethos of contextualizing or framing. I mean, in the content space, the things that drive clicks tend to get more weight than the things that matter.

A simple example, any teenager could put together a story that says, hey, this Thanksgiving, food prices are higher. So here are eight cheaper meals that you could eat. you know, and then put together some clickbait listical. But the bigger questions are, what are the key drivers of inflation? In what ways are we experiencing inflation now and how does it differ from previous inflationary periods? So, for example, right now, a lot of the inflation that we are experiencing is borne out through higher prices for new cars, much higher prices and used cars, honestly,

most much higher prices in the car market, but new cars in particular are factored into the equation, as well as higher prices for airline tickets. If you drill into the data, you actually drill into the data, there is a distinction between what's salient and what is real. And oftentimes what's salient, meaning what comes to mind for the average person, is what we directly experience firsthand. So we when we are pumping gas into our cars, we see, or even when we're driving down the highway and just looking at the price of gas, you know, we can see that higher price. We have firsthand experience of it. And this firsthand experience, the drive down the highway where we see the higher prices is a daily reminder. When we are fueling our cars, we're usually just standing there. We have

nothing else to do but just watch the price on the fuel pump increase. So the price of gas becomes incredibly salient, but just because something is salient does not necessarily mean it has the biggest impact on our wallets. No, that's not to say that gas prices aren't high. That's not to say that they don't impact our wallets. That is simply to say that if something is salient, if something has caught our attention, that does. not necessarily make it the most important thing. A does not equal B. One of the major expressions of the current inflationary period that we're living in is the cost of airfare. But the cost of airfare does not equally affect everyone. First of all, there's a huge section of the population

that doesn't have the money to fly. And now let me put an asterisk here. The lowest income people are the ones who are hurt most by inflation. I want to make that very clear. But when it comes to specifically airline tickets, that's an issue that by and large affects the middle class. Second, a lot of elderly people don't fly or rarely fly. But Social Security is tied to inflation. Social Security, in fact, just announced

that its latest cost of... living increase is 8.7%. So social security benefits are going to increase by 8.7% beginning with this month, December 222's benefits, which will be payable in January of 2023. And so there could be net a slight benefit for seniors in that while social security benefits are adjusting to reflect inflation, some of the ways in which that inflation is expressed right now, are not the ways in which seniors tend to spend. And again, I want to put some huge asterisk here. This is not to say that those living in retirement or living on a fixed income

aren't in stressful situations right now. I mean, utility prices are going up. Food prices are high. The cost of gas is certainly higher. But, you know, many of them have their mortgages paid off. So higher mortgage rates are not an issue. higher rental prices for those who are homeowners, seniors who are homeowners, tends to be less of an issue. So I guess stepping back from the weeds a bit, the broader idea that I'm trying

to communicate is that the economy affects different people in different ways. There are very few people in the content creation space who pay attention to the nuances of that, it is easy to talk about an issue or a group as a monolith. Or you remember the intellectually lazy trope of like, millennials are bad at investing, which I've always hated. We're hearing that less these days now that the oldest millennials are 40, 40, 41, I think, 42 maybe even for the oldest millennials. So we're hearing that less these days, but that was especially during the Great Recess.

and in the immediate aftermath, that was just this drumbeat of an intellectually lazy trope. Millennials are not investing. They're bad at investing. They're scared of investing. They're not. Oh, man. And I took umbrage with it then, and I obviously continued to do so. But that was just something that was easy to pair it and repeat, and it was clickable. But that doesn't make it real. And similarly, painting any given group is a monolith. or discussing any given issue in a one-dimensional manner, it does not do it the justice that it deserves.

You know who inflation is bad for and good for? Inflation is bad for people with a lot of savings, obviously, because your savings in your savings account is diminishing the cash value of your emergency fund, the purchasing power of that, is decreasing. So inflation is bad for savers, but it's great. for people with a fixed rate mortgage, because they're just paying that mortgage back in cheaper and cheaper dollars.

We did a deep dive, by the way, on inflation in episode 365, if you want to really understand hyperinflation, biflation, stagflation, the CPI, the PPI, core inflation, demand pull inflation, cost push inflation, if you really want to understand all of that. episode 365, you can listen by going to afford anything.com slash episode 365. At any rate, I guess where I was going with all of this is what I'm learning at Columbia through this fellowship. And the big takeaway is that the distinction between who is a journalist versus who is a content

creator is basically a non-existent, almost meaningless. I don't know if that distinction even exists anymore. because both journalists and content creators, traditional journalists and content creators, have the ability to inform and influence the public. And when we have that ability, we have the duty to do so with care. And what I see too much in the content creation space is, if I may go so far, as to say, a breach of the public's trust through sheer lack of rigor. Lack of nuance, lack of original sourcing, lack of fact-checking, and it's critical to me that afford anything never falls prey to those temptations. Being at Columbia, I can see a thousand and one ways for us to improve all of our content from the podcast to the newsletter to the show notes. It's ironic, it's painfully ironic, that it is at precisely the time when I am bursting with the

most ideas, that I'm also the most hamstrung from being able to implement them for just sheer lack of time. So, four days a week, I'm up at six. I get on Zoom at 6.30 a.m. to talk to my team at Afford Anything. that's 6.30 a.m. to 8 a.m. and then from 8 a.m. to 8.45 a.m., I have those 45 minutes to get ready, eat breakfast, make coffee, pack my bags, all of that. And then 8.45 a.m., I'm usually out the door. That puts me on campus by 9.30. And then I'm on campus 9.30 a.m. until between 8.30 to 9 p.m. 4 days a week. And then with the commute back, it's usually around 10 p.m. that I'm back home. So it's very intense. Last night, for example.

Last night I was in class until my last class ended at 8.30. I stayed and talked to some of the students afterwards. I probably left campus around 9.15. By the time I was home, it was past 10. That's when I started making dinner. I had a piece of toast with some cheese on it. That was dinner. It was around just shortly before midnight, maybe 1145 that I went to sleep.

And then I set my alarm for 501 a.m. So I could get up and start working on this first Friday piece, this episode. And I'm actually already, like I'm looking at the clock and I'm running late. I'm behind schedule and need to wrap this up and get to campus for the day. So I've got four days a week that are very, very intense. And then the other three days a week are less intense. To me, to me, a less intense day is a day in which I'm working only eight hours instead of between 12 to 16. Today, for example, if all goes according to plan, as I mentioned, I set my alarm for 501 a.m.

It took me like half an hour to like kind of get going and making coffee. So it was around 5.30 that I started working. and today my intention is to be done by 3 p.m. That's what I'm aiming for. So that to me is a half day. So that's where I'm at right now. And I'm not saying this to engage in some kind of a pissing contest, but only to communicate how frustrated I feel, honestly,

about the fact that there are so many things that I want to be doing, that I literally just do not have the space for. I've gained seven pounds in the last two months because I'm eating a lot of my meals out of vending machines at this point. And I haven't, with the exception of Thanksgiving, I haven't seen the inside of a gym in two months, which is very unusual for me. I was at the gym between four to five days a week

right before Columbia started. But at this point, I'm working seven days a week, week. I took Thanksgiving day off, and then the following day Friday, I worked a half day. But then Saturday was a full day, a full 12-hour day. I was on campus until around 9 p.m. on Saturday, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. And so, yeah, it's not a sustainable lifestyle, but, you know, this is nine months, 10 months of incredibly high-intensity work. and it is the hardest professionally, the most challenging thing I've ever done, but also the best thing I've ever done. And I also want to add, in the past, I never really believed when people would talk about like these grueling work days of 12 to 16 hours.

In the past, I never understood how that was possible because I thought, like, isn't your brain going to check out after some time? I mean, won't you just get distracted? What I realize now is that in the event that you are sitting alone at a computer looking at a spreadsheet or reading or reading or writing, then yes, absolutely, your brain will get distracted. You can't singularly focus for that long. Your brain will get distracted if you're working alone. But in the company of other people collaborating together on a project, that's what I've realized. That's how such long days are possible. To be perfectly frank, that's also what makes it enjoyable.

I mean, the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, there's no way I ever would have done that alone. Stayed at a library until 9 p.m. If I was the only person inside that library, no way, no way. But the fact that so many of my classmates were around me and it was a shared experience and we were all doing it together, Hey, we're all in this together. We're all grueling, plugging away together. That shared experience, the camaraderie, the community, that's what makes this level of intensity both possible and also pleasurable, enjoyable.

So those have been my big takeaways from these first couple of months. All right, well, I need to wrap up. I need to go get myself back up to Columbia. But thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community. I hope that you've enjoyed today's episode. It's a nice way to put kind of a bow on 2022. I didn't even have time to talk about Netflix, right? Yeah, it was in a movie.

I haven't even had time to talk about that yet. I was also on CNBC and on Chris Cuomo show and on Bill O'Reilly show. And I did, honestly, I didn't even know he. had a show still, but he does, and I was on it. I haven't even, actually, my parents have asked for a link to that so they could watch it, and I haven't even sent them that yet. It's just been, there's been so much going on. So, oh, and Big Think, I did a production. Yeah, there's so much more that I could say that everything has been just happening so quickly. I haven't even been able to talk about it. But I hope that today's episode was informative, useful, helpful. I hope you

enjoyed it. And I'll be back in January when we start the new year. I'll come back on and we'll do something like this again. In the meantime, feel free to send me feedback or thoughts or comments on Instagram. I'm there at Paula P-A-U-L-A, P-A-N-T. And thank you for being part of this community. This is so important, so pivotal. So thank you for being there for each other. Thank you for spreading the word about great financial health and financial literacy. And have a great rest of 2022. And I'll see you in the first Friday episode of the new year, as well as obviously every Wednesday for our normal Wednesday episodes.

All right. Thank you so much. And I'll catch you in the next episode.