#37 – Inflation Softening, Election Uncertainty, Apple Stats, And A 5% Retirement Withdrawal Rate

Wes Moss [00:00:16]:
Our focus, providing clear, actionable information without the financial jargon to help 1 million families retire sooner and happier. Based on the long running WSB radio show, this money Matters podcast is tailor made for both modern retirees and those still in the planning stages. Join us in this exciting new chapter and let’s journey toward a financially secure and joyful retirement together.

Wes Moss [00:00:46]:
Welcome to Money Matters. Here it’s Sunday morning. Your host Wes Moss, along with Jeff Lloyd here in studio. Jeff Lloyd, good morning and welcome back, my friends.

Jeff Lloyd [00:00:57]:
Wes, good to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Wes Moss [00:01:00]:
I know you work hard. I know you’re one of the hardest workers. I know. But an 80 hours work week, did you see this headline? JP Morgan will, they will limit, now these are junior bankers, not banker bankers, I guess these are the under the sub 30 group. Sub 30 years old. They’ll limit the banker’s hours to 80 hours a week.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:21]:
I saw that headline. And okay, they’re limiting it to 80, but what’s that coming down from? 100 hours workweek.

Wes Moss [00:01:30]:
Yeah. I mean, and you started doing the math around 100 hours workweek and it’s hard to, it’s hard to get there. I mean, that’s 1010 hours shifts. So it would be in six, in seven days. If we take 100 divided by seven days, you’re talking about every single day of the week, 14 hours a day.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:52]:
Yeah. And they’re, they’re just not working 85 days a week. They’re working six, seven days easy, 80 hours a week.

Wes Moss [00:01:58]:
If you, if you’re working seven days, you’re going to be working eleven to 12 hours every single day. This I love, I love this line about you. Junior bank. Junior bankers at JP Morgan already have a protected window. They’re protected, I guess, from work from 06:00 p.m. friday to noon on Saturday. And this one, this is the best one. And they already enjoy one full weekend off every three months.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:30]:
So they get four. Four weekends every year is how I’m reading. That’s right.

Wes Moss [00:02:35]:
One a quarter.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:36]:
One a quarter. Okay. Here’s your weekend.

Wes Moss [00:02:38]:
That’s some serious sacrifice. Those investment bankers must love their job.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:43]:
And if you kind of think about.

Wes Moss [00:02:44]:
It, actually they don’t like, so there’s a lot.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:46]:
Typical work week is 40 hours. Right. And they’re limiting it to twice that.

Wes Moss [00:02:53]:
Limiting to double. All right. What, what else this week? So us has more 401K millionaires than ever. That, and this, this has been happening in the last couple of quarters. We’ll get to that Apple new iPhone. And I’m surprised we’ve got some inflation math around that. Plus what, what the, what the I, the first iPhone back in zero seven cost. And how much would that be if you just invested the money? Retirees.

Wes Moss [00:03:19]:
And this one is the, to me, this is the most important of all because, and maybe the most boring, but I think it’s the most important. That’s why I keep bringing it up. But this is something that I have not seen and we haven’t talked about here on the show. This was just from Barron’s retirees. Here’s the headline. It’s time to give yourself a raise. How to keep the cash flowing for decades. A 5% withdrawal rate.

Wes Moss [00:03:42]:
This is part of the headline. A 5% withdrawal rate. 5% now looks to be, quote, safe for retirement, using buckets for cash income growth to keep it all afloat. So we’re going to dive into that because again, we’ve talked about the 4% rule here and the bashing of the 4% rule. Only a couple of weeks ago. There’s an article that said, hey, you can’t use 4% of your money plus inflation. It can only be could if you want to avoid financial ruin. It should be closer to two and a quarter.

Wes Moss [00:04:10]:
Here we are a couple of weeks later, there’s a new article from Behrends who just a couple of years ago said that the 4% rule was dead and you needed it should be under 2%. Now they’re coming back and they’re saying 5%. You pulled this too. I have this somewhere on my phone. I don’t know if we printed this out. Mortgage rates lowest level this week. Mortgage rates hit their lowest levels since Feb of 23. And then here’s not a great headline.

Wes Moss [00:04:38]:
September has been the worst month for the us stock market historically with an average of negative 1.2% since 1928. Jeff Lloyd, I’ll give you the, I’ll give you the deck of cards. Where do we go? Where do we go first? What interests you the most?

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:59]:
Well, I think we got to go with, let’s talk about the iPhone. The iPhone 16 was announced this week. You know, a few updates, some hardware upgrades, some software upgrades, buttons, some battery life. And the iPhone 16 has come a long way over the past 17 years. Remember the first iPhone? The first gen iPhone was released at the end of June in 2007 in zero seven. So we’re on the iPhone 16 over the past 17 years. So you’re getting a new iPhone about once a year.

Wes Moss [00:05:34]:
Yeah. Well, and I remember, I’m trying to think if we even had iPhones. I guess we did have iPhones started back when we started money matters, but I don’t know if I had one yet. I think it took maybe a couple years until I had, I remember I think I had like a, was a BlackBerry maybe before those got or some version of that? I was still typing with the numbers ABC. Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:57]:
You had the actual keyboard with the BlackBerry. I remember that was one of the biggest things with the iPhone is there was no actual keyboard.

Wes Moss [00:06:05]:
Well, I know I never had a BlackBerry, but I had one of those, a texting semi smartphone where you still had to press multiple times to get to the letter, like ABC. Anyway, so it’s hard to fathom back then what did it cost? What was the iPhone number one?

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:23]:
So in July, was there an actual.

Wes Moss [00:06:26]:
Iphone one or did it start at another number?

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:29]:
I’m not sure. I don’t know if they called it the iPhone one or if it was just introducing the iPhone.

Wes Moss [00:06:34]:
But back in 97, what did it cost?

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:36]:
It cost dollar 499, today’s brand new.

Wes Moss [00:06:40]:
Iphone 16, the base model is what?

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:43]:
It’s dollar 799.

Wes Moss [00:06:45]:
Now if we take the original amount 17 years ago, that was the 499, and just adjust that for inflation, yesterday’s $500 is what.

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:55]:
Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics has this CPI inflation calculator. So you can type something in. It’s like back in July of 2007 it was x. It was x. What is that in today’s dollars? So if you, if you type in 499 back then, what does that equate to in today’s dollars? It’s about $754, which is essentially where.

Wes Moss [00:07:20]:
The new phone is today. So, so there’s been, it’s only risen with the price of inflation. So that’s what, 40, 45 more dollars even inflation adjusted. And I don’t know how many times better today’s iPhone is than the, what I think is hard with iPhones is that it’s hard to measure the difference between the 14 and the 15 or the 15 and the 16. But it’s very easy to measure the difference between the iPhone, the early iPhones, the one, two, three relative today. I mean it’s a totally different machine. It’s totally different. The power level is tremendous of what you can do with it, the seamlessness of it.

Wes Moss [00:07:58]:
So it is probably ten times better than today and it’s essentially the same cost.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:05]:
Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:08:06]:
Adjusted for inflation.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:07]:
And think about the technology embedded in that phone, just from like a camera standpoint, taking pictures, taking video, the storage that you can have on the actual.

Wes Moss [00:08:17]:
Motion cinematic mode, they’ve made a lot.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:20]:
Of progress from the original iPhone.

Wes Moss [00:08:22]:
It’s true to what you have today.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:23]:
And you’re only paying in today’s dollars, only 45 more dollars.

Wes Moss [00:08:29]:
So if I invested though for 499 back then in Apple, what’s that worth today?

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:35]:
So if you would have bought $499, if you would have bought Apple stock instead of the iPhone, the first iPhone, what would that be worth today? It’d be about $25,000.

Wes Moss [00:08:48]:
That’s a lot of iPhones.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:49]:
Yeah. So you could buy like 31 iPhones.

Wes Moss [00:08:51]:
Now that’s a lot of iPhones. Again, no endorsement. We’re not saying buy or sell Apple stock, of course. So again, more and more 401K millionaires. And that makes sense because I think we were here in the first quarter of the year and or even last quarter in Q two. Here we are in really we’re mid September, there was a record number of 401K millionaires and now there’s another record of 401K millionaires. And that makes sense as markets have been fairly, I would say, better than good this year. So you keep having more and more folks crossing the million dollar boundary or that threshold and that makes complete sense.

Wes Moss [00:09:30]:
The economic news of the week, inflation is now at its lowest level since Feb of 2021. And what does that mean? So again, PCE, the personal consumption expenditures, one way to measure inflation, and that’s been around, that’s at 2.5%. But CPI is now also the consumer price index that just came out this week. That’s also two and a half percent year over year. So we’ve gotten the rate of inflation under control all the way down from the 9.1 we solved two and a half years ago. The problem, of course, as we experience as Americans, it doesn’t mean anything’s gotten cheaper. It’s just going up less quickly. So we still have, everything’s more expensive dramatically, 20, to call it, 25% from the early days of COVID However, the Federal Reserve, as they’ve now talked about for the last call it month plus, they have essentially said, we get it.

Wes Moss [00:10:31]:
Inflation’s back to close to where our target is. This number continues to support that. Now the unemployment number has gone up pretty dramatically over the last year. That’s why the marketplace is looking for the Fed to cut rates. And whether it’s a quarter of a percent or half a percent. We still won’t know until the upcoming Fed meeting. This, what this, it’s coming up.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:53]:
We will know. We will know this week, we’ll know.

Wes Moss [00:10:56]:
This time next week.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:56]:
We will know if there’s going to be a rate cut on Thursday. But remember what we’ve kind of said over the last couple of months. The question is really no longer will the Fed cut at this meeting. How much will it be? 25? Will it be 50 probabilities, zero point 225 or 50 basis points?

Wes Moss [00:11:16]:
And we tend to think, Jeff Lloyd, I think very often people think that rates are dictated by the Fed, and of course they are. But the market itself, the bond market, the interest rate market itself moves on the expectations well before what the Fed does. And we’ve seen that over the last couple of weeks with the mortgage rates. So mortgage rates, even though the Fed has still yet to do a cut, we’re still at five and a quarter to five and a half percent on the federal funds rate. It’s still there. However, mortgage rates today are now, have gone all the way from high sevens. We were getting closer to 8% for the average 30 year fixed mortgage.

Jeff Lloyd [00:11:57]:
Now this week down to, they’re down to 6.2%. That’s the lowest that we’ve seen in a year and a half since February of 2023.

Wes Moss [00:12:06]:
And that just goes into our thought that if we get into the five range, which is now getting, we’re knocking on the door. You get into the five range. Five and a half, where we could get, it could happen on mortgage rates if interest rates in general continue to go down, that we think spurs a lot of housing activity, or it certainly would.

Jeff Lloyd [00:12:27]:
So that mortgage rate is 6.2. I actually talked to someone in the office this week that got a mortgage rate in the high fives, so they’re hitting that range. It’s available out there.

Wes Moss [00:12:38]:
I think that’s another good point. The average 30 year fix, when you go back to what people are, remember, that’s people with credit not so perfect, and they’re a little higher, and then you get folks that are slightly below that. We’re already getting into the 5% range for some folks. So we have some. That’s good news. That’s good news. If you’re looking to go buy a house or maybe put your house on the market and have to go buy another house with a mortgage. We have also a very interesting mortgage stat that we’ll get to.

Wes Moss [00:13:08]:
Here we are in the month of September. It’s been a volatile month it’s been a good year, I would say, for stocks and a much broader stock market this year than last, which is good news. I’ve been continuing to look at dividend paying company ETF’s or indices relative to the general market, and over this past last week, they’re starting to look pretty close, I’d say dividend paying companies that are dividend growth companies in general have largely kept up with the more tech heavy s and P 500. However, September is not a great month historically. If you go back to 1928, the returns don’t look all that great. If you go back from 1928 to 2024, there are only two months that, on average are negative. This is, call it, this is almost 100 years of data. The best month, by the way, is July on average is up almost 2%, 1.7 historically December, November, December, January, historically good months.

Wes Moss [00:14:16]:
November up one on average, 1% on average. December up 1.3% on average, and then January up about one and 1.2% on average. However, February is down just a 10th of a percent on average, and September is the worst month by far. September average is negative 1.2% and it’s the only month that seen a positive rate of return less than 50% of the time. And that’s just where we are right now. And of course, you’ve got the. How much, what’s your time clock on the election? How many days we got, how many hours and minutes?

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:53]:
I don’t have the hours, minutes and seconds, but we’re, we’re less than two months away from elections.

Wes Moss [00:14:58]:
So you have the uncertainty around that this still very close election. Investors don’t love uncertainty. September is historically not a great month. So I would just, I would be prepared that this could be continued to be a choppy month. Put in the historical context, September has always been historically not great, number one. Number two, the market really can’t stand uncertainty. It hates uncertainty. It loves certainty.

Wes Moss [00:15:26]:
So regardless of who necessarily wins, again, we’re leaving. Politics aside, markets want to know where there’s a winner, and that’s why we often see rallies once there’s a clear winner. Post presidential election, we’re going to run a news, weather and traffic. Then here on money matters, I think we’ve got to talk about this new barron’s article, the retirees. It’s time to give yourself a raise. That sounds good.

Jeff Lloyd [00:15:55]:
I like that headline.

Wes Moss [00:15:57]:
More money matters, straight ahead. If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout, or if you remember as a kid, Rocky running the steps, and if Michael Keaton is still mister mom to you. Then guess what? It’s officially time to do some retirement planning. It’s Wes Moss from money matters. Weren’t those the good old days? Well, with a little bit of retirement planning, there are plenty of good days ahead.

Wes Moss [00:16:23]:
Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com.

Wes Moss [00:16:28]:
That’S your, yourwealth.com. the headline of the week to me is this, is it time to give yourself a raise? Well, actually, that’s not the headline. That’s the way I look at it, because the exact headline, and this is from Barron’s, and I love Barron’s. I’ve been a reader. I’ve gotten the, the good old fashioned physical barons in the driveway for, I mean, it’s been 20 years, and there was about a two, three year period where they were terrible about delivering it, and I never would get it. I wouldn’t even get it until Sunday. And I always liked it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:05]:
The mailbox.

Wes Moss [00:17:05]:
I like to be able to read it before the show. Anyway, this is last week’s parents retirees. It’s time to give yourself a raise. How to keep the cash flowing for decades. And they talk about income, which we love to talk about income here on money matters as well. A 5% withdrawal rate now looks, quote, safe for retirement savings. Again, according to Barron’s using, they call, they say, buckets for cash income and growth. Wait a minute.

Wes Moss [00:17:33]:
Don’t, haven’t we, wait a minute. They’ve been listening to money matters for the last 1516 years. And this is why these numbers matter. And if you’re feeling a little dizzy about all of this back and forth, when it comes to withdrawal rate numbers, this constant back and forth about retirement withdrawal rates, you’re not alone. We’re in the heart of this. Back in October 22. So call it. Exactly.

Wes Moss [00:18:01]:
Just about two years ago, Barron’s had everyone rethinking the classic 4% rule. They were saying a more conservative approach might be 1.9%. That was, that was the title of an article around withdrawal rates. Just 1.9. Just, that was two years ago. Two weeks ago, right here on money matters, we talked about a withdrawal rate from a Wall Street Journal article that said, if you want to avoid financial ruin, I love how they, and that’s running out of money in these studies. If you go back and look at, if I withdraw x amount percentage per year, adjust for inflation, and if I run out, these studies essentially say, quote, financial ruin. So if you want to avoid financial ruin, your withdrawal rate should be two and a quarter percent per year here for.

Wes Moss [00:18:50]:
So we’ve got years and years and years of back and forth. The 4% withdrawal rate rule works, and then now it doesn’t work. And now all of a sudden, they’re talking about 5%. And I like that. And these are in, these digits are super important. Three or four or five might not sound like a whole lot, but every percentage point in your withdrawal rate, if you think about it this way, is ten grand a year. If you have a million dollars saved for retirement, ten grand. So every point matters tremendously.

Wes Moss [00:19:27]:
At a million dollars, the difference between a two and a quarter withdrawal rate and 5% withdrawal rate is $25,000 per year and over $2,000 a month. So, yes, it matters. It matters to get this rule of thumb, this guide right, or at least feel confident about it, because it’s, it’s your primary fuel valve to let gas into the engine. Imagine you’ve got your investments. That’s gas in the tank. You’re going to have a, you can have a full tank, but if your fuel line is closed down, call it the 2% withdrawal rate. Then nothing’s getting to the engine. And if your fuel line is wide open, full tank of gas, plenty of money, call it six or 7% withdrawal rate.

Wes Moss [00:20:09]:
Then no matter how much gas you have in the tank, you’re very likely to run out at some point. And that’s why we spend a fair amount of time, every time there’s a big article in a Wall Street Journal or Barron’s, I think it makes sense to kind of break this down. And this latest iteration from the same publication that was saying it should be less than 2% coming out at 5%. It’s a big difference. Jeff Floyd so there’s a couple reasons why. And this, I, to some extent, have a problem with changing a number this dramatically. What’s the percentage? Four to five is what percentage?

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:52]:
Yeah, that’s a 25% jump. That’s a 25% raise.

Wes Moss [00:20:56]:
You do your retirement planning and you’re counting on four, and now all of a sudden the rule changes and it’s five. Now all of a sudden, you have 25% more. But these are super long term projections. So when you do retirement planning, you look at my favorite page on a retirement plan is the withdrawal rate page, and it gets calculated by how much you say you need per year. That gets adjusted for inflation. It looks at your portfolio value with an assumed rate of return and says, oh, according to this, you need 3.38% in this year in order to meet your spending needs. And next year it’s 3.52%. So that number is super critical, but it goes out.

Wes Moss [00:21:37]:
We’re looking at these projections for decades and decades. So to have a moment in time and say, because something has changed today or this year, to change a rule of thumb, that’s a guide for multi decades that I already have a little bit of issue with. The first reason they’re lobbying, why 5% now works, is that there’s a big financial firm, or one of the big asset managers, supposedly projects us stocks to return 8% annually over the next, call it coming decades. And by the way, that’s lower than historical numbers for the S and P 500 and bonds to be about 5%. This is over the next 20 years, which would then lead them to say that putting all that together, you could still take out about 5% and still be okay. The second point they make of why 5% could work here, and again, this is Baron saying this, not us. Here on money matters, they bring up the really good point that as long as you continue to be flexible and you can moderate your spending at any given point, that flexibility really helps make sure you’re not digging a big hole. So if you are taking out more than your portfolio is returning for too long, you’ve got to be willing to be flexible, reduce spending in some way so that you can cut back your withdrawal rate.

Wes Moss [00:22:57]:
But I think the biggest point, Jeff Lloyd, they make here is that they talk about income investing. They say, well, if you have a cash bucket, an income bucket and a growth bucket, and you look at, again, your cash is your kind of dry powder. Where have we heard that before?

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:13]:
We’ve heard it on money matters. For the last 15 years, your growth.

Wes Moss [00:23:16]:
Bucket is invested in equities, primarily.

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:19]:
And we’ve talked about the buckets 15 years here on money matters, large companies.

Wes Moss [00:23:24]:
Small companies International, that’s your antidote to inflation. What better, there are, maybe there are better places, but one of the, one of our better arrows in the quiver to outpace inflation, protective purchasing power and then the income bucket, which really is a, the way they look at this, this was, I actually separate these two out, typically. But the way they, they say this is, they look at fixed income that pays interest. So a variety of different fixed income or bonds that pay interest. Then also higher yielding dividend paying stocks, utilities, reits, energy pipeline companies, all together to generate steady income for your more intermediate term expenses, is the way they look at this bucket approach. They also talk about dividend paying company ETF’s real estate, or REIT ETF’s, all in this barron’s article. But really, to me, that philosophy has always made sense. If you have a portfolio that has, we call it dividends interest distributions, right? If we have dividends from stocks, interest from bonds, then distributions from areas that are like energy pipeline companies, real estate, et cetera, they all add up to the same thing.

Wes Moss [00:24:39]:
They’re all cash flow. So dividends interest distributions equals my portfolio cash flow, which then gives me my portfolio yield. And imagine all of the money you’re looking at, your liquid retirement savings. It’s generating cash flow at the tune of, let’s call it 3%. Well, if just sitting there generating cash flow of 3% and you’re taking four or four and a half, then doesn’t it stand to reason that just the income alone is paying a big portion of your withdrawal need? And that is part of their argument of saying why money could potentially last even at this 5% level, which, again, starts to make a little bit of sense. I, to some extent, I think that Behrens is preaching to the choir a little bit here in this article. I like their idea around cash flow. Multiple forms of cash flow gets you close to that withdrawal rate.

Wes Moss [00:25:37]:
The question still is, what’s the right draw rate or rate of withdrawal? And I would go back and take a slightly more conservative approach. Jeff Lloyd, we’ve talked about this many times over the years. I still like the 4% plus rule of thumb. It’s not five or six where you can make an argument for that. It’s not one or two, which just, I think, has people quitting before they get started. It really is kind of an intermediate approach that I believe it helps people figure out a way they can max out what they’re pulling out from their retirement portfolio without running out, provided it is dynamic and flexible. And again, Barron’s brings up that same point with any of these withdrawal rates, these are just guides. They’re guidelines that you can exceed at certain years when the spending’s high, and then you may have to dial back.

Wes Moss [00:26:31]:
But as long as you’re dynamic about it, I think that’s really where that, to me, is. The other big .1 of the pushbacks.

Jeff Lloyd [00:26:38]:
That we hear from those lower withdrawal rates, one to 2%, it’s what’s the point of working so hard to save? And now I’m getting into retirement, and I can’t pull any of that money that I work so hard for because.

Wes Moss [00:26:53]:
I’m going into financial, you’re going to.

Jeff Lloyd [00:26:55]:
Go into financial ruin. You’re going to, you’re going to run out of money too fast. You’re going to outlive your money, which is one of the biggest fears in retirement. If not, the biggest fear in retirement is the fear of running out of money. But you get to that four 4% plus, then you can enjoy retirement, have fun in retirement and enjoy that hard earned money in retirement.

Wes Moss [00:27:17]:
And, and really, it’s the rule to understand this critical piece of all the financial levers. Let’s say there’s twelve of twelve big variables in any sort of long term plan. It’s probably variable. Number one, it’s how much of what I have saved I can use in a retirement, which I think is the, here’s the real kicker, having some sort of plan. And your plan literally can just be, I know I can use x percentage. And if nothing else, I think that’s the start of some sort of plan. I think that is perhaps more important than knowing the exact specific number. So, so more, more than half of retirees are just winging it.

Wes Moss [00:27:58]:
They have no strategy whatsoever. I think that that uncertainty, that’s a recipe. That’s a recipe for, for disaster, not the exact digit that gets tagged for your withdrawal rate. So I would say this, forget obsessing over whether it’s 1.9 or four or 5%. Stick with what we have talked about and studied over and over again, the tried and true 4% plus rule of thumb, and just make sure you have a solid plan. Stay flexible as markets change. At the end of the day, we want to enjoy our retirement, not stress overdose. The exact percentage to be able to withdraw in any given year.

Wes Moss [00:28:40]:
Inflation numbers this week, the figure down from 2.9% in July. Most recent reading 2.5% for the August number. That’s pretty close to that good old fashioned Fed target. The two two range two and a.

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:55]:
Half feels pretty good. But for people in the Atlanta area, it might feel a little bit better than two and a half percent because they have this city index.

Wes Moss [00:29:05]:
Oh, from the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the BLS. And hold on, before you give us Atlanta, what’s the worst area? What’s the hardest hit with the city when it comes to annual inflation?

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:18]:
It was Chicago this past reading at 3.8%, followed by New York, Newark and Jersey City at 3.7%.

Wes Moss [00:29:25]:
All right, so the Northeast and the North Midwest, not calming inflation. The best you got to go. This is a little bit of, a, little bit of a hike. Urban Alaska, you got to go pretty.

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:38]:
Far away only from Atlanta to get one and a half percent.

Wes Moss [00:29:42]:
I hope we have some listeners in urban Alaska. I think we do. Hello to you. Thank you for joining in and listening to money matters all the way down here emanating from Atlanta. And where are we? Where’s Atlanta?

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:57]:
Atlanta is sub 2% for the first time in almost four years. So that’s something to celebrate. It’s at 1.7%.

Wes Moss [00:30:05]:
That’s the Atlanta Sandy Springs Roswell area. That’s pretty good.

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:09]:
So this is good news on a Sunday morning.

Wes Moss [00:30:12]:
The sunbelt for the most part, under 3%. And a bunch of the, you’ve got Miami is lower than, well, we’ve got Phoenix is lower than the annual rate. Atlanta is lower. Houston is lower. The woodlands and sugar land. I don’t know if I know sugar land.

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:29]:
Surrounding areas of Houston.

Wes Moss [00:30:32]:
If it weren’t for eggs, inflation would be looking pretty good still. Year over year, up 28% for eggs, juice and drinks, up 18%. Continued frankfurter inflation up 11%. Dried beans, peas and lentils, of course, still inflation there, up about 7%. And then don’t we have a deflation chart somewhere?

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:57]:
Yeah. And you will love what’s at the top of that list.

Wes Moss [00:30:59]:
I’m just going to guess. Apples.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:00]:
It’s your favorite fruit. Apples. They’re down almost 14%. Here’s a good gasoline is down just under 11%. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but if you kind of get outside the Atlanta area. I filled up with gas under $3 a gallon, which is, which feels pretty good.

Wes Moss [00:31:19]:
It feels pretty good. So fuel oil, gasoline both down twelve and 10%. Used cars. Trucks continue to correct lower, which in a, in a good way, down 10%. What else we have here? Men’s suits down 10%. The appliances.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:35]:
This is good news. It’s my wife’s birthday coming up this week and women’s dresses are down 4%. So maybe we need to go shopping this week.

Wes Moss [00:31:42]:
I think it is time for some new clothes. The, all right, we’ve got to wrap up here on, on money matters. So fun to be here in studio with you, Jeff Lloyd. For those listening, you can find our new happy retiree calculator tool under the resources tab@yourwealth.com. that’s y o u rwealth.com dot. It’s a quick way to have a money and happiness general financial plan that you can print out a PDF takes a couple minutes to do, so we invite you to do so@yourwealth.com. and with that have a wonderful rest of your day.

Mallory Boggs [00:32:22]:
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Mallory Boggs [00:33:09]:
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