Wes Moss and Clark.com’s Christa DiBiase team up to highlight the top 10 financial trends investors should watch in 2025, including economic resilience, consumer spending strength, and rising productivity.
In the second hour, Wes partners with co-host Jeff Lloyd to explore market momentum, the importance of dividends, and savvy retirement strategies. The episode concludes with an inspiring story of a happy retiree using careful financial planning to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime College Football Playoff experience.
Read The Full Transcript From This Episode
(click below to expand and read the full interview)
- Wes Moss [00:00:01]:
The Q ratio, average convergence, divergence, basis points and BS Financial shows love to sound smart, but on Money Matters, we want to make you smart. That’s why the goal is to keep you informed and empowered. 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 in studio. Who do we have? One? Jeff Lloyd here on a, I guess it’s a holiday weekend, Martin Luther King Day holiday. There’s an awful lot going on. Well, this weekend I can tell you, traffic’s going on, but really tomorrow is, there’s, what do we got tomorrow, Jeff? Just a few things.Jeff Lloyd [00:01:06]:
Yeah, just a few things. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, tomorrow’s a market holiday. We got MLK Day, so the stock market is closed tomorrow. And we got a pretty big event both nationally and in Atlanta. We got the, we got the inauguration tomorrow and we have the College Football Playoff national championship game at Mercedes Benz.Wes Moss [00:01:31]:
Well, you know what we’re doing here today? We’re doubling down on America. How about that? That’s what we’re going to do. I know we’ve talked so far this month about the outlook in the United States, looking at equity markets, US Stock market. But today I want to really, I wanted to maybe dive in a little bit deeper on not just this big, big, big, big picture, but just zoom in a little bit on what drives markets, primarily earnings, and talk a little bit about that. That is the what drives the markets, which is the result of one of our themes here, the army of American productivity. And the United States has been in the lead economically. It’s been in the lead in almost every category. You could look at whether it’s overall gdp, whether it’s the size of our stock market, whether it’s the productivity that we have, the productivity gains we’ve started to see in the last two years, artificial intelligence.Wes Moss [00:02:22]:
We lead significantly in that area and think of it as all of that combined. Well, that’s great and that’s the economy, but it really has to go back to earnings for companies. And bottom lines have to grow. We’ve got to get more bottom line. And so we’ll zoom in a little bit on that. So today we’re doubling down on America. And I think that another way I’d look at it, it’s just A, it’s an, it’s an overall investment theme we just can’t ignore. And I understand that when you’re thinking about putting money to work or you’re thinking about investing, there’s always this nervousness around, well, look, we had a really good year last year.Wes Moss [00:03:00]:
We had a really good year the year before. Like I, it’s hard to want to continue when you’ve got markets already. I don’t know how many times you said it last year, but I think you kept saying all time high last year. And that happened over and over again.Jeff Lloyd [00:03:15]:
And The S&P 500 hit 57 new all time highs last year. And, and, and, and what did that do to investors? It was a good thing that was happening, but it made them cautious about the future of the market and where the economy’s going. How much higher can it go? We’re at an all time high. Like, do I need to take some off the table or is now, now’s the time to sell?Wes Moss [00:03:41]:
Yeah. And that’s what makes investing so hard. So you’re thinking to yourself, gosh, I’ve got a bunch of money invested. Do I stay invested? Or maybe, maybe you’re, you’ve, you’ve got money that you thinking about investing. I saw a chart this week. It’s something like $8.3 trillion in money market. So the reality here is that for our listener base, I bet they’ve got a little bit more in cash than they had last year because the preponderance of America has more in cash. And those trends, that means that on average people are stashing a little bit more away in cash.Wes Moss [00:04:12]:
Now it could be a good thing because they’re earning a little bit more, wages have done well, but it’s also a little bit of a sign. Hey, I don’t know if I’m ready to put the money to work just keeping the money market getting the four, four and a half percent. And that’s attractive. So I want to talk that through that again, why America continues to take an even bigger lead. Not just a lead, but the lead has been growing army of American productivity. If it were a marathon, they’re now ahead even further than we were last year. And a way to think about it, and this goes back to our core of just the basics of how do you put together a portfolio? How do you have a balanced income investing portfolio that has cash flow that’ll pay you to wait while markets fluctuate? And that’s the, that’s the combination of a couple of really Big areas in the United States, which would be. And again, we’re talking about the United States stocks that pay dividends and stocks that are more growth oriented, that don’t necessarily have to pay dividends.Wes Moss [00:05:13]:
But you’ve got your stock portion, your fixed income, your dry powder, your, your, the portion that is there for stability and income. And then some of the other areas that, that are, if we think about real estate, we think about energy pipeline companies, and putting all that together, you can really get to me, it gives me a much greater sense of balance, makes me worry less about, oh, of the next six months. And it helps me focus on like, okay, well, I’m not doing, we’re not investing for today. We’re investing for a full year. And that’s short. It’s really three years. And even that short, it’s really five and 10 and 20 years. And that’s the perspective we have to keep reminding ourselves.Wes Moss [00:05:49]:
So that that is what I want to cover today. And yes, we’ve got a huge Monday to tomorrow, stock market’s closed, MLK holiday, the national championship, and of course, travel. I live in Midtown, so it’s always, it’s, it’s all, it’s not always busy. But every time we have an event like this where we have like, maybe it’s Taylor Swift or we have the super bowl, it goes from bad to worse. And I noticed this past week it was already bad. Maybe it’s because we were uncovering from the snow, but this is one of the worst traffic weeks I can remember in Atlanta. It took me an hour and a half to get to snow Sandy Springs, I think Wednesday morning, it’s crazy outside.Jeff Lloyd [00:06:27]:
Of Snowmageddon in terms of traffic in Atlanta. You just mentioned the Big three, the Super Bowl. It was the Taylor Swift concert.Wes Moss [00:06:35]:
Yeah.Jeff Lloyd [00:06:36]:
And it’s this past weekend with the national championship game again.Wes Moss [00:06:39]:
Well, that’s, that’s what we’re faced with. But by the way, we were like 1 degree, 1, 1 degree Fahrenheit from another Snowmageddon. I mean, we were so close to having that thing really shut everything down. And really we just had one snow.Jeff Lloyd [00:06:54]:
Day and that next wave that came through instead of snow, it was just, just cold rain.Wes Moss [00:07:00]:
So close. Right on the, I was watching that, the weather. You’re on the kind of that line where it goes from the pink, which was ice 33 degrees and then the 32 degrees above, that was the blue and that was where it was snow. And it was just, we were real close from shutting this place down. So I think we dodged, we dodged a weather event. And let me equate that back to the economy. You and I in the office this past week were talking about productivity. And I talked to tons of people about this because our outlook for 2025 talks about productivity growth.Wes Moss [00:07:33]:
And I’ve read a bunch of other outlooks from Wall street and they talk about productivity growth. So it’s kind of been a theme this year. I think people have woken up and said, wait, wait a minute. You know, productivity is at two and a half percent. It’s been one forever. That’s a two and a half time jump. It’s a, it’s 150% jump in productivity. Doesn’t sound like a lot when you say, well, we’ve gone from one to two.Wes Moss [00:07:53]:
But it’s a more than 100% jump in productivity. And I think we all struggle to figure out why. Like, where’s it? Are we really that much more productive? And there is no perfect or great answer. The formula is easy to figure out. Productivity, it’s just gdp. It’s our what we out total output in the United States divided by hours worked. That’s it. So it’s a, whoa, okay, we can, that’s how you figure it out.Wes Moss [00:08:17]:
But imagine what goes into that to get that calculation right. You’ve got this massive numerator, total economic output. And then you have this all important denominator which is the less people work. If GDP were to stay the same, then guess what that means. Productivity’s gone up. Oh, wait, wait, what? So I wonder. And Friday last, not this Friday, but the past, the snow day we had here in the city may be one of the ingredients or the answer to why we’re so much productive. Because to a letter everyone I talked to about that Friday said, oh, it was a totally normal work day now, the kids were out of school.Wes Moss [00:09:00]:
But we’re so well conditioned and so locked in now to working remotely. It just was a totally seamless day. And it was unexpected. We didn’t know on Monday that we were gonna be home on Friday, right? So people scheduled meetings for Friday. I had three or four meetings just in the morning. And they were zooms anyway. And all of a sudden, boom. The world’s kind of shut down for a day.Wes Moss [00:09:26]:
It didn’t stop anything when it comes to commerce. Now granted, the roads were closed, there were, I think our pediatrician office was closed. We had businesses closed for a day. But for the most part, the services world, that’s, let’s call it anybody in finance Insurance just go down the list just seamlessly, is now able to switch over and stay productive. Whereas would you have last year or let’s say five years ago? Let’s say that wouldn’t have happened to nearly that degree. Well, that still counts as a workday. But guess what? You didn’t do anything this time. A week and a half, A little over a week ago, all those work hours that the bls, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted, we actually were working.Wes Moss [00:10:10]:
So I don’t know if we’re just more productive because we’re more locked in, working remotely and being able to flexibly work is just now truly ingrained as opposed to new. And I wonder that again. I had another conversation this week with one of our folks in Denver. She’s three days a week at home, two days in the office. She says she saves five hours a week in commuting. She five years ago, she didn’t save six hours because she didn’t work flexibly. Now what does she do with that six hours? Well, guess what? She probably works a little bit more than she did. So I think her work hour, all of our collective work weeks have maybe snuck a little higher.Wes Moss [00:10:50]:
And I’m wondering if that gets picked up in the data. So maybe it’s not that we’re that much more productive. It’s in our exact time. Maybe we’re putting just a little bit more time because we have a little bit more free time because we’ve saved on commutes. That’s another thing that could boost the productivity numbers. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer here because there’s so much data. But those are some of our theories on why we’re just the army of American productivity who’s been in the lead. Hey, wait a minute.Wes Moss [00:11:17]:
I want. China’s looking at us, India’s looking at us, European Union, wait a minute. They’re way up there ahead of the pack. Last year they were way ahead. Guess what? We’re even more ahead right now in 2025. Yeah.Jeff Lloyd [00:11:30]:
And think about what you did on Thursday night when we didn’t know if it was going to snow or ice over or if you’d be able to come into the office the next day. All you did, you took your laptop home. And if you couldn’t make it back to the office like you said, you could still plug in at home, continue to work, continue to be productive, continue to have those zoom meetings, and it wasn’t a complete lost day.Wes Moss [00:11:51]:
The good news is we can work from anywhere all the Time. The bad news is we can work from anywhere all the time.Jeff Lloyd [00:11:59]:
It’s kind of a double edged sword, isn’t it? The good and the bad of it.Wes Moss [00:12:02]:
The good and the bad of it. I prefer the flexibility that it creates and again I think that makes us collectively just that much stronger marching that much faster. And that’s the army of American productivity. And of course it all comes back into. By the way, we added $1.4 trillion in GDP last year, just way far ahead of any other major country, including China, including the Eurozone. Hey, who do you think wins over Time? S and P500 or China? Emerging markets or non US developed markets?Jeff Lloyd [00:12:36]:
I thought you were about to ask me who’s going to win the Ohio State Buckeyes or Notre Dame Fighting Irish. But I’m going to go with your question. I’m going to go with the U.S. do you.Wes Moss [00:12:48]:
I’m going to, I want to. I have an Ohio State story and a, and a happy retiree story I’m going to tell but I’m going to get these numbers out first. So if you, if you started with 100k now this is a little bit skewed. We always take a little, these numbers a little bit with, not with a grain of salt because these are the actual numbers. But it’s also from the, the trough of 09. So when the market bottomed out, great financial crisis which started to wrap up at the end of a market, bottomed in 09 and then moved higher from there. But if you look at that return, then essentially it’s a 1010. You could call it 11X.Wes Moss [00:13:28]:
It’s basically a dollar turns into 12. So $100,000 would have turned into 1.2 million. If you had a million dollars invested in retiring, you weren’t taking from those assets and you were doing a full total return and you were invested 100% of the S&P 500 back in the bottom of 09. That would be worth $12 million today. This is a silly example, but it’s again just the math. If you had $100 million in 09 and it was in the S&P 500 for the entire time, it would be a billion, 1.2 billion today. So I mean you get 100 millionaire just through equity investing just in itself can create a billion. And which is just a staggering thought.Wes Moss [00:14:11]:
But here’s the comparison really. Let’s go real life 100,000 turns into 1.2 million. But if you did this in, let’s call it a large non US index Equity markets, it’s less than half. It’s more like a dollar turns into $4, not 12. Emerging Market Indice if you pick the dollar turns in about three and a half bucks. And if it were to have been invested in China and their equity markets, more like 2.7. So dollar turns into 2.7 over that 15 year period. And the reality of what drives so much of this, I guess I’m going to get to the happy retiree story after the break.Wes Moss [00:14:53]:
We don’t have enough time for it. I want to give it justice because it involves A, a happy retiree and B national championship and football and, and money. So we’ll put all that together you don’t want to miss. But if you go back and look over the market history and not the stock market returns, but the underlining, call it the gravity, the tide of what drives markets, it’s earnings. And if you go back to essentially go back to World War II until last year, earnings have grown and they look like a pretty darn steady chart over that period of time at about 6.5% annually. That’s ratcheting up profits over that period of time. Extremely durable historically. More money matters straight ahead.Wes Moss [00:15:39]:
If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout or if you remember as a kid, Rocky running the steps and if Michael Keeaton is still Mr. Mom to you. And 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. Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com that’s y o u r your wealth dot com.Jeff Lloyd [00:16:12]:
Wes, don’t you have a happy retiree story for us?Wes Moss [00:16:16]:
I do, I do. I’m not going to say who it is, but just this is. This just warmed my heart. I got an email family I’ve worked with for a long period of time and the, the email was said something about, hey, I’m trying to continue to be a happy retiree and I and I need some money to be able to continue that. And the family are giant Ohio State Buckeye fans. And the email was, hey, this is a kind of a once in a lifetime thing. The Buckeyes are in the national championship and they happen to be here in Atlanta. Do you think I can afford to take my family? And it’s a couple people and look, these tickets were, these tickets, they’re not cheap.Wes Moss [00:17:04]:
They’re not cheap. And you know, you’re talking about, I think in midweek when we were looking, you could, you could get seats for like 1500 bucks, but then they go way above that. So I don’t know what ultimately the price was paid here for these particular tickets. But my thought here was, look, a, it’s been, and this was just what’s the assessment? Right. And every retiree is different. But here’s, here was my thought. Well, look, it’s been a really great two years, right? 20, 22 not good. 23 was good, 24 was great.Wes Moss [00:17:39]:
So markets have done really well. And if you’re ahead of schedule, if you’ve been an equity investor, Even if it’s 50 or 60% of the portfolio, not the whole thing, you may be a little ahead in your overall financial planning. Remember, if we do a financial timeline, we’re usually running that at 4 or 5%. To be conservative, you’re doing kind of a more robust cash flow analysis. You’re usually growing a portfolio into the future at 5% at the most. And then you’ve got inflation running at 2, 2 and a half percent. So you’re really only netting 2 or 3, 2 and a half percent or 3% beyond inflation. Well, if you extrapolate that out and the, that’s what your cash flow would look like year to year to year.Wes Moss [00:18:25]:
We’ve got a couple great years in markets. Maybe, maybe a lot of you may be ahead. If you’ve done some planning a couple of years ago, maybe your target of where you should have been, maybe you’re a little ahead. So that’s, that was fortunately the case here. And I just said, look, I, you can afford it. It’s not cheap. You know, you’ve got, let’s call it two grand a ticket, two times, I don’t know, five tickets. You’re talking about 10 grand.Wes Moss [00:18:50]:
Yeah. This is once in a lifetime. And when, when, when, when’s Ohio State going to get back to the national championship? Who knows, who knows what’s happening with college football? I, it is, it, I think it’s going to become super. I think it’s going to become like private equity. It’s going to be five or six. You can’t touch them, they’re so big. I could be wrong about that. But you know, blackrock is an example.Wes Moss [00:19:12]:
Reported this week, they’re, they’re now managing $11.6 trillion and they’re, it’s so there’s this a little bit of a winner take all. And I kind of, I could see that happening with nil where You’ve got the big wealthy schools with a couple billionaires, they can afford to buy any players they want. And then every other school is kind of like, hey, we can’t compete. I went from. So that’s the happy retiree story. If you can be able to have in your long term plan, if you’re a little ahead of plan or you’re planning for those expenses, God willing, those once in a lifetime experience come up and you can afford it.Jeff Lloyd [00:19:49]:
I love that happy retiree story. Good for the Buckeyes making it back to the national championship. But it’s the, you know, we always talk about happiness and retirement and there you got the financial aspect and you got the lifestyle aspect and that story is kind of marrying the two together of, hey, you’ve worked all this time, you’ve saved your money, you’ve invested and you got to the point where, yeah, maybe you’re a little bit ahead in retirement. So you should be able to treat yourself and your family and take them to an, hopefully an unforgettable experience for them that they can all witness together and experience together.Wes Moss [00:20:26]:
And this goes back to the basics, which producer Mallory has always has wanted me to do in the last couple of weeks when we haven’t. But if you think about when you go back to the basics, one of the, the biggest fears when it comes to any retirement planning is running out of money. Even if you do a plan and it has a 99% confidence, you still think, what about the 1%? What if I. It does, things don’t work out. And we go back to this very important rule of thumb, which is the 4% plus rule, which is this rule that says, well, as long as you’re only taking around 4 to 4.5% a year and your portfolio should sustain for 30 years plus 90% of the time, really over the course of history. As you look at if you run the numbers in the market and withdrawal rates and increasing for inflation each year all the way back to the 20s even. I think if you start in 1929 with, with a study, even your worst case scenario is running out of money in 29 years. So it gives you a high degree of confidence of if you’re following these guides because they’re not set in stone, then you can flex a little bit more in a given year because maybe your team made it to the national championship and maybe the, and maybe it’s not in your home city and you got to fly.Wes Moss [00:21:44]:
So it’s not 10 grand, it’s a $20,000 deal. Or now, let’s say we go through a couple rough years of the market, well, maybe you can pull back on your spending a little bit so that it’s not quite at 4%. So these rules, they are meant to be guides because it allows you to be and really forces you to be able to be flexible and finance and investment planning and cash flow planning. Really, even though you model things get modeled out as a linear, it’s going to grow at 4.5% every single year and for 30 years. The real world isn’t like that. We’ve got to be able to flex a little lower and things are tight. And we are maybe able to. We’re certainly able to.Wes Moss [00:22:22]:
And that the story is an example of. We’re able to splurge a little bit when the world calls. And if you do planning, flexing a little bit beyond your normal spending withdrawal rate, that’s doable and that’s, that’s why we do the planning to start with. So speaking of talk about the cost of the what is the economic impact supposed to be here in the city of this said game?Jeff Lloyd [00:22:47]:
The College Football Playoff national championship game is supposed to bring in about $75 million in economic impact just to the city of Atlanta and the local businesses.Wes Moss [00:22:59]:
So it’s already been happening the last couple this weekend, Saturday, today, tomorrow, even though we’re going to be complaining about traffic, is it worth 75 million bucks for the local restaurants?Jeff Lloyd [00:23:10]:
I would think so.Wes Moss [00:23:11]:
I mean, I mean, just vendors, other businesses.Jeff Lloyd [00:23:14]:
Think about all the people flying in all the Ubers, all the rental cars, all the hotels filling up, all the restaurants and bars, getting an influx of people in town for the big game, the local stores and vendors.Wes Moss [00:23:26]:
Can you imagine if Georgia was in this, what this city would be like?Jeff Lloyd [00:23:31]:
So, okay, I have a question.Wes Moss [00:23:33]:
I bet you’d be more than 75 million in economic impact you think it would be.Jeff Lloyd [00:23:37]:
So I was going to say it could be less because more people in Atlanta, they’re not, they’re not staying in as many hotels and flying in and taking as many Ubers.Wes Moss [00:23:46]:
But I don’t know. I would if I had to. I think if it were, if UGA was in this thing, we’d be at 100 million in economic activity because. Because it just makes it. Everybody is now a prospect to go to the game. How many Ohio State’s fans are here? I don’t know. Maybe there’s. Maybe there’s seven.Wes Moss [00:24:05]:
No, maybe. Maybe there’s 20,000 of them here. Maybe there’s 50,000. That’s still plenty to fill the seats. But in Georgia you probably have, in Atlanta you probably have 3 million UGA fans. So I think it’s a supply. My bet would be that the supply is so great it would just, it would be a rock and economic event. But we’ll take, we’ll take what we.Jeff Lloyd [00:24:26]:
Get and I bet those ticket prices might be double the 1500 get in the game, sit in the rafters tickets right now.Wes Moss [00:24:35]:
I think you’re right. So where do we head from now? I know. Well, the other big event, not just the national championship game, but of course the inauguration that’s tomorrow along with the MLK holiday. Stock market is closed. Jeff Lloyd ran some numbers on markets you went all the way back to 1960 here. How did markets do from the inauguration day, which is usually on January 20th? I guess last year if January 20th.Jeff Lloyd [00:25:05]:
Happened to fall on a Sunday, they’d move it to the 21st.Wes Moss [00:25:09]:
Okay. But again right around the 20th. Right around the 20th.Jeff Lloyd [00:25:11]:
Yeah.Wes Moss [00:25:12]:
What are the numbers look like a year out for the s and P500 post Inauguration Day?Jeff Lloyd [00:25:17]:
Yeah. So the numbers go back to 1960s. So this covers the past 16 presidential inaugurations. And so we’re looking from Inauguration day, what did the s and P500 total return look like a year later? On average, the last 16 inaugurations the market was up about 11.7% year later.Wes Moss [00:25:44]:
Which stands to reason because of historical context of markets. It’s not just in a, an inauguration year when you get that big of a sample set 16 different periods of time over the course of call it what has that been? 60, 60 plus years, 8, 860 plus years. Then you’re, you’re going to end up going back to the average of what markets have pretty much done when you, when you get that big of a sample. And then that goes back to this. I wish our listeners could see this chart. I just call this the durable US Earnings. So this is the army of American productivity work. And not just today.Wes Moss [00:26:21]:
And maybe it’s an overdrive today because of we believe it’s work from home, work from flex and artificial intelligence and just technology in general making everything more efficient. We’re going to call it the that’s probably 80% of the story. We don’t know the other 20%. And we think maybe people are working a little bit more because they’re flexible and that doesn’t go into the numbers so it makes it look more productive, meaning maybe really just working a little bit more. But if you go back to 1945 all the way through today. And you’re looking not at the stock market, but the aggregate earnings. How much profit are the companies within the s and P500 cranking out in any given year? And it’s not a perfectly straight line, but it’s pretty darn. It’s a very durably from the bottom left to the upper right if you’re looking at a chart.Wes Moss [00:27:14]:
And that’s the story. And the story is durable line that continues to grow at about 6.5% per year. And that’s a big part of the market growing at its 10, 11% per year over the course of time. Because we also have dividends that get reinvested. That’s a big part of the S&P 500 historically. Remember S&P 500, the total return is the number we are all after.tr total return, want our money to grow. But there’s only two variables within that. Total growth or appreciation plus income.Wes Moss [00:27:47]:
Income itself. Dividends have been about 40% over the course of economic history. So think 10% rate of return. Well, four of it’s coming from dividends. That’s a lot. It’s been a lot less in the last decade. That’s why one of our outlook ideas for 2025, don’t ignore dividends. We could get a reversion to the mean and dividends could start playing a greater part.Wes Moss [00:28:08]:
Big day tomorrow. Holiday inauguration national championship game right here in town. So big events locally, nationally, and I don’t know. Oh, this is my national event of the week. Economic number we need tell us about inflation this past week, Jeff, which by the way spurred the market up 700 points from Dow on Thursday and or on Wednesday. And then this. The average mortgage mortgage rate is not in the magic mortgage rate zone.Jeff Lloyd [00:28:42]:
Well, let’s start with inflation real quick. Consumer Price index came out on Wednesday. Year over year. Prices for goods and services up 2.9%. Not quite the Fed’s 2% target, but we’re still in that 2 range if you strip out food and energy because who needs food and energy? It’s what they call core inflation. It rose 3.2% which was a little bit lower than Wall street estimates. So that was a healthy inflation number to see on Wednesday. And certainly we saw markets celebrate.Jeff Lloyd [00:29:19]:
S&P 500 had its best day since November. Dowels up, I think over 700 points. So good headlines you like to see after a good headline inflation number.Wes Moss [00:29:30]:
And really this the chain reaction of why markets celebrated that is that, well, if we’ve got less bad Inflation, if it’s more lukewarm than toasty warm, then you have a Fed that doesn’t necessarily need to mess with interest rates. Right? And if, if all of a sudden inflation gets hot again, it’s three and a half and 4%, then the Fed has to go back to raising rates. Which leads us to mortgage rates. The average mortgage rate this week hit.Jeff Lloyd [00:29:59]:
It’S back over 7%. I think it was 7.04%.Wes Moss [00:30:04]:
That is not the highest mortgage rate that the average American would take on buying a home. And obviously the higher the rate goes, the less people say they would engage at a rate that high. Now look, if we’re under 3%, 100% of Americans say I’d do it. Three, three and a half percent, 95% of Americans. No wonder when rates were low, housing was booming. Well today when, if you’re in the seven to seven and a half percent range on the average 30 year fixed, only 9% of Americans say that they would, they would consider having a mortgage rate that high. So think about just, it’s, it’s really an incredible thought here. 3%, 3, 3 and a half percent, 95% of Americans say they do it, take on a mortgage 4 percentage points higher and almost nobody will do it.Wes Moss [00:30:53]:
That’s just that trim four points and that dramatic of a shift. Again we’re a little ways away from the quote magic mortgage rates where about half Americans said they would take on a rate at five to five and a half percent. A little bit of a long way to go and I think that about wraps it up here for us. Jeff Lloyd, thanks for being here man. Always appreciate it. So much more fun to have you here.Jeff Lloyd [00:31:19]:
Thanks for having me back.Wes Moss [00:31:20]:
You can find me and Jeff easy to do so@yourwealth.com that’s y o u r your wealth dot com. Have a great rest of your day.Mallory Boggs [00:31:35]:
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