#58 – Market Myths Busted: Panic Less And Plan Smart—GDP Growth, Bond Yields, and Productive Retirement Strategies

Jeff Lloyd [00:00:51]:
Thanks for having me back.

Wes Moss [00:00:53]:
It’s. We got some headlines this week that maybe the headline of my week is my mom sending me a text. And one of the. It’s a scary headline news article that, that probably my headline of the week because it also prompted me to write an article about it. And then, and then she called me and said you didn’t call me since the text that you sent. I sent you. And I said mom, I did one bet. I know I didn’t call because I was sitting here writing an article about the text that you sent me the article and that.

Wes Moss [00:01:21]:
So I actually thank you.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:23]:
That was a thoughtful response to your mom, not in the form of a response text. I’m giving you a full article.

Wes Moss [00:01:31]:
It was a greater life response than. Than a phone call. But again, I did end up talking to her. But the, the article, I’ll pull it up. I’ll pull up the text message from her and of course it came with. Well, there’s a lot of them about how bad the economy is and the world is.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:51]:
Does she call you Wes or Wesley?

Wes Moss [00:01:53]:
She does. She does. Reckless firing of federal workers, Social Security, acting head exits. But here’s the one. So it’s. I think she’s just nervous about the world and the economy. I get it. This one is Robert Kiyosaki predicts Wall street crash and layoffs.

Wes Moss [00:02:11]:
Prepare for market crash, depression and war.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:15]:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to prepare for what? I a couple of things.

Wes Moss [00:02:18]:
All the bad things.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:19]:
Market crash, Great Depression, depression and war. Okay. Three minor things.

Wes Moss [00:02:26]:
No wonder she wanted to check in. Yeah. If you look at. So Kiyosaki is. I mean he’s a big time author. I mean he was back, remember back in the 90s, he wrote rich dad, Poor Dad. I love these books. I think there’s a game called Cash Flow that teaches people about financial concepts.

Wes Moss [00:02:41]:
He advocates for you to be a small business owner. Don’t Waste your money on non asset oriented investments. Avoid reckless spending. I mean, these guys had some great advice over the years and I don’t know what happened, but he turned really sour on the economy. And I don’t know how far back this goes, but there are articles that chronicle what he said during, call it 2011, 12, 13, 40, and on and on and on and on about how bad things are going to get. So you get this article, it’s always got the bread lines, the statue in the bronze, I don’t know if, near the Franklin Memorial somewhere in Washington D.C. the Statue of the men standing in the breadline in the Great Depression. Those articles are going to catch your attention.

Wes Moss [00:03:32]:
And that’s exactly what happened this week. And I had to call my mom and just say, mom, I don’t think the world’s ending. I think the economy’s in pretty darn good shape. We’re growing at over 2%, inflation somewhat in check. The labor market is balancing. Instead of two job openings for one Seeker, we have 1.1. We’re back in equilibrium. That means inflation can be okay.

Wes Moss [00:03:54]:
And she’s just not buying it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:03:57]:
So I just did a quick Google search on Kiyosaki and one of the top returns was six times. Robert Kiyosaki totally blew market predictions over the last 10 years.

Wes Moss [00:04:12]:
Well, look, it’s been a little bit like a broken record. And I don’t fault anybody for saying something bad’s going to happen to the economy. Something bad always happens to the economy. The stock market always goes down. It eventually recovers. So it’s, I think it’s totally fine. And you can pull at a thread and see a bad economic report. I mean, market this past Thursday was down pretty significantly.

Wes Moss [00:04:31]:
Walmart was down 6% because they missed their earnings. And they’re worried about Mexico tariffs, Canadian tariffs. Of course that’s going to hit their bottom line. On the conference call they talked about it. So that kind of led the whole market lower. Not just the stock, but also it was a sign that, wait a minute, the biggest, one of the biggest retailers on the planet, they’re going to face some headwinds. Well, of course, but that’s every day. Every day there’s a headwind.

Wes Moss [00:04:57]:
Every day there’s an individual story that you can pull at and say, look, see, this is the start of the end. So I don’t fault people for writing about it. He’s a super smart guy, but that’s been his message for year after year after year after year. And that stock market is going to crash. The housing market’s going to crash. And since 2011, when we first started seeing some of these predictions, just look at the total return of The S&P 500 is up almost 300% since 2011, when, when these doom and gloom predictions started in the housing market. There was another prediction back in 2017, the housing market was going to crash. It’s up about 70% since then.

Wes Moss [00:05:42]:
So I get it, it makes sense. But it’s not just my mom. It’s a lot of our moms, it’s a lot of our parents. It’s people that are listening that get nervous. And I think it’s just important to bring what we think is economic reality here to the show. And that’s why we talk about consumer spending and housing and inflation and interest rates and manufacturing and employment and earnings, which really, by the way, that’s what matters for the equity markets and for most of our 401ks. If we’re invested somewhere, it’s probably a portion of that is in equity. So we all want the economy to continue to move forward so that we, so we have growth in our 401ks.

Wes Moss [00:06:22]:
So my message to my mom was, look, I, I think that from everything I can see, this economy actually looks pretty good. I don’t, I don’t see us falling off the cliff anytime soon.

Wes Moss [00:06:35]:
He must be looking at some different data. You know, we always joke about Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve being data dependent, data dependent to make their decisions on the future path of interest rates and how to maximize employment and combat inflation. He must be looking at some different data on the economy that we’ve been looking at and that we’ve been talking through over the last couple of weeks. Months and years of, hey, employment has been strong in the US Inflation. Yeah, the last inflation number that came out was maybe a little bit warmer than it’s been in the past, but overall it’s been trending in the right direction. And you combine that with wages outpacing inflation and the army of American productivity and put all those things together, you got a generally good, healthy economy. And like you said about Walmart earnings, and we’re in the middle of earnings season right now, actually a little bit of over 80% of S&P 500 companies have already reported this past quarter. Earnings have been generally good.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:45]:
Both earnings and sales have been strong for the companies that have already reported.

Wes Moss [00:07:50]:
You know, and again, you’re going to get Earnings forecast from 12 different major Wall street firms and then another several dozens. You’re going to get dozens and dozens of overall forecasts for the S&P 500. FactSet is, I was reviewing FACTSET research this week for 2025. They’re looking at 12 over 12% earnings growth for the S&P 500 for 2025. That’s, it’s a serious amount of economic growth. Here’s an example of that. Now this is revenue, not earnings, but just this week this is Army America productivity. Amazon passed Walmart over the past quarter for biggest, most revenue in a quarter of any company on the planet or retail wise.

Wes Moss [00:08:33]:
180 billion for the quarter for Walmart, 187 billion for, for Amazon.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:38]:
And so that’s the first time that Amazon had passed Walmart.

Wes Moss [00:08:42]:
First time in any quarter. So still they haven’t done it for the year yet. But imagine the trajectory from essentially around what late 90s for Amazon was at zero. Walmart was already huge. And now those two paths have crossed. The other thing, reading about Walmart, I did not know this and I always think about how amazingly inexpensive those TVs are when you go to Walmart. I mean you can get TV for like $3 when you go to Walmart. They own Vizio.

Jeff Lloyd [00:09:09]:
I did not know that. I did not know that they own Vizio.

Wes Moss [00:09:12]:
Which, it makes total sense because Vizio TVs are like, you know, $172 for a seven foot wall TV now kind of, you know, look, it’s a little flimsy, but it makes sense now. I didn’t know that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:09:29]:
It’s amazing how cheap they’ve gotten and it’s amazing actually how light and easy they are to pull out of the box, plug in and then all the.

Wes Moss [00:09:40]:
Tv you can use a sticker now you can just use one of those scotch tape stickers and just throw it on the wall tv.

Jeff Lloyd [00:09:46]:
But it’s ready to go. You plug it in, you hook it up to the Internet and you don’t have to wait for the cable company to come out, set an appointment, say hey, we’ll be there from 8 to 12. They call you if I just hook it up to WI fi.

Wes Moss [00:09:59]:
Speaking of WI fi, what rhymes with WI fi is all time high? How many of those have we had this year?

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:06]:
Well remember we had 57 last year. 57 all time highs we talked about.

Wes Moss [00:10:13]:
I felt like almost every week and.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:14]:
We’Ve already had multiple this year.

Wes Moss [00:10:17]:
Is that a good news or bad news?

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:19]:
You know what, we get the all time high question all the time, is that good news or bad news? And normally my first response is why Would it be bad news? Don’t you want the market to be at an all time high? And they’re like, yeah, but don’t you think now’s the time to take a little money off the table or put some into cash? And what we’ve found and through research and through just looking at the historical data is normally these all time highs kind of come in packs and come in waves. And we didn’t see any all time highs in 2022 and we saw one and I think 2023. I’m not, I’m not looking at the numbers, but I think it was the.

Wes Moss [00:11:05]:
Very beginning of the year and then we didn’t get one for a while. But I think of it as this economic flywheel. Once you have the momentum to get to the point where you have an all time high, because a lot of things have to have already been going right and that’s typically that economic flywheel momentum continues and earnings that flywheel continues. And look, it remains to be seen, however, we’ve got a couple of charts. We’ll go over here today that I updated the from the Federal reserve. This is U.S. bureau of Labor Statistics via the Federal Reserve economic database looking at job openings, overlaying a chart about unemployment. That’s been a wild chart over the last four or five years.

Wes Moss [00:11:47]:
And it’s telling us something that I consider really pretty good news. Labor market A more balanced labor market jolts job openings, labor turnover, they. That’s the we, we like to look at how many vacancies there are in the United States economy, how many employers have open seats they’re trying to fill, how many people out there looking for a seat. If you go back to right after Covid, there were 22 million unemployed for a very short period of time. I mean the number just went absolutely through the roof. And there were 4 million job openings at the time. Not a good ratio.

Jeff Lloyd [00:12:27]:
It’s just amazing. Looking at this and thinking back to that time, you had about 6 million or so unemployed people. And then basically in the span of a week or two or within a month, within a month it skyrocketed to over 22 million.

Wes Moss [00:12:45]:
Then relatively quickly, over the course of call it a year, I would consider pretty quick, we went from having over 22 million people unemployed in the United States all the way down to 6 million people unemployed. So we went from 22 million people looking for a job to 6. Well, at the same time, we went from 4 million jobs open seats looking to be filled to 12 million jobs open looking to be filled. So you had this absolute bungee cord in both directions. Way too many people unemployed, nobody looking to hire. That flip flopped over the course of about a year and then by 2022 the ratio got so out of whack that it was two to one and you had two companies hiring for a position and only one person looking. And of course that was great. It was great for the labor market.

Wes Moss [00:13:41]:
Good for you. As a job seeker, we saw people changing jobs, getting better salaries, making career moves. And during that whole period of time, we had about a year, year and a half period of time where it was the golden age of the employee. It was the golden age of the job seeker to choose from.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:04]:
The employee was really in the driver’s seat. Whether they wanted to keep their current job. Maybe they could negotiate higher salary or better hours or more flexibility, or if they weren’t given those, we’ll call them demands, they could go somewhere else.

Wes Moss [00:14:20]:
Well, and from a retirement perspective too, I think about how many folks I worked with over those that period of time that wanted to retire but like the idea of continuing to work a little bit. Companies were also really flexible back then to help retirees say, well, don’t, don’t leave now, please work. We’ll let you go part time for a year. So I saw a lot of that. So we had some real flexibility. I think it’s good. That was a. As a the golden age of employment, at least for the last 50 years.

Wes Moss [00:14:48]:
Today we’re back to just a more normal level. It’s not a. I wouldn’t say it’s a bad level at all for job seekers, but we’re back to almost a one to one ratio. And why I think that in general is good news. One, Unemployment. The overall level of rate is low. It also means that inflation can be a little bit more in check. We don’t have this big imbalance between seekers and people willing to pay.

Wes Moss [00:15:11]:
It’s good news to keep inflation in a Goldilocks state of mind. 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.

Speaker A = Narrator [00:15:27]:
And if Michael keaton is still Mr.

Wes Moss [00:15:30]:
Mom to you, the 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.

Speaker A = Narrator [00:15:43]:
Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com.

Wes Moss [00:15:48]:
That’S y o u r your wealth com. We have an investment idea to review. We’re talking about why starting yields matter. The yield buffer. It’s a Columbia thread needle piece that we found this week. You found it this week. I thought it was very informative and applies to a lot of people because within any target date fund or any balance Fund or any 401k, there’s going to be a bunch of options that are on the safe side. One of the themes that I’ve found this year, there’s this perennial question that I don’t have a perfect answer for, which is, hey, if cash is yielding 4, why would I buy a bond yielding 4 and a half if I could lose money in the bond? But cash, it’s not going to go, it’s not going to go up or down.

Wes Moss [00:16:37]:
Now, historically, how do I answer? Well, we go back to history. 98% of the time over a three to five year period, bonds are going to win over cash. The you get to lock in your bond rates for three years, five years, 10 years, depending on the duration. Cash rates. Here’s another downside to cash. The minute the Fed lowers rates from four and a quarter or four down to three and a half to three to two and a half, the minute that happens literally that next week, money markets go down, it’s almost instantaneous. So you have no buffer in locking in higher yields. Now with bonds, those are set for usually longer periods of time.

Wes Moss [00:17:17]:
And the worry though is that the seesaw effect, they’re an investment, they’re not a money market. And the seesaw effect is pretty significant. The further you’re out on the seesaw, imagine you’re in a playground, you’re standing on one end. Well, if you’re at the edge of that seesaw, you’re not near the fulcrum, there’s a lot of movement. So somebody pushes the seesaw down, you go way up in the air, you go way, somebody will fly off the other end of the seesaw. That’s a long duration bond. Think of that as a 20, 30 year, but a lot of movement in rates. Interest rates go up, your bond yields go down.

Wes Moss [00:17:55]:
Vice versa, if you’re near the fulcrum of that relationship, interest rates go up and you have a short term bond. Doesn’t matter much, not a whole lot of movement. But for bond investors. Jeff Lloyd, explain to us from this chart why the starting yield matters so much and what kind of buffer.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:18]:
I also think we’re getting a lot of these questions lately because you’re seeing more yield with bonds even as interest rates have come down a little bit. But I also think people still have 2022 in the back of their mind. And earlier you were talking about a balanced portfolio. Let’s talk about a balanced portfolio in terms of a 6040 portfolio. So you got 60% invested in equities and you got 40% invested. Invested in bonds. Well, normally and from a historical perspective, if equities went down, historically, bonds went up.

Wes Moss [00:18:55]:
That didn’t happen. That relationship fell apart.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:57]:
That relationship fell apart in 2022. You actually had the worst year for a quote, unquote balanced 6040 portfolio since 1937.

Wes Moss [00:19:08]:
And it’s because that seesaw relationship went the wrong way. We saw rates start at a really low point. They were virtually at zero and they went up significantly that year. That took bond prices down. And that happened. And that’s in economic history. It happened. And that, I think, is to your point why people are now more nervous.

Wes Moss [00:19:30]:
I thought bonds couldn’t lose money. I thought they were supposed to be safe. What are these minuses on my bond portfolios? What are these parentheses? But what we always have to be looking where we are today moving forward. And that I think is what’s interesting about this study from Thread Needle, that if we’re, we talk a lot about Treasuries, why don’t we. Let’s go over the, the, the US Ag or aggregate bond index, which is a mix. Again, a big part of that is Treasuries, government bonds, but also corporate bonds as well. So that’s that middle chart. Jeff Lloyd.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:02]:
Yeah, so we’re looking at the US AG Indicators Index, and let’s say the starting point is 4.86%.

Wes Moss [00:20:09]:
Let’s call it just shy of five.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:10]:
Just shy of five. Well, if rates stay the same, you’re going to get that just under 5% return, total return for the US agbond.

Wes Moss [00:20:20]:
So again, your total return is growth plus income. And in your scenario, if rates are totally flat, they don’t move. There’s zero on appreciation or depreciation. So there’s no growth or detraction. And everything you’re getting in your total return is from that income from that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:38]:
Income from that with the bond, from that interest. Now, if rates move up 50 basis points, that’s bad news. What does that do to the total return of the bond? It goes down to the tune of under 2%. So a 50 basis point increase, your total return in the bond goes from just under 5 to just under 2%.

Wes Moss [00:21:01]:
However, to me, I look at that as saying there’s actually some buffer Room because rates are at call this four and a half to five level. Even if they do go up by a full half a percent over the course of a year and prices come down. What Columbia Threadneedle is saying here is that you still have a positive rate of return for fixed income. And to me we’re not looking to make a huge amount of money in fixed income, but over time it’s second, it shouldn’t keep up with equities. We want a positive rate of return. So to me that is an interesting way to look at that. It’s just saying that we still have, we have some, some buffer and it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:21:42]:
Provides that buffer, provides that somewhat stability and safety in your portfolio. Now that now the other end of the seesaw with a 50 basis point reduction, reduction in rates. What does that do? Well, your total return goes to just under 8%. So the opposite effect in a decreasing rate environment.

Wes Moss [00:22:05]:
So if you, let’s say that here we are floating around 4.5% of the 10 year treasury, we end the year at 4 rates are coming down, your existing bond prices will go up. So that total return equation will still have the yield in it, still have the income 4 and a half, 4.8% depending on which bond index we’re looking at. But then you would get an additional 2 to 3% on top of that because of the price move. So just an interesting way to look at it and I think another way to look at fixed income right now beyond just being the safety part of the portfolio, the steady part of the portfolio, the dry powder part of the portfolio, it’s that if you’re looking at everyone’s lined up for this giant. It’s a marathon. You’ve got hundreds of people. Bonds are starting at a pretty good spot. They’re not starting at the back of the pack.

Wes Moss [00:22:55]:
They have good yields today relative to the last 20 years of history, which gives them some buffer room. And 4 to 5% in interest in any given year is significant. Which makes me go back to how do you fund retirement and thinking about the income that can come from a portfolio, particularly going back to. Sure we talk about the 4% rule. We’re not going to talk about that. Well, we’ll talk a little bit about the 4% rule. But imagine if you had a all fixed income portfolio that was, and again this is hypothetically that just yielded 5% and you were taking on very little risk. You had high quality bonds, A lot of people could retire on that.

Wes Moss [00:23:41]:
Now the problem with that, even though, let’s say it’s kicking out 5% per year is that it’s not necessarily going to keep up with inflation. So you’d be fine for the first few years. You wouldn’t have to worry about stock market risk. Your bonds, yes, they’re going to move a little bit up and down, provided you have high quality fixed income. But it’s another way to fund retirement, which, again, I’m writing about this this past week reminded me of what we still call fill the gap. What is the fill the gap analysis and how does that help us remind us how much we need to save for retirement to begin with? You remember fill the gap ftg?

Jeff Lloyd [00:24:19]:
Of course I remember the FTG strategy.

Wes Moss [00:24:23]:
This is the way I look at this is that. And it’s important to have this. I think one of the areas around why we have insecurities around money and investing and it brings up all this fear is that it’s not always top of mind. So if you don’t think about it for a week or two weeks or a month or two or six months, you lose the checkpoint. Well, wait a minute. Did I need a million dollars to retire or was it a million? Or was it two? Honey, I don’t remember. Honey, what was it? Is it three? So to have a really simple way to back into how much you need saved, I think is important because you can quickly and easily do the math and kind of stay top of mind. Well, that’s the goal.

Wes Moss [00:25:08]:
Oh, that’s right. I remember filling the gap told us we needed what. Let’s do an example. So these are three simple ways to fill the gap. And then filling that gap, the income gap can quickly tell you how much money you need save for retirement. That will then produce that. Just talking about yield now we’re talking about just an overall withdrawal rate. So we start with this number.

Wes Moss [00:25:30]:
Let’s say you have. You and your spouse each get $2,000 a month, $4,000 a month, and there’s a pension of $1,000. So you’re getting $5,000 per month coming in. But you look forward and you say, well, we’re spending $7,000 a month right now. Maybe we need $8,000 when we retire, but we know that our Social Security will be, let’s call it $2,000 a month each. Four. Our pension will be $1,000 a month. That’s five total.

Wes Moss [00:25:59]:
So we just subtract what we need. $8,000 a month. Or we start with $8,000 a month. That’s what we need minus our guaranteed income flows, five grand $3,000. That’s the gap. One of the favorite families I work with sent me his own filling the gap analysis that he does on his own spreadsheets. He loves it because he can remember and keep top of mind those important retirement planning numbers. TIM so let’s do some math.

Wes Moss [00:26:25]:
3,000 is the gap. We have to solve for that five. Five’s already coming in. We need three more. So we take 3,000, multiply by 12 or annual, or to get an annual number, it’s 36,000. And if we apply what is just the simple 25x rule, which is the inverse of the 4% rule, math’s pretty easy. 36,000 times 25, $900,000. And that $900,000 is the amount at 4% to now fill that gap for arguably the rest of your life, 30 plus years.

Wes Moss [00:26:56]:
And that’s it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:26:59]:
I was just about to say it kind of just comes back to simple math. Income and expenses. You got a gap and you solve for that.

Wes Moss [00:27:08]:
The other way to look at this, too, is that once you end up with let’s call it that round number of million dollars, we, we just said 900, but we’ll call it round number of a million dollars. And you have a portfolio that has a yield because it has some bonds in it. TOM let’s say stock yields are only 2.2.5% because yields have gone lower as the market’s risen. But bond yields are at four and a half now. We’ve got at least, let’s call it 3% yield. It’s not that difficult to achieve. Now, that total return equation, growth plus income, we know that we already have $30,000 a year just in income, whether it’s interest and dividends coming from that overall equation, a little bit of growth, now we’re able to outpace inflation and fund retirement. Is it that simple? JEFF LLOYD I guess it is, when.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:58]:
You put it like that. It really is. And what do we like to do at Capital Investment Advisors? Sometimes we just like to make it simple. Make it simple, make it simple. And when it comes to solving for retirement saving and retirement spending, we try to make it simple.

Wes Moss [00:28:16]:
The world’s complicated enough. JEFF LLOYD I don’t know where we head here. Is it Doge dividend? Is it other headlines? You tell me you know where we.

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:26]:
Should head after this.

Wes Moss [00:28:27]:
Where should we go?

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:27]:
We should go to Waffle House. And they were in the headlines this week. And last week we went.

Wes Moss [00:28:33]:
I went to Waffle House this week. So, you know, I know. What, what, what, what am I missing.

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:41]:
So you know that they added an egg surcharge amid rising egg prices. 50 cent per egg surcharge.

Wes Moss [00:28:50]:
That makes me so hungry for eggs. Let’s go to Waffle House.

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:53]:
Let’s do it.

Wes Moss [00:28:53]:
The, you know what, the reason we went to Waffle House and we didn’t get eggs, it’s because it was, it was a late night sporting event this week way up in. It was up in south for scythe and it was too late. As we got home, Chick Fil A was already closed. One of my kids goes, what about Waffle House?

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:14]:
And you’re like, yes, that is the best thing you’ve seen.

Wes Moss [00:29:17]:
But he did, he got, he always gets waffles and bacon and didn’t want eggs.

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:23]:
Hey, nothing wrong with waffles and bacon.

Wes Moss [00:29:25]:
Oh, it’s great.

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:26]:
And didn’t have to pay extra, you.

Wes Moss [00:29:28]:
Know, extra 50 cents per egg. You like, you slip that in.

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:34]:
You know, those consumers are really getting smothered and covered these higher prices.

Wes Moss [00:29:39]:
No question about it. But it’s cool to have done that. I was, it was really a research project going to go into waffles this week. I didn’t see egg prices because my kid didn’t want eggs. What else we got here? Trump weighing Doge dividend. Doge with us to, to send the taxpayers checks. How much could it be? Well, I saw him this week speaking at some future investment conference or whatever it was, and he said, yeah, there’s a hedge fund guy that brought this up, asked Musk about it. Musk said, oh, well, I’ll ask President Trump about it.

Wes Moss [00:30:18]:
Meaning that if they save money at Doge and they cut out 2 trillion in the deficit, could that potentially just go back to the taxpayer and who knows? The President said it’s a possibility. It would be like a national. It’d be like what Alaska does, but they do it. They have the permanent dividend that comes from all their oil revenue. They have this giant fund for everybody who lives in Alaska and they get a dividend every year just for living there. We would get a dividend just because we have. We’re eliminating the deficit and finding, eliminating waste I guess in the government. So 20% of the savings, evidently this is the idea would be a check that gets sent out to taxpayers who had again hypothetically overpaid, didn’t get what we paid for, comes back in a check.

Wes Moss [00:31:08]:
The Doge dividend.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:09]:
So would you count that as an additional revenue stream or income stream for a happy retiree?

Wes Moss [00:31:17]:
You know what, it may put it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:18]:
In the Doge dividend category.

Wes Moss [00:31:20]:
Is it a true income stream? I would say no because it sounds like a one time stimulus check. Now if you think about what which is this is interesting and if we’re we’re trying to cut the deficit, I get it and let’s say we do find the 2 trillion which would be a small miracle if we do that. But why then pay it back when we’re trying? We still have $34 trillion in overall debt. So I’d like to if we’re going to get rid of the debt problem first we get rid of the deficit problem, then let’s start chipping away at the debt. We got a long way to go. So I Do we really need a stimulus check? If you go back and look at the other stimulus checks that happen which were a big part of the inflation issue, we had three of them starting in 2020 back to back to back and Americans got checks for 600 bucks, 1200 bucks, 1400 bucks. Next thing you knew we had everybody opening up Robinhood accounts, trading stocks. Place went through the roof.

Wes Moss [00:32:13]:
I don’t know, maybe we stick to one thing at a time.

Wes Moss [00:32:15]:
Jeff Lloyd we’re finally kind of getting inflation back under control. Maybe we don’t need another doge dividend or stimulus.

Wes Moss [00:32:22]:
Say we love dividends but I just I’d love to have a balanced budget as well possible. We’re working on it and we’re wrapping here on money matters. Maybe it’s time to go to Waffle House. Jeff Lloyd thank you for being in studio. You can find Jeff Lloyd, me, Jeff Lloyd, the whole team. Easy to do so@yourwealth.com that’s y o u r wealth. Have a wonderful rest of your day.