#69 – From Buffett’s Big Exit to the High School Job Boom: Money Moves That Matter Now

Wes Moss [00:00:17]:
Our focus, providing clear, actionable information without the financial jargon to help 1 million families retire sooner and happier.

Jeff Lloyd [00:00:27]:
Bigger.

Wes Moss [00:00:27]:
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.

Jeff Lloyd [00:00:47]:
I would love to say this is a special Mother’s Day edition, but it’s not. Everything’s going to revolve around Mother’s Day today on the show, but it should. Jeff Lloyd, shouldn’t it?

Wes Moss [00:00:58]:
It should. As much as mothers have done for us and mothers do for millions of people, they deserve a special show.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:06]:
We’ll call this the Money Money Matters Mother’s Day special.

Wes Moss [00:01:09]:
Mothers matter.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:11]:
Mothers do matter a lot. Happy Mother’s Day, mom to my mom, if she’s listening. And happy Mother’s Day to obviously to my wife. And I think that, I don’t know. What are you guys doing for Mother’s Day? You know what?

Wes Moss [00:01:27]:
I think I’m just going to get the kids out of the house for a little bit and give Kate just a little bit of me time.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:35]:
Okay.

Wes Moss [00:01:35]:
And she’ll have the house to herself and maybe watch a show. We’ll probably do some takeout dinner, pick up from her favorite restaurant.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:44]:
Okay. I think that’s good. The. I think what we’re doing, I think of it as a bountiful meal, which may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a. That I’m going to let the boys cook the meal tonight.

Wes Moss [00:02:00]:
The boys are in charge. Cooking dinner. Okay.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:03]:
Yeah. So I’m going to be overseeing the grill. Maybe more of like a pit boss type style because I don’t want the meal to be inedible, but I do. It’s kind of fun to have them. Funny. My youngest is the most into cooking. My little, my third grader is like really? He’s. He likes to help more than the older boys.

Wes Moss [00:02:24]:
Are you going to let him man grill?

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:25]:
He’s too young now. He’s. I can’t. He’s not grilling steaks. You know, maybe he could flip him a flip flop. But it’s, it’s any. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how it goes.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:36]:
I don’t know if this is tangential, but this is, this does relate back to food. Jeff Lloyd it relates back to food and kids and tariffs. So. So how does that all tie together?

Wes Moss [00:02:46]:
All goes back to tariffs again.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:49]:
This past Thursday we got the big tariff announcement. Not tariff announcement, but a trade deal announcement. United States, uk, the market, like that. We’ve been waiting for the first deal, maybe as a template, but maybe not. President Trump didn’t say it was necessarily a template, but it was great to get some sort of trade deal done. We’ve been hearing that. We’re in negotiations and we did. Then that’s a great template.

Jeff Lloyd [00:03:12]:
Maybe we’ll get a ton of these in the coming weeks. We don’t know. The Fed talked about tariffs this week. It’s still too early to tell financial impact, but you cannot get away from hearing about tariffs. It’s either tariffs, the pause in tariffs, the trade deal that have to. That are the deals with tariffs. And even my seventh grader came home with what I thought was a significant project about tariffs and he had to do a whole poster board dealing with the avocado tariffs from Mexico. And it was one of the, it was a big enough project that I said, I’m like, when did you get this? It’s due tomorrow.

Jeff Lloyd [00:03:53]:
When did you get that? Did you get this assignment a week ago? Because it’s like six questions about how does the US Government benefit from tariffs? What could it do? What could impact to the US Consumers on tariffs? What could it do to the avocado growers? And he was, every kid got a different product and his was Avocados, the producer of XYZ product Avocados in. In Mexico. What are they going to do to help with the impact? So it’s a, it was a big thing. And I was like, well, did you think about the USMCA when in relation to these tariffs? The two. He’s like, yeah, I think it’s 25%. And then we did look it up and I think it is, I think avocados are 25% tariff. And then he had to do a whole poster board, like a whole poster board with pictures and printouts and the border and had to come up with creative title. And here’s the title, the Guac Tax, which I thought that was a pretty good title for when you’re dealing specifically with the tariff impact on avocados from Mexico.

Wes Moss [00:04:56]:
Now what class is this for? Is this a social studies? Is this economics? Is this.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:01]:
You would think I’d be a good dad and know the answer. I don’t know, but I know it wasn’t science and I know it wasn’t math, so it had to be something like social studies, world world views or something. I don’t know. Now maybe it was. I would love to think it was economics class, but it wasn’t.

Wes Moss [00:05:17]:
Now, did you get the answer for him on when he first found out this project was due?

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:22]:
Oh, yeah. Back to that. Literally the night before it really.

Wes Moss [00:05:26]:
So it really was actually take home project. Homework.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:29]:
Take home project. And that’s the time of year we are now in. Not only is it Mother’s Day, which is a much more important holiday than the next season. I will talk about. And it’s graduation season and high school is still in, but there’s not a lot of time left. A bunch of colleges have already done graduations. I even wrote a graduation speech this week and I tried to apply the habits of happy retirees. What would a 20 year old need to know about that? Now I’m not giving a graduation speech, but for some reason.

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:01]:
Right. I just love graduation speeches. So I outlined one in case one day I get to speak at a graduation maybe. Maybe way down the line.

Wes Moss [00:06:10]:
You were really inspired a couple of years ago when Matthew McConaughey delivered one of the best graduation speeches probably of all time.

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:17]:
It was, it was up there. Will Ferrell, probably number one or two. McConaughey, McConaughey’s number one. He had the best graduation speech of all time. And we’ve even talked about some of those lessons here on money matters. But. So where are we going with this? I think the guac tax is pretty standard. As I looked into it, it’s just, hey, look, 25% on avocados coming from Mexico.

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:41]:
What does that, what might that do? Probably the other giant news from really last weekend that we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about is the Buffett retirement. He’s not worried about tariffs. He doesn’t like them, does not like tariffs. But he’s not concerned that we’re going to. He’s not running out and selling all his stocks because he’s worried about tariffs. So the night it’s a, it was a nice reassurance and lesson from Buffett, who announced at the end of a five hour Q& A, at the very end, he just slipped it out and I’m retiring.

Wes Moss [00:07:14]:
It really took the crowd by surprise. And we’ve been talking about Buffett in these annual meetings just about every year. They’re a big major event each year. How long have we been speculating this could be the last year for Buffett, yet he never retired. He never retired sooner.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:32]:
Do you think he’s the opposite of retire sooner?

Wes Moss [00:07:35]:
Retirement was retiring too soon.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:38]:
Look at 94. I think that he did. I think I love that he’s continued to work. And he loves it. He just loves it. And he loves Cherry Coke and he loves McDonald’s. And we put together 10 lessons from Buffett that will live on for as long as we live. And now again, Buffett, hopefully he’s fine and healthy.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:59]:
I think he is. He’s just said it’s time and Greg Abel is going to take over, but he’s going to still remain the executive chairman of the, of the board. So he’s not going any. He’s not leaving and his advice will continue on. But it’s just great to be able to hear from him anytime there’s a big hiccup in the world economy, a recession, a big recession, a financial crisis. Covid, anything that we get worried about, he really, I think the Wall Street Journal had there’s some sort of an article that called him America’s financial dad is Retiring. He’s kidding.

Wes Moss [00:08:35]:
He really is. And he’s one. When he talks, people listen. Just this past week, you see the same thing from Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. When he talks, the market listens.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:47]:
Market really does.

Wes Moss [00:08:48]:
And there’s another one out there, Jamie Dimon. I feel like when, when he talks, the market listens as well.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:53]:
You’re right. I think it’s Buffett, Jamie Dimon and Jerome Powell. Those are the three that really. Well, then again, we seem Scott Bessant, the new treasury secretary, markets listen to him, what he says. And obviously President Trump, he obviously has a huge impact on market direction in any given day. But I think let’s go with that, Jeff. We’ve had 10 lessons from Buffett. We’ve got the Fed essentially stayed put, did nothing.

Jeff Lloyd [00:09:21]:
They actively are doing nothing. Not changing rates. It’s Mother’s Day. And Jeff Lloyd, you guys are doing takeout. We’re doing a homemade meal from the boys, which again, I’m going to try to oversee. And my favorite story from the week, though, which we will get to in this hour, I call it the high school job draft is heating up. High school job draft is heating up. And this is in the same week that we read the US Treasury Department just announced 5.3 million Americans who have defaulted on their student loans are soon to have their wages garnished.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:00]:
Wait a minute. Big student loans. I gotta pay them back. If I don’t, you get wages garnished. Then you’ve got companies coming into high schools knocking on the door, saying, we will hire you as a junior. We’ll sign a contract today when you graduate for 70k a year. So now you have that.

Wes Moss [00:10:17]:
Now you have high schoolers going straight to the pros. And we’re not talking about basketball, baseball.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:21]:
It’s a pro salary. Pro salary, there goes. What’s the average college student salary coming out of school? 2025.

Wes Moss [00:10:30]:
It’s about $68,000, actually. The average projected starting salary in the US for the class of 2025, 68,600.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:43]:
Average high school kid who can do a trade may even be more than that. We’re going to talk about that in just a little bit. So let’s go back to Buffett. I mean, we’ve learned so much from him. His style has been so wonderful to learn from. There’s kind of really countless speeches and books that I’ve seen and read over the years that have kind of shaped my thinking around and learning from him. Again, he’s been at this thing for over 60 years. Very few people have been investors and then had a track record, a published track record for that long.

Jeff Lloyd [00:11:18]:
Those people don’t work until they’re well into their 90s like Buffett has. And I would admit, when I was younger, the very beginning of my career. So if you go back to the late 90s, when I was right out of school, I kind of looked at Buffett, who again, was still had been again investing for 35 or 40 some years. At the time, I looked at it and said, thinking, this guy’s a multi. He’s one of the richest people in the world. Right? Of course, it’s easy for a billionaire to stay calm and believe in America because he’s already become a billionaire investing, drinks, cherry Coke, he buys McDonald’s, has the same car for 10 years. I thought, well, that must be nice, must be easy for a billionaire. But over time, I realized that Buffet is exactly the kind of investor that you want to be, that I want to be.

Jeff Lloyd [00:12:11]:
And I learned that after a couple of years of thinking, wow, this guy. It’s easy for him to say, but he keeps investing simple. He invests in businesses, not trends and not flashy trends. And I think maybe most importantly, he reminds us that having a little bit of cash is okay. Berkshire Hathaway today has something like $300 billion sitting in cash. So I really have come to love. I love Warren Buffett and everything that he’s about and have now for a very long time. And I want to walk through some of the important lessons that I can think of from over the years that apply to all of us today and will continue to long after he is fully, fully retired.

Jeff Lloyd [00:12:53]:
Give us Some stats from 1965 until today. S&P 500 Total return vs Berkshire Hathaway Total return.

Wes Moss [00:13:03]:
So the compounded annual gain for Berkshire from 1965 through last year. So through 2024, 19.9% per year. It’s pretty good.

Jeff Lloyd [00:13:15]:
Pretty good.

Wes Moss [00:13:15]:
S and P 510.4%.

Jeff Lloyd [00:13:18]:
That’s also pretty good.

Wes Moss [00:13:19]:
That’s also pretty good.

Jeff Lloyd [00:13:20]:
All right, cumulatively then, The S&P 539,054%.

Wes Moss [00:13:28]:
Sounds pretty good from that 65 through 2024.

Jeff Lloyd [00:13:33]:
Now, this is where the math gets interesting, and this is the miracle of compounding and mathematics. But 10.4%, so essentially double rate of return. So instead of 10, we’re talking almost 20 for Berkshire Hathaway. Instead of 39,000%, was the cumulative rate of return for Berkshire.

Wes Moss [00:13:54]:
5,500, 2,284%.

Jeff Lloyd [00:13:59]:
Okay, do that math. That is incredible. Here we are 60 years. So 1965 until today. That’s through last year. Really a tremendous rate of return. And I remember looking through every year they published that. It’s at the beginning of the annual letter and the annual report.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:19]:
In some of those years, they had 100% rate of returns in the really early years. And Buffett will, will say that it is easier to make a higher percentage rate of return when you had a small, when he had a smaller conglomerate, a smaller fund, because a couple companies could really make a big difference. Now with a market cap that’s, let’s call it roughly a trillion dollars, it takes a lot to move the meter for an enterprise that big. So they, they buy a company for $10 million today, even if it doubles or triples, really didn’t do anything mathematically. It’s just kind of like drop in the ocean. So that’s part of the reason. And there’s been a lot of articles over the past six months that Buffett keeps accumulating cash. He’s never had this much cash.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:59]:
What does that mean? Is he scared of the market? Is he scared of tariffs? He’s not. He doesn’t seem to. He doesn’t like tariffs he talked about in the annual meeting, but he’s not scared of tariffs. He doesn’t think that that’s going to derail the US Economy. They just find it difficult to find a company that they can invest in that will move the meter for something that big. And they’re looking for whole companies in order to do this. And it’s hard to find a giant company that’s still growing really rapidly that they can. And so I think that’s a big reason why they have so much cash.

Jeff Lloyd [00:15:32]:
But one of his principles is that it’s okay to hold some cash and look and seek for opportunity. The first out of the 10 we’ll get to this quickly is to be patient, but be able to act decisively when opportunity strikes.

Wes Moss [00:15:48]:
He.

Jeff Lloyd [00:15:48]:
In 1966, he found a company that 2 million in earnings, 2 million in real estate, and 2 million in cash and is being offered for 6 million bucks. And he hesitated about five minutes and said, I’m buying it. So it’s, it’s. Part of that is you’ve got to have some dry powder to be able to, to take advantage decisively for opportunities. And Buffett has shown us that over and over again throughout his investing career. More Money matters straight ahead. Are you facing a fork in the road and deciding between continuing your career and retirement? I’m Wes Moss, host of Money Matters, and this massive life decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. Talk with my team.

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:32]:
If you’d like help reviewing your retirement accounts and building a financial plan, we can help you review options and offer an opinion based on your best interests. You can find us@yourwealth.com that’s Y-O-U r wealth.com Jeff Lloyd. We gotta get to our Buffett lessons because we got 10 of these. So let’s jump right in. I’ll let you pick the first one, and then we’re gonna go rapid fire from there.

Wes Moss [00:16:59]:
Can I do a one off? And it’s actually not on this 10.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:02]:
Come on, now we’re gonna do 11. Okay, go ahead.

Wes Moss [00:17:04]:
Listen, I know, but it’s our favorite, and it’s what we talk about on the show a lot.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:08]:
Okay, what is it?

Wes Moss [00:17:09]:
Okay, and this is a Buffet quote. It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but it’s not always a smooth ride.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:20]:
Never bet against America.

Wes Moss [00:17:22]:
And we always talk about the army of American productivity. We love it. We love it.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:27]:
Yeah. Okay, I’m gonna. Actually, I think that that that’s similar to the. One of the. One of the ones I already had on the list. US continues to be the greatest place to do business in the world. I’m just going to. I’ll substitute it for that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:17:40]:
Okay, here we go. Number one is be patient, but act decisively. Two, these are lessons for really any age investor, 20s, 30s and all the way into retirement. I think all these still apply. We could do more. There’s 100 of them, but let’s do these 10. Two, don’t confuse activity with progress. Sounds a lot like the Fed this week.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:02]:
They actively did nothing. Jeff Floyd, because interest rates, they didn’t wanna move rates, they kept rates exactly where they were to four and a quarter, four and a half. Because we have inflation mostly in check, it’s not too high and we have unemployment rate low at 4.2%. So the economy is in okay shape and they’re like, they’re always data dependent and they’re watching. But don’t confuse activity with progress. That was an active decision by the Fed to not move. Right. And he has made a fortune by being invested at all times.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:34]:
Yes, he has cash, but he really does. He plans on holding companies for a very long period of time. I was going over some of these ideas with von Hessler folks this week and EVH made the point. He goes, you know, I’ve just never been, it’s so hard to pick stocks that it’s just hard to know what stocks to buy. And my comment with that, in thinking out Buffett would think this through. Think of, first of all, he’s got, if you count the privately owned companies that they own the whole thing, and then pieces of other companies that they own, big pieces of private companies. And then if you look at the different publicly traded stocks that they own, it’s somewhere, it’s close to 150 companies. So he’s got tons of diversification and his holding period for the most part has been, hey, this is a great business.

Jeff Lloyd [00:19:23]:
I’m not worried about the stock. And this business should continue to grow over time. I said to evh, I know that’s, I think that’s one thing that stops people from investing is like, I don’t know which stock to buy. And it’s not. My, my comment to that was it’s not about buying the right stock. It’s about participating in markets over time. And if you really think about what Berkshire’s done, that they’ve, they’ve participated in markets over time, they own some of the biggest companies in the world, some of the strongest companies in the world, and they have owned them for 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 years. That’s participation.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:00]:
That’s not nailing the right time to buy the exact right stock. It’s, hey, I’m going to Own a bunch of really good companies. I’m going to hold them forever. So don’t confuse activity. Feeling like you have to be in and out and trade. Oh, this is the, oh, wait, wait a minute. What about this new trend I’ve got to get in that. It’s not about that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:16]:
It’s don’t confuse activity with progress. Number three, trust is the great currency of business. It’s the primary currency. And look, he’s still working at 94. It’s partially, I think, a big chunk of that. People still trust him. Yes, he loves what he does and he says trust is more rewarding for him than money. And I love that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:42]:
And that can apply to any of us. If you are in your career and people look to you and you’re, and you’re providing some, something for someone in any industry, healthcare, finance, insurance, energy, you name it. Medicine, there’s, it’s, there’s little that can compete with that.

Wes Moss [00:20:59]:
Jeff Lloyd, Couldn’t agree more. Let’s move on to four, number four.

Jeff Lloyd [00:21:03]:
I think that if you’re worried about AI, you’re going to like this one. Number four, the right people matter more than the right algorithm. Remember a couple years ago when he first used ChatGPT and he said he asked it to write a sonnet in Spanish and it came out with a sonnet in Spanish and he was like, what? This is amazing. And this is for a guy who took, for a while, didn’t want to invest a ton in technology. And obviously he changed his mind over time because he certainly has some real tech holdings. But Buffett was talking about this recently and said that his Ajit Jane, who’s the vice chairman of his insure, all the insurance companies and Berkshire Hathaway owns a ton of insurance businesses. He would trust talking with him over what he said is the smartest, most powerful AI software in the world still wants to talk to a human. So, and, and I don’t know, time will tell.

Jeff Lloyd [00:22:00]:
How much are we going to use AI in the new world in 20 years? I think of it, I don’t know. I guess I just don’t know. I think today I look at it as a great augmentation to human thought. And we were talking about this as a family the other day. My kids were marveling, how does AI just be able to bring in all these conversations? They’re not inventing anything. AI just does an amazing job of knowing pretty much anything that’s ever been written that’s on the Internet. They take it and it knows it. And then it pieces it back together.

Jeff Lloyd [00:22:36]:
So it’s not creating anything. Yes, it’s generating content, but it’s not thinking about the content because it’s only as good as what it is learned. And we humans have written what it is. Now, the next step, I guess, would be this artificial general intelligence where it starts thinking, I don’t know. We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ll have to cross that porch when we get to it. All right, number five, focus on enduring businesses, not macro predictions. And this is kind of goes into what he thinks about tariffs.

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:08]:
He’s not trying to guess the market’s best move because he doesn’t care if stock prices are up or down 10 or 20%, doesn’t care. And I. You may. Again, it goes back to maybe that’s cavalier. It sounds almost cavalier. This guy’s a billionaire. What does he care? He goes from 200 billion, 190 billion. Oh, but he, he doesn’t care about the stock price because he believes in the underlying.

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:30]:
And that’s what matters to him, and that’s what should matter to us as investors. And thinking about what he thinks about tariffs, he said, look, I don’t like tariffs. I think we should have open global trade. But it’s not as though it’s going to ruin this economy. The companies figure this out. Going back to what you spoke about, Jeff Lloyd, which was the army of American productivity, he calls it the American, he says the American tailwind, the great American economic miracle, Tarot wind. That’s Warren Buffett, number six. Well, number.

Jeff Lloyd [00:24:01]:
We already did that. Which is about America. Number seven. We’re already on number seven. Stay with your circle of competence. Again, this kind of applies to life. It applies to the jobs. We do work.

Jeff Lloyd [00:24:12]:
He’s always emphasized doing and sticking with what you understand and not going in a hundred different directions.

Disclaimer [00:24:19]:
The.

Jeff Lloyd [00:24:20]:
And I think that when it comes to investing, look, there’s some major categories that we need to understand and major categories that we need to be invested in. But if you’re going to do 20 different real estate projects and you’ve never done a real estate project before, then you’re going outside of your competence. It could be great for someone that does lots of real estate. But if you’ve never done it, you want to start it when you hit retirement at age 60. That doesn’t make sense. So stay within your circle of competence. Now, may take a little time to figure out what that is, but once you know it, stick with it. The next one goes back to Number eight is I call this one just greed is the enemy of a happy retirement.

Jeff Lloyd [00:25:02]:
And to some extent, this is about knowing when enough is enough and not trading peace of mind for once. You already get to the point, let’s call it happy retiree money. I believe in. I believe that there’s a plateauing effect and that once we get to a certain amount of money, and this, I’ve learned this through my happy, my research of happy versus unhappy retirees, once we get to our level that pays for all of our goals, our lifestyle that we would like to continue to live, then we don’t need the next incremental dollar on top of that doesn’t necessarily buy an equal amount of happiness. So I get, I call this diminishing marginal happiness per new extra dollar. Once you get to a certain point, I think money does a lot in helping us get to a place of peace of mind and call that happiness. But once we get to a certain point, we don’t need to risk even more to get more, knowing enough is enough. 9, and this one may be my favorite, the Power of simplicity.

Jeff Lloyd [00:26:04]:
Jeff Lloyd. We try to talk about making it simple is one of our core values here on the show, and it’s what we try to break down the complexity of the world and investing, which is inherently complex because there’s unlimited ways, literally infinite ways to invest. How do you make the complex simple? Not just keep it simple? Because it’s, you can’t just keep things simple. You have to spend time and energy and effort to make things simple and focus in on what really matters. No, that’s not 10. I’ll let you do number 10.

Wes Moss [00:26:44]:
Give yourself permission to enjoy the ride.

Jeff Lloyd [00:26:47]:
Oh, you sound like a happy retiree.

Wes Moss [00:26:50]:
Well, look, Buffett worked Till he was 94, so he was obviously enjoying that ride for a long time. And we hope he enjoys a ride for many more years to come. But, you know, retirement isn’t just about, like, doing nothing. It’s about doing what matters to you.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:07]:
And, well, the other thing, too is that we know that Americans, some people love their work. One in five Americans love what they do. Buffett’s in that group, one to five. But four out of five don’t necessarily. There’s a, there’s 20% of America despises their job, and about 60% of America is kind of take it or leave it. Remember the Map project? It ranks as number 39, 40 of the things we love to do. So give yourself permission. You don’t have to be like Warren Buffett.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:36]:
Work till you’re almost 100. For a lot of Americans, it’s about being able to say, all right, I’ve worked enough, I’ve saved enough, going back to number eight and now I can enjoy it and travel and do the thing, create a new purpose in retirement. That’s what happy retirees do. We all do it a different way. Work can be part of that poor pursuit. Once you stop your primary job, you can work part time. That might, you may want to do that, you may enjoy it, but give yourself time. Happy retirees, they have a lot of different core life pursuits, AKA hobbies on steroids.

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:16]:
One of them is volunteering. Can you count the fact that Warren Buffett and his buddy Bill Gates are giving away a couple hundred billion dollars? Does that count as volunteering? They could take some time to give away that much. I mean, I learned that from watching Brewster’s millions back in 1985. Poor Monty Brewster, he could barely spend 30 million, wasn’t allowed to give that much away in 30 days. Imagine 200 billion. Got a lot of work to do. Jeff Lloyd, we wanted to get to in our as we wrap up today, what my favorite story of the week of the Wall Street Journal, I call it the High School job draft heating up. And the reason I think that this struck a chord is a couple things.

Jeff Lloyd [00:29:00]:
One, we also got an announcement this week that the Treasury Department is starting sometime this summer is going to be garnishing wages for 5.3 million Americans who’ve defaulted on their student loans. We’ve got a trillion dollar student loan issue in the United States and it gets more and more expensive every day to go to college. That begs the question, if you’re 17 or 18, why would you want to take on 100k in college debt or 200 grand in college debt when their employers out there ready to pay you 70 grand straight out of high school? Wall Street Journal tells this great story about the rise of skilled trades. And I’m still a believer in education. I still absolutely believe that college is worth it. But there are also a lot of other industries that a are not going away. And I wouldn’t be worried about AI taking my job if I was a welder, if I was an H Vac, if I was a plumbing, electrical, auto, tech. And these are the skilled trades.

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:01]:
And the skilled trades. One thing I guess I hadn’t really thought of, one, you’ve got a huge amount of baby boomers retiring from these skilled trades. One and two, those skilled trades are, there’s a lot of tech involved now There’s a huge amount of technology involved in almost all these areas. Energy, H vac construction and building. It’s very high tech now. And schools are saying, look, we’re replacing the retiring baby boomers with kids that grew up with technology and we want to get them right out of school. This is a story from Father Judge High School out of Philadelphia. Every single welding senior in the school has a job offer starting at a minimum of 50k and some of them are at $75,000.

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:49]:
And these are juniors and seniors coming out of Father Judge. These kids said they start feel like they’re getting nil deals. One of them said, it honestly feels like I’m an athlete, I’m getting attention from all these pro teams. And you said it, it was like going straight from.

Wes Moss [00:31:05]:
Yeah, it’s like you’re going straight from high school into the pros. And like we already said, the average starting salary for a College graduate is $68,680 for this upcoming graduating class.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:21]:
And some of these trades are paying.

Wes Moss [00:31:23]:
70 grands are paying just that right out of high school.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:26]:
So look again, I don’t think this is a fringe story. I think this is a growing wave. You’ve got big companies like Constellation Energy, Canistaro, we’ve got different big automotive groups and then a bunch of local contractors and manufacturers. They even did something called the Heavy Metal Summer experience to start recruiting kids. So I think that it’s not necessarily just college for all, but I think it’s options for all as this economy that is so AI focused. I like these jobs. It’s pretty AI proof for the long run. All right, we’re going to wrap it up with that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:32:04]:
It’s easy to find Jeff Lloyd. It’s easy to find me and our Money Matters team. You can find us ask questions through yourwealth.com that’s y o u r your wealth dot com. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

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