#43 – Halloween And Housing Economics, Election Outcomes, And The Harvest Business Review’s Article About Retirement

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:11]:
I am. And I already have my costume.

Wes Moss [00:01:13]:
What, what is it?

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:14]:
And I might have already used it this past week.

Wes Moss [00:01:17]:
We’re going to get into some of the economics, of course, of Halloween. The numbers are spooky, but of course, of course the numbers are, they’re just fascinating. Interesting. We’re going to talk about home sales this week. Of course you’ve got mortgage rates that don’t want to go down even though the Fed has lowered rates. We are stuck in a complete housing logjam. We’re going to look at those numbers. Existing home sales, the lowest, the worst, I don’t know if you want to call it the worst or just the lowest since 2010.

Wes Moss [00:01:49]:
The numbers just don’t even come close to where they were a few years ago. Completely stuck in the mud because of where interest rates are. And Jeff Floyd, the stock market doesn’t go up every day.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:01]:
Yeah, it’s been a little bit tough.

Wes Moss [00:02:02]:
A week days in a row.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:04]:
It’s been a little bit tougher week this week we’ve seen a couple of down days and yeah, turns out the market doesn’t go up every day.

Wes Moss [00:02:12]:
And can we get a 2024 pre election update? We got a lot to cover. Not to mention Retire Without Regrets, the latest Harvard Business Review article that kind of tracked some, well, really tracked retirees diligently over a decade long longitudinal study, which is a pretty the conclusions. There’s two stark conclusions that I just, I can’t, I read it this morning. I wasn’t planning on talking about it here on Money Matters because I haven’t fully flushed it out. But it’s just, it’s such a stark and important story. I want to at least share a little bit about it. So let’s start with Halloween spending as we get into the of candy and costumes. Jeff Floyd.

Wes Moss [00:02:55]:
Where do we stand?

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:56]:
Hey, we’re going back to the National Retail Federation. Remember last week we talked about holiday spending almost to a trillion dollars. Halloween spending, not as much, but still a substantial number. Planned Halloween spending for 2024. $11.6 billion. Over $100 per person.

Wes Moss [00:03:17]:
Well, $100 doesn’t sound like a lot, particularly in today’s dollars. However, if you think about, and just think about all the things you do for Halloween, you’ve got your little candy bucket, the candy, the costume, the cards, all of the. And then of course, the decorations, which started popping up in like, August in my neighborhood. But so it’s become culturally, it just seems like a bigger and bigger holiday. I, I don’t know. Can you really call it a holiday in the United States? So we spend 11.6 billion. At least that’s what we’re supposed to spend this coming week. Last year was what, 12? So we’re down a little bit.

Wes Moss [00:03:55]:
Where’s all the money going? Where’s the real spending going? Jeff Floyd.

Jeff Lloyd [00:03:59]:
Well, it’s interesting if you look how that 11.6 billion is broken out. You got 3.8 billion to costumes, 3.8 billion to decorations, then another three and a half billion to candy, and then the last 500 million. Do you know where that goes towards Halloween greeting cards.

Wes Moss [00:04:23]:
Now that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:23]:
That is a Halloween greeting card. I will tell you this.

Wes Moss [00:04:26]:
Have you ever done one of those?

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:27]:
I have not. But growing up, my grandparents would always send me a Halloween card with a $20 bill in it.

Wes Moss [00:04:36]:
Oh, no wonder the kids look forward.

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:40]:
And you know what that $20 bill would not buy today?

Wes Moss [00:04:45]:
A costume.

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:46]:
It would not buy one of those big bags of candy. Have you bought candy yet for the trick or treaters?

Wes Moss [00:04:50]:
No. Like a CVS, it’s like 30 or.

Jeff Lloyd [00:04:53]:
$40 for just one big bag of candy. It’s astronomical. It’s insane.

Wes Moss [00:04:57]:
I think the aisle there reads Fast track two. Diabetes is what that does. So it almost sounds like a political campaign here or slogan for Halloween spending. 3.8 billion costumes, 3.8 billion decorations, 3.5 billion candy. 500 million greeting cards speaking. And top, top costumes. 2024 kids. Spider Man, Ghost princess, witch.

Wes Moss [00:05:21]:
Superhero. Batman for adults. Witch, vampire, cat, Batman, pirate. And for pets. Are you dressing up? You see pets in the neighborhood?

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:33]:
I’ve seen some, but these are the top pet costumes. You got number one, pumpkin Hot dog. I have seen a lot of hot dog pet costumes.

Wes Moss [00:05:43]:
Hard to beat.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:44]:
Bat, ghost, bumblebee, and then number six, cat.

Wes Moss [00:05:49]:
So your dog dressed.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:50]:
Your dog dressed up as a cat.

Wes Moss [00:05:52]:
All right, speaking of election, let’s go right into that. That’s enough about Halloween.

Jeff Lloyd [00:05:56]:
Hey, we are less than two weeks from the election. It is a week from next Tuesday.

Wes Moss [00:06:00]:
And the two big indicators are that we watch. Well, there’s more than two, but two of the ones that have a really strong historical track record that point to whether it’s the incumbent party that wins or the or new party would be the S&P 500 indicator on a three month basis prior to the election. What does it do, number one? Number two, the misery index. And where do we stand on both of those? Remember, misery index is you take the inflation rate, you take the unemployment rate where it is today. It’s really an. It’s a three month moving average. But let’s just call it those two numbers added together, essentially CPI plus unemployment, the high. And if you think about that, higher we have unemployment, the worse the world is.

Wes Moss [00:06:40]:
Higher we have inflation, the worse the world is. That’s why they call it the misery index. And really we’re just comparing it today versus where we were a year ago. Did it get better? If it got better, meaning lower, incumbent party favored. If it gets worse, incumbent party says, hey, but the world’s a little worse than it was a year ago. I want somebody new. Where do we stand on the two indicators for the election?

Jeff Lloyd [00:06:59]:
Yeah, so if we look at the S and P performance, you take three months leading into the election, so July 31 to October 31. And what it says, if the S&P 500 price return is positive, incumbent party wins. If it’s negative, the incumbent party loses. And that has predicted the past 20 out of the last 24 elections using this indicator, kind of as we stand Today, S&P 500 price performance is up around 4 to 5%. So that would suggest incumbent party winning.

Wes Moss [00:07:35]:
The election 4 to 5%, not 45%. 4 to 5. Right.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:39]:
We’re up. Thank you for clarifying.

Wes Moss [00:07:41]:
Call it 4% or so in this three month period of time. That would point to the incumbent party. But let’s. So we’re going back since 1928, we have 96 years worth of data, 24 different presidential cycles. And this way of looking at it, S, P up, incumbent wins. S P down, incumbent loses, has been right 1, 2, 3, 4 every time except 4. So 24 presidential cycles, it’s predicted 20 out of 24. And it has essentially been right every single election since 1984.

Wes Moss [00:08:16]:
Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:16]:
So it’s been right the last 10 election cycles.

Wes Moss [00:08:20]:
All right, well a lot can happen in the next. Is it even. It’s not even two weeks. A lot can happen a week from Tuesday, in the next week, in two, three days. It’s come upon us so quickly. And then of course a reminder and you know, Larry Fink, which is one of the big private equity firm or really fund company CEOs this week came out and said very simply that the election doesn’t matter stocks. Now that is the way I have always looked at it. The data tells us that any political configuration markets do fine, whether it’s Democratic Senate, Republican House, Democratic President or Republican President, Democratic House, Republican Senate.

Wes Moss [00:09:04]:
Those two numbers are both in the mid teens on average over the course of history for the performance of the S&P 500. So it just shows us that you can put any configuration and markets seem to. The way I look at this is they figure out a way. Certainly there are better industries under different administrations. You can look at a particular industry and it might be favored under one political configuration. Some industries are maybe more punished under a political configuration. However, in general, if you look at all 500 stocks in the S&P 500, we’re talking about 11, 12 sectors, all different sectors of the economy and then hundreds of subsectors within. And companies as a whole figure out a way to continue to win, can continue to move forward, continue to grow their earnings.

Wes Moss [00:09:55]:
There may be some companies. So you can’t say politics doesn’t matter to markets. It just as a. As a collective, as a group, the group itself finds a way to continue to progress no matter what politics are. And that’s the way I would describe. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, it’s just for the group sees its way through historically almost no matter what.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:15]:
Yeah. And one thing that we’ve said the last couple of months is the market like certainty. And once it knows what political party is elected in the White House or elected into Congress, it can digest that information and move forward.

Wes Moss [00:10:31]:
And then I think I don’t know why this would be any different. And again the leaving politics aside, just trying to look at long term history, that’s what it shows us now what does matter in the more intermediate term? And this is a big part of the economy. I did a talk this week about the really just an economic update that really focused in on the labor market. So if you had to pull a Couple of big pieces out of how are things going in the United States? How’s the economy going? I look at two things really stood out to me this week, and one is employed, employment and the labor market. Number two is the housing market. And I would say we have good news in one and not so good news in the other on the housing market. We’re just in this continued log jam. If you go back to the year 20 pre Covid.

Wes Moss [00:11:19]:
Let’s go look before the. I always think of COVID Any chart you’re looking at, whether it’s housing or employment or inflation or you name your economic indicator, it looks like kind of an earthquake went off in 2020. When it comes to the data just all over the map. Supply chains were disrupted, inflation was disrupted, monetary supply, pent up demand, pent up supply. Then the convergence of those two and the consumer goes and spends on goods. And then after a year of that, they go back to services. So it’s just this big earthquake of data for the most part has kind of settled back to more, I would say a state of normalcy with a few exceptions. And housing is one of those.

Wes Moss [00:11:59]:
If you go back and look for years and years and years and years prior to Covid. So go back to the beginning of 2020, all the way back to the year 2015. So let’s go, let’s talk five separate years here. Existing home sales stayed pretty steady right around five to five and a half million homes were changing hands every year over and over and over and over again. Good time for realtors. Then 2021 came along after a brief dip because the earthquake of the pandemic and the shutdowns, wham, we’re talking about six and a half million homes. So we had just tons of housing activity because interest rates went down dramatically. And then it’s just been a slide ever since.

Wes Moss [00:12:42]:
So as soon as rates started going up, people stopped selling their homes, people stopped buying homes. And today here we are at only we’re going from six and a half million home sales, existing home sales, all the way down to 3.8 million. It’s almost been cut in half. And I did a chart this week that shows mortgage rates and existing home sales, and they are very much just inverse. As one goes up, the other goes down. That’s it. Mortgage rates went down essentially from the early 90s through 2010, then 2015, a long stretch of rates coming down, rates going lower, and home sales just kind of kept going up. And then every time we’ve seen a spike in mortgage Rates, home sales come down and that’s really where we are today.

Wes Moss [00:13:26]:
The Fed lowered rates about a month ago. Ironically, even though the Federal Reserve has lowered their target rate. That’s not the bond market. The Federal Reserve just controls that short term, ultra short term rate from bank to bank. And that sets interest rates in general, but it doesn’t completely move the entire bond market. The 10 year treasury is where 30 year mortgage rates essentially come from. And they’ve gone up. The ten year treasury got down and was flirting with what, three and a half percent.

Wes Moss [00:13:56]:
Now we’re back to 4.25% in the course of a month or so. That’s a 3/4 of a percent move higher. And of course mortgage rates have gone higher as well. We were as high as, let me get my mortgage chart. We were as high as 7.8%, came all the way down to six. And then the last couple of weeks we’re back to about six and a half percent for mortgage rates. No wonder we have existing home sales that continue to just look like there’s nothing happening.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:22]:
Yeah, you remember talking about when we got down to 6, 6.1, we were almost breaking into the fives and we looked at some interesting data that showed what’s the highest mortgage rate you take on for buying a new home? And that sweet spot was in that, that five to six.

Wes Moss [00:14:40]:
So that’s five and a half was, they called it the magic number.

Jeff Lloyd [00:14:43]:
That was the magic mortgage rate where about 50% of Americans would take on a mortgage at that rate.

Wes Moss [00:14:51]:
For better or for worse, many of our financial decisions, our family financial decisions, are made where they’re made right at the dinner table. And you and your spouse, you and your partner, you and your loved one and your family and your kids, you’re sitting around talking, hey, we’re going to move, we’re going to move. It’s a big deal to do so. So if you, if the variables stack up against you, too big of a deal to move, can’t find a place, too expensive, then the family says, we’re staying, we’re staying. And by the way, there’s a big theme with that too. It’s, it’s essentially the renovation theme I don’t think is going anywhere anytime soon. But when the conversation switches to wait a minute, we’re in the fives now, which we’re not today, we got pretty darn close. Hey, we’re in the fives now.

Wes Moss [00:15:36]:
When it comes to mortgage rates, it removes one of those really big variables that’s kind of messing up the hey, let’s move soup and we, we flirted with it. Then we’re going the other way and housing’s just going to stay stuck logjam until we see lower rates. It’s not inconceivable that in three months, six months, a year from now we’ll see much more lower mortgage rates. They’re just not here yet. More Money matters straight ahead. If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout or if you remember as a kid, Rocky running the steps and if Michael keaton is still Mr. Mom to you, then guess what, it’s officially time to do some retirement planning. It’s Wes Moss from Money Matters.

Wes Moss [00:16:21]:
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 why o u r your wealth.com what’s your favorite topic so far today? Is it mortgage rates? Is it existing home sales that are stuck in the mud?

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:45]:
I think it’s the mortgage.

Wes Moss [00:16:46]:
It’s a Halloween candy.

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:48]:
It’s the Halloween candy, but it’s, it’s the mortgage rates. It’s, it was fascinating the last since they announced the rate cut about a month ago, seeing the 30 year mortgage trend down to about 6.1. But last couple of weeks we’ve seen that 30 year mortgage tick up higher. As we’ve seen rates come up doesn’t.

Wes Moss [00:17:07]:
Help the housing logjam that we know that gets decided around the dinner table, hey, we’re going to move, put the house on the market, go buy another house. I think the magic number, we’ve seen empirical studies around this, surveys of people saying here’s where I would start moving. Magic number five and a half percent range. We’re just not there yet. And by the way, two thirds of America as far as top celebration plans for Halloween hand out candy. It’s not a plan. It’s not a plan. I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest plan.

Wes Moss [00:17:37]:
52% decorate the lawn, 49% dress and costume, 43% carve a pumpkin. You know, we’ve got pumpkins at the house and we still haven’t carved. We’ve got I guess a little bit of time. Just such a mess. Got four kids out carving pumpkins. It’s a lot of seeds and the goop that comes out. I’m not 100% excited about the pumpkin carving thing. It’s almost like one thing I have a little trouble with is kids eating ice cream.

Wes Moss [00:18:06]:
And when it’s kind of just melting and it’s like melting all the. It’s kind of like that.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:11]:
It kind of is.

Wes Moss [00:18:12]:
But a Halloween version of ice cream.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:13]:
Are you telling me the Moss household, those boys don’t like digging into the guts of the pumpkin and scooping them out and.

Wes Moss [00:18:20]:
They do. I don’t love the. I don’t love the aftermath.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:24]:
Now, do they still dress up? Are they. Are they dressing up this week?

Wes Moss [00:18:27]:
So my third. My third grader has a plan with his buddy at school. They’re both going to wear different Detroit lion football jerseys. They’re both Detroit lion fans. My seventh grader, even though my wife is from Michigan and she’s always like Detroit, he calls her fair weather just because the Lions are so good this year.

Jeff Lloyd [00:18:51]:
That’s right.

Wes Moss [00:18:52]:
He’s still Falcons. When you’re a kid, your team goes to the Super Bowl. And that’s all we can say for my younger kids is the Falcons went to a Super bowl and win Super Bowl. You get locked in. You get locked in.

Jeff Lloyd [00:19:04]:
It’s kind of been tough sledding being a Falcons fan in a Lions fan. I know the last few years Lions have been good, but kind of tough times being an NFL fan for those two teams.

Wes Moss [00:19:14]:
You know what it is? It’s tough for most fans.

Jeff Lloyd [00:19:17]:
It really is.

Wes Moss [00:19:17]:
Really thinking there’s only one super bowl winner. Nobody. We don’t ever talk about that. Mo fans. I can’t. Terrible season. It’s been such a long drought. Oh, you weren’t the one team out of what.

Wes Moss [00:19:29]:
How many NFL teams are there now? 30, 32. I believe it’s a one in 32. You’ve got one one team that’s happy and 31 teams that are mad they have the worst season ever. That’s just the reality of the world. It’s a 1 in 32 deal.

Jeff Lloyd [00:19:44]:
You have one winner unless you’re the.

Wes Moss [00:19:46]:
One winner and you can just keep going. All right, so unemployment rate, we know and I spoke about this this week, kind of opened my eyes maybe to a different perspective. And I want to get into this Harvard Business Review article about two divergent retirements. One, this kind of is really a cautionary tale around retirement. But just to do one more, I think, important piece of the equation around the economy as we’re headed into the elections. Almost here. U.S. unemployment rate, remember before COVID had gotten down to max, max, max employment down to three and a half percent, very few people unemployed.

Wes Moss [00:20:26]:
And then it spiked to 15% and then it recovered dramatically. Here we are today still at a low historical unemployment rate of 4.1%. What’s interesting, though, is how people are finding jobs and the companies that are looking for jobs. We’ve got job openings that we can track through something called jolts. And we can measure that against job seekers. Think vacancies in a hotel and people trying to book a room. Well, for most of economic history, there have been more people trying to book a room than vacancies. And the vacancies, that’s the hotel.

Wes Moss [00:21:03]:
That’s the employer. Advantage. Employer, Advantage Company. For most of economic history. I just look at 2010. We had 16 million people looking for work, and we only had about 4 million jobs open. Imagine that, 16 million people looking only. Only 4 million job openings.

Wes Moss [00:21:23]:
You had four people looking for every one job. So who wins there? Well, the company wins. They take their pick. They don’t have to raise wages. And that’s just changed. It’s changed dramatically. And again, the economic earthquake went off on the seismograph that was pretty steady for a long time. And then all of a sudden, I don’t know, is that Godzilla walking around outside? Because the seismograph’s going crazy.

Wes Moss [00:21:46]:
We go to 25 million people unemployed and only 4.6 million jobs. But that was a really small window. And then it corrected and we saw this again, I would say, maybe once in a generation, economic shift, where now it went. Advantage employee. Advantage job seeker. Now we only have. Let’s say this goes back to 22. We only have 6 million people seeking.

Wes Moss [00:22:15]:
Only 6 million people want a hotel room, but there’s 12 million of them. There’s 12 million openings. There’s 12 million jobs. Only 6 million people looking. So you’ve got two job openings for somebody looking. What happened? Well, advantage employee. Hey, well, I can go here and I can go there. There’s all these job openings.

Wes Moss [00:22:36]:
I can. Wages had to go up. Wages had to go up. And now here we are again, getting back to the ripples in the pond have calmed down, but it’s still Advantage worker. There’s 8 million job openings. There’s only about 6.8 million people looking. So you’ve got 1.2. Well, not 2, but 1.2 job openings now per worker.

Wes Moss [00:22:56]:
Workers also have been dealt the cards of inflation. They want more money. You’ve seen the strikes from Boeing to the big three auto companies to the airlines to ups. A couple years ago, employees woke up and said, look, we still have the advantage. We want more money. They also want more flexibility. These numbers are just Economically fascinating and again a little bit like an earthquake with a new paradigm we’ve got. Back in 2019, pre Covid, only about 5% of folks worked exclusively remote.

Wes Moss [00:23:32]:
That of course went to 70% and then it settled back to a more normal level. Today it looks like this is where we’re staying of almost 30%. That looks like the reality of the world is about a third of folks are remote workers. But the even bigger change, and that’s a 4x change from where it was prior to Covid. I think the bigger change Jeff Floyd is hybrid work. We’ve gone from before COVID 25% to 53% of folks are working hybrid and expect to work hybrid. So not only do employees want more money, they want more flexibility. 75% if you take the fully remote and the hybrid.

Wes Moss [00:24:12]:
That’s a huge part of the workforce that wants flexibility. They want more money and they’ve got more say so right now because there’s less of them than jobs to fill. Again, continue. I’d look at it as advantage worker. It’s a good thing for the if you’re out there looking for a job still, I think it’s a strong environment, not great or not easy for employers looking. But a story that’s an important one here as we head into the fall. I know it’s election season. It’s an assessment of the economy.

Wes Moss [00:24:47]:
The workers still feeling pretty good right now.

Jeff Lloyd [00:24:49]:
Jeff Floyd So yeah, that really flip flopped post Covid and if and I’m not looking at the data, I’m just remembering reading all these headlines of you also had a lot of people leave the workforce force post Covid.

Wes Moss [00:25:02]:
That’s a great point.

Jeff Lloyd [00:25:03]:
Labor force participation then you have even more openings and less people to film.

Wes Moss [00:25:08]:
Right now labor force participation went from something like 63% to 60% and I’m rounding here 3% of the workforce. It’s a lot of people, 8 to 10 million people just no longer in the workforce. It’s climbed back but we’re still not back to 63% of able bodied folks in working age actually wanting to work. So you’ve got less people in the labor force as well. Again makes the worker more scarce. And I’d say we are going to continue to see advantage worker at least for this foreseeable future. Now speaking of advantage, we are here to talk about the economic numbers, the market numbers. Yes.

Wes Moss [00:25:46]:
But the other big piece of the equation and this just kind of hit me this I read this article this morning so I wanted to at least touch on It. And maybe we’ll talk about this further. But this is a harbor, this is a Harvard Business Review. And they’re writing Jeff Lloyd about retirement. Like the title of this is Retire Without Regrets. And what’s different about this study? And they come up with a prescription. They say you need just to have alignment and awareness and then agency and then adaptability. Again, only Harvard would use those four words.

Wes Moss [00:26:19]:
I had to look up agency. Have agency when you head into retirement. What kind of agency? Where are we headed? Do I need to go to an agency? Or wait a minute, what is agency? Oh, it’s kind of like you take control. It’s a better word for that, I think, is just ownership, taking ownership of our lives. But what was different about this, and I’ve done a lot of surveys over the years, is that they are famous and they do this in a lot of different capacities in different research departments and universities. I think maybe have the wherewithal and the capacity to do this. But they do these longitudinal studies where they will find a group of people and they’ll track them. They’ll track them for 10 years and in some cases they’ll track them for their entire lives on different research projects.

Wes Moss [00:27:07]:
And that’s what’s different about this. And they tracked, they interviewed pre and post retirement. Not a huge number of folks, but again, this is intense research. 106 people that they tracked pre retirement and then post retirement. Ten of them they followed for a whole decade. So talk about longitudinal. They really got to know these people pre. They met with them a couple times a year and they really understood their expectations around retirement and then how retirement really went for them.

Wes Moss [00:27:39]:
The article highlights two very different stories. They even show the little hand drawn life maps, which I love, the power of just pen to paper on mapping something out. And the story of Irene, and this is a year into her retirement. She draws this, what looks kind of like a bay. And I think it’s partially because she lives on the water. She’s a Cape Codder. She moved to her Cape Cod house. And she’s got family and friends to the west, friends of the library to the northeast.

Wes Moss [00:28:12]:
It looks like it could be some of her kids. Joan, Chris, Leslie, Paige with a heart around them, friends in the south reconnecting. She has a little picture of art and writing, ocean conservation, cooking, entertaining. Drew a little pot and pan and a wine glass. She drew an airplane for travel. Then she drew two little birds, birds and nature. And it was this full picture of retirement. And guess what? Irene, a year in and Two years in and five years into her retirement, never looked back her big time corporate career and just couldn’t have been just more excited, more fulfilled sense of purpose.

Wes Moss [00:28:55]:
Kind of the ideal retirement. Same amount of money as Lawrence. Lawrence. His drawing showed, I think a pretty different story. If I were a, I don’t know, a retirement psychology expert, which I’m not a psychology expert, I just play one on radio is you can just tell that his roadmap was, is just felt more, I would say just less complete or incomplete. You know, he draws this big circle and one of the highlights or activities was chores. And then pay bills was another activity. And then money, man, manage money.

Wes Moss [00:29:34]:
Like, are those three things you’re looking forward to? I don’t think so. Then read books, watch movies. Is that gonna be a fulfilling retirement? This one is very telling. It lists volunteering, but it says think about volunteering. Very different than the agency of actually volunteering. Where Irene was in the conservation group for the near the water that she lived in Cape Cod. She was a member of Friends of the Library and helped out, volunteered at the library. And this story of law, and this is a real life story.

Wes Moss [00:30:09]:
I don’t know if they changed the names or not, but Lawrence was thinking about volunteering. And then really the biggest part of his life pie chart was time with local son and grandson. Well, that sounds good, that sounds great. But what ended up happening instead of a social network. And again, this is tracked year by year by year. His real identity was just, hey, I’m going to watch my grandson. And then what happened? Well, his son got divorced and the wife got custody. And then all of a sudden, no more grandson.

Wes Moss [00:30:39]:
So his identity ended up essentially evaporating. And Lawrence, and again, this is real life, went from drinking casually to drinking a lot to drinking so much because he didn’t have an identity. Even though financially he was fine in retirement, he ended up in rehab. The good part of the story is that once he got sober, recognized the problem, he really then blossomed. But it took many years to kind of go through that pain, find his new identity, connect with those around him who had similar struggles. And the good news is Lawrence then finally blossomed. But it took him like a half a decade. And we don’t want that for anyone listening here to Money Matters or their podcast, retire sooner.

Wes Moss [00:31:23]:
Jeff Lloyd, thanks for being here, man.

Jeff Lloyd [00:31:25]:
Thanks for having me. And happy early, Happy Halloween.

Wes Moss [00:31:29]:
With that. You can find me and Jeff Lloyd. It’s easy to do so@yourwealth.com that’s y o u r your wealth.com have a wonderful rest of your day.

Mallory Boggs [00:31:44]:
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Mallory Boggs [00:32:32]:
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