2026 09 04 Financial Issues

0:00Welcome to Financial Issues, where we help you steward faithfully by honoring God with your investments. Now listen in as we give you the practical tools and advice you need to become a biblically responsible investor. This is Financial Issues where we help you defund darkness and fund the light by investing with Biblical integrity. Great to be here with you on this Friday. Folks, it is focus Friday. We've got overtime later on. We've got a packed show for you. Happy to have you. Seth Udinski, Samuel Case in the control room and your host, Mark Manila, Mark ready for a Friday show here at Financial Issues. You know, Seth, I woke up this morning real early and I was like, oh, I'm tired. It's been a long week. It's my and then all of a sudden, oh, it's focus Friday and overtime. And I've pertin' up, jump in the shower. Woo, let's go. Like a shot of energy. It's like realizing it's Christmas morning.

1:01Exactly. Every week. 52 Christmas mornings. That's awesome. Folks, listen, the phone lines are wide open. Give us a call at 610-363-1110 and we've got time, but you've got to get in the call queue right now. We have, there's a tendency of the Financial Issues listeners to light up the phones with 10 minutes left in the show. Listen, if you have to do it, you have to do it. We have to do it. Complex questions. Exactly. There's time right now. We've got an hour and a half here. Call in right now. You got plenty of time. We've got a lot of time left for the next 6-363-1110. If you do it right now, we'd love to hear from you. Guys, let's kick off the show with this topic here. Looks like corporate profits are at an all-time high, or at least they were for the second quarter of the fiscal year. Sam, could you give us the details there? Yes, Seth. I think the technical term here is a blowout, as yes, they hit an all-time high in the second quarter. Business is bringing in about $4.3 trillion after tax. So you know, just a pittance. That's on $4.8 trillion when adjusted for inventory value. It's an increase of $350 billion from the previous quarter.

2:02Now Mark, sure would news where I got some of this information from is saying these gains were propelled by tariff refunds, but also the ongoing resilience of the consumer that has led to this roaring stock market. Do you think that's a fair assessment of what's going on here, or is there more going on? I think both are true there. Those two things they said are obvious and facts. So you don't argue as much with facts as you do opinions. And I think that's rare from a media report too. Yeah, really. A media assessment. But they nailed it there. And I like seeing American companies profit. That's a good thing. That's what you go into business. You start a business to create a profit so that you can help yourself grow if you're the business owner, the original business owner. And then hopefully grow the economy as well. And hopefully that will trickle down to other people as well. Now obviously sometimes corporations get real greedy. We always have to realize that at some point, this is getting out of hand where corporations

3:08are making so much money because I also think there's another side to this. Companies were pretty quick to tell customers, you know, tariffs raised our costs so they raised their prices, right? Yep. And they passed that. Right away too. Right away too. Yeah, right away fair enough. But when some of those tariff costs are refunded, I'd like to see that same logic work in reverse. If the consumer helped absorb the increased cost, why couldn't we benefit from a reduced cost in the goods and services from these companies instead of the companies just slurping it all up and patting their balance sheet. So so not so much a tariff refund, which some people were saying is I bought this at an increased price. I want a refund. You're just saying, why don't they just bring down the prices? Right. Come on. Even if it's just for the quarter, you know, you raised them for six months to a year because of the chairs. Why not bring them down six months for our year because of the refunds you got to offset

4:11the prices? I think that's only fair, don't you? Mark, I totally do. How confident are you that that something like that could actually happen? Well, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being absolutely, I'd say zero. Makes sense. I feel similar way too. Yeah, as much as I love it for sure. Mark, you know, a question I had, as Sam had mentioned, this resilient consumer, it does seem like the consumer does have resilience despite the fact that things are so expensive. Is that part of the issue here that the consumer is so resilient or maybe just desperate? We have to buy stuff. I have to buy gas. I don't want to. I don't like paying for those programs. We did on lifestyle creep. Yeah. One of the things about lifestyle creep that people don't understand, we're all used to this really lavish lifestyle. Even our impoverished live better than Solomon did. A lot of people don't realize that. Well, of course, they had air conditioning. They have air conditioning. They have cable. They have phones. They have, you know, they have so much.

5:13We have so much. Well, one of the things about that that nobody takes into effect is, yeah, everybody whines and complains when they can't have the newest, the best cell phone or, you know, drive the latest car, they start feeling like, oh, poor, pitiful for me. But the reality is inside, they know they got a good. So what's happening here is our society is at a point of comfortableness that when craziness is going on, they say, so what? I got a good. And if they don't think that, I really believe that. That's why our economy is doing so well because most people know that the real wage growth for the last 20 months, 18 out of 20 was positive, which means their income, most people's income went up faster than inflation did, even though inflation was a pain. So they realize, well, everybody's telling me affordability is an issue. But and I'm sure they don't sit down and think this, this straight, but they just know it because they're driving their two year old vehicle away from their four bedroom house,

6:19you know, two, three car garage house to a job that doesn't hold them way to accountable to get near on time to, you know, it's just, it's just a leisurely society that is doing well and deep inside, they know that. So I think our economy is reflecting that as people are still spending because they know they're okay. By the way, Mark, I did a little research here. There are a couple of companies that have lowered prices in light of these refunds, particularly a Walmart and tractor supplier, some of the big names out there. Good going tractor supply. Awesome. Love that. Do we like you? That's right. And we want and we want to like Walmart. It's just they've heard so many people. Yeah. And people say, what do you mean by that, Mark? I don't want to get on a rant on this. But you know, when Walmart started building their super stores and coming into small towns, they put all the small businesses out of business. They couldn't keep up with the Walmart.

7:19They couldn't drop their prices low because they didn't have the purchasing power that Walmart had. So Walmart pretty much, even though I like the idea of Walmart, they put a lot of people out of business. I would like to say, I really wish we had a local hardware store. I remember as a young man, I could go to this one hardware store and they had a whole wall of just drawers and you could find anything you needed to fix in any part you needed to fix anything you had in your house. You know, it was great. Now if you don't own what the big box store has, you don't fix it anymore. Yeah. Anyway, Mark, you know, you bring up tractor supply, which currently is on our whole list. It gets me to think, how might this report that Sam just mentioned impact our investments? Well, that's a good question. Yeah. I, the impact investment, what's going to happen is first, we're going to see that a lot of companies that may have been weakening a little bit in their financial issues, steel

8:19are going to strengthen up. It's going to change things. That's good. But then we have to build into this and understanding that this is a one time deal. So with us carry on to the future, will they utilize this money in a way that propels them forward? Or will they just absorb this and get lazy and then sloppy and then in two quarters, your balance sheets are falling apart. We got to be very careful with this is what I'm saying. Don't jump into a stock because this quarter saw a revenue jump and think and earnings jump like that. We have to be very careful about that. Try and remove that from the equation and see what they look like without this insertion of this money. Little bit of a sugar high in there, sugar rush. There you go. Yeah, sugar rush. So it's going to, it's a lot of people are going to see stocks that really, it looks like they change course, reverse course, but they really have it. They just, they just got this boost. It'd be like, it'd be like getting a bonus check, you know, for you go home and you

9:21feel like, whoa, let's go out there dinner dear. You know, absolutely, Mark. Folks, if you want to chime in on this, the number is 610, 363, 1110. Love to hear from you. Speaking of good news guys, we did see the markets yesterday continue their rise two days in a row now of good days yesterday. It was actually a great day on Wall Street. It was their best day in a month, Thursday's bell saw the Dow Jones, the S&P and the NASDAQ all up well over a percentage and the, the Russell 2000 up about half percent as well, Mark. This morning, I'm seeing a little bit mixed in the futures and really not, it's, it's pretty calm overall. You know, the NASDAQ screen, the Dow and the S&P down slightly. I am seeing Mark oil down a little bit from where it was. So that is nice to see that for sure. And then gold slightly down as well, same with silver. So that's what we're looking at this morning on the markets, Mark. And, and you know, back to the, the, the tariff refund. I think it's really important to remind us that companies don't, you know, the markets don't pay us for yesterday's profits.

10:23So we look at forward profits and that takes that out of there. So when you're looking at a company, even though we, we see the quarter was great, look to the forward profits that they're projecting and see if that, if they change drastically. And if they do, be careful. Be careful also with your dialing finger because you need to call in at 610, 363, 1110. We'd love to hear from you. Give us a ring there folks. 610, 363, 1110. Hey, want to mention real quick also our newsroom. The financial issues newsroom is now active. It's live. You can check it out on financial issues.org. If you click on that newsroom button at the top of the website, you will find several articles, op-eds, Mark's commentary, different things like that that he's given.

11:26And really good stuff. Seth is amazing. Yeah, I put that out there too. Seth is raising cane on the Christian post with his Why Chrysler's conservatism can't save America. Has over 80 comments. So you need to get in there and defend our guy's set. Thank you, Sam. You know what? I needed that. I needed that. Thank you. One of the funniest things to do is when you do something like that, if you have the honor to do it, Mark, you understand this. And Sam, you do too is if you put out an article or a link like that and you read through the comments, it's like sticking your head in the toilet in search of gummy bears. Like it's fun. Did you just come up with that analogy on the spot? That is crazy. Thanks for joining us today. I think with that, I don't know. I just read the comments and they're all mad at me and I go, me, who everyone loves? It's crazy. How dare you? I know. No, it's so much fun. Yeah, check out those articles. And don't forget, Mark's as well. Really good one on debt being the new altar of America over on Town Hall. Check that one out too, folks. Great stuff. You know, we can't do what we do without you all. So you all are the sponsor of today's show.

12:28Our partners, our monthly soldiers, thank you all so much for what you do to make financial issues go. Amazing. Seth, whenever you say that on Fridays, it reminds me of the old PBS ads where they're like brought to you by watchers like you. Thank you. Thank you. I could never tell if that's like if they're just saying it's your tax dollars that are paying for this, whether you like it. Yeah. If that's what it is. But I was a kid when I saw those and I believed it. I did too. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. 610, 363, 1110. Mark, here's a great comment from Brian in your home state of Missouri. He's saying we have so much that our poor people are plump, not skinny. And I think he's right, Mark. I mean, that is not and that's not making fun of the physics. No, it's not. And it's not demeaning. Yeah. But you know what the number one cause of death with the impoverished people of America is? Is it obesity or heart disease related to obesity? Yeah. Obesity, right? So you think about that now, here's what's really wonderful about that. We have such a great society built on the free enterprise system, which is incredible,

13:33that all the left is knocking, that all the socialist's knocked, that all the communist knock yet we are our impoverished live better than a lot of the higher classes and a lot of the nations, the majority of nations around the world. We have. Yeah. We built a society that is incredible. We have built a country because of God's hands on it because it was God who gave this country to us who put this country together. It was our constitution built on biblical concepts that made this work. And if we stay focused on God or if we get back to that focus, we'll continue to have an incredible country that glorifies God. Although Brian's in my comment about, you know, the impoverished in America sound a little bit harsh. It's not meant to be harsh. It's meant to brag about what a great society we have where even are impoverished, except for the mentally ill or the drug addicted, having very cushy life.

14:35Well, what it shows is that for the first time in human history, people have had to develop some discipline about how much they eat. That was never a problem before just because there wasn't enough and we're trying to figure out how to grapple with that. Yeah. So when the number one drug manufacturer, the number one selling drug is one to help you lose weight. Yeah. Right. Tell us you something. Anyway, let's not go over that. That's right. We got a whole show to do here. We got a lot of questions here to get to as well, Mark. William is asking a good one here. He's saying, we'll stablecoin help the USA with its huge debt problem. If so, how and over how long a period of time and should we be buying stablecoin? Mark, what do you think? Oh, stablecoins could help the United States finance its debt, but it won't solve the debt problem. This is really important. Under the Genius Act, regulated payments, payment stablecoins are generally required to

15:37maintain liquid reserves. Think about this. We have to have US treasuries. So they stablecoins will become another big buyer of US debt. Now all that does is enable the Congress to borrow. I mean, it's not going to get rid of the debt. It's actually going to make it easier for the house and the Senate to grow the debt. So no, it won't get rid of the debt. It won't help us get rid of the debt. It'll help us finance it. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, that's a bummer. Unfortunately. And as far as buying stablecoin, why would you buy it? It doesn't make any sense. It's called stablecoin because it's not supposed to grow and enlarge itself. It's supposed to stay stable. One dollar is supposed to be one dollar. It's not supposed to have growth in it or kick off profits. In fact, I think part of that bill even said they couldn't kick off dividends or interest

16:38from a stablecoin. I might be wrong on that, but that's in the back of my head. So there's no growth potential there. It's more of a transactional token than anything else. Yeah. Mark, I had had this question lined up for our conversation in the first segment and I didn't ask it, but Williams' question has forced me. So it's really Williams' fault. I'm putting the blame on him. I'm just kidding. Oh, that's... But here's the question, Mark. The stuff we talked about in the first segment with corporate profits hitting all time high, will that help the serious financial problems? In our country like the national debt, or is it just a step in the right direction? Is it just a drop in the bucket? You've got to separate that. There's the private economy and then there's the government. Remember, corporations making money doesn't mean that the government is taking in more money. In fact, a lot of the profits from this quarter were from the tariffs refund, which means it took money away from the government. So effectively, it will not help the debt at all.

17:38Yeah. Absolutely. And as you've heard us talk about folks, yeah. Let's talk about this just a little bit because it does get deeper and complicated. When our society's doing good, when GDP is up, that means that the economy's strong. There's more spending going on. Wages do seem to increase during strong GDP growth cycles. All that happens, what that means there's more money that does get taken into the treasury. And if applied properly, it could help the debt. But unfortunately, we have no way to know that it's going to be applied properly. In fact, the majority of people would say it just wouldn't matter how much money we brought in that Congress would figure out a way to spend it, to abuse it, to lose it. That's what I would think, Mark. They would just see, oh boy, more money that I get to spend. I know Scott Besson the other day said, we can grow our way out of the $40 trillion in debt. And I get that that makes sense on paper.

18:39But I'm thinking in reality, when we grow, we just spend more to match the growth. Am I wrong about that? No, I'm not sure that Besson was, I think he was talking about debt to GDP. Oh, got it. There's a lot of numbers that say, if we keep debt at a certain level compared to low GDP, then it's manageable, okay? And that makes sense. So if you grow to the GDP, it means you can keep up with the debt. Well, we don't want to keep up with the debt. We need to get rid of the debt because eventually the GDP will pull back. And when that happens, we don't have enough money to be paying our debt. We don't have the things we need to take care of the trillion dollars a year right now of interest payments that could have gone to something wonderful doing something great in our country. Oh, I know, like not taking it out of my pocket to begin with and allowing me to do the things I want to do with that money. And you want to do with our money by lowering the tax rates.

19:41It could put more money back in our pockets. It could help our society even be stronger. So I think that I think he is right. And yet he's not look, he wasn't talking about the whole picture. One of the things he does well about speaking is he talks about a topic and he talks well on that topic to help people understand certain things about it. Very few people understood the GDP to debt maintenance ratio there, you know, and now they do. Yeah, that's a very helpful explanation. I, I misinterpreted what he was getting at. Well, I, I may misinterpret it. I don't know which speech you saw. But that's what I, when I saw him, that's what I took out of it. Yeah. Mark, I, I, I, I have to ask your forgiveness. You know when I had a run with him. Yeah, that's right. You guys are Scotty Boy. Exactly. Mark, what is the end result of this? If this continues, what's the catastrophe? Will the banks fail? Will our economy crash? The markets crash?

20:41What's the end result if, if the debt keeps on going and eventually there's some, like, will there be a black swan event? It's just, is, is just going to go indefinitely until we're 150 trillion. I know. But I think that's why it could be a black swan event because what, what's going to happen is it's going to be disasters. But we see it coming. Right. We see it coming for a while. Yeah. Over the last year, probably once or twice a week, I've mentioned debt is the biggest threat facing our nation right now. We're, we're on a river, floating down a river, and we've gotten past the fun, gentle, tubing area. And now we're into the rapids and we're approaching the falls and we can actually see the falls and the falls are where our debt overcomes us where we can't pay interest. As soon as we default, the dollar then stops being the currency of trade around the world. When that happens, we have to start getting nobody who's going to want to invest in our debt because they're not sure if they're going to get paid. So we're going to have to increase the rate of that we pay out.

21:41The interest rates to make, to make it viable for somebody to take the risk of investing in America. And then when that happens, it's going to cause inflation. When the inflation happens, it's going to cause us to go into a recession or even a depression and it could take 10 years or more to get out of that to and get control over everything. Now, sometimes that's what it takes to clean things up. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to shut down all the useless and unneeded grants and all the useless and unneeded plans and programs that we have to get our budget back under control. Sometimes the only way to make that happen is through pain. I don't want to see that happen. I think we have a strong enough country. I think we have a great enough country that we can turn this around. I do believe, I really do believe that this administration has been working hard on that. Unfortunately, they inherited this and they're moving forward with it, but they're putting

22:42so much in place. They've already been finding hundreds of billions of dollars, even trillions, actually, two trillion dollars in fraud and waste. They're not able to recover all that because hundreds of thousands of lawsuits every time they try to shut down a benefit, a NGO or something, the lawsuits that pop up from the enemy within keeps that from coming down, but they are moving in the right direction. The GGP is moving in the right direction. Everything is moving in the right direction. I'm hoping to see actually a dent in the debt before the end of this year. Well said, Mark. Hey, folks, real quickly. Monday is Labor Day. You all know that we've got a special Labor Day themed program plan for Mondays. Don't miss that out and then we'll be back, of course, live on Tuesday. But we got plenty more of the show coming up here, Mark, including overtime, right? That's right. And if you got to leave us, sorry to see you go, but you really don't. You could go to financialissues.org and join us for the whole show and overtime.

23:43Hit in the chat. Email us your questions. Give us a call. 610-363-1110. Happy to have you here, folks. Financial issues on Fridays, which means we've got focused Friday. We've got overtime. So we're not ending in a half hour. We've still got a whole hour of programming, which is awesome. Make sure that you can get financialissues.org slash watch the FIsM app or any of our social streams and you can join us for overtime in a little bit. Mark, we got a question here from Robert and Texas. Not really a question, actually, more of a comedy saying debt is a worldwide problem. If the US goes down, so will the rest of the world. What do you think? That may be true, but that doesn't make me feel any better. Actually, it puts more weight on our shoulders as believers as Christians.

24:46Over here for the rest of the world, we're here to serve God as ambassadors. And I don't want the rest of the world to go down. I want to raise them up. Capitalism, as the Marxists call it, I call it the free enterprise system, actually has lifted up more people out of poverty than any other system. That system based on God's concept of putting others first and given people the responsibility and the freedom to make good decisions that are in alignment with Godly wisdom has raised up this world in general. I want to see the world raised up. I know. Yeah, the world will go down. If the US crashes, the whole world crashes. So but that that I don't know why people think, I guess that saying misery loves friends or misery loves, I forget how I go. This company. Yeah, loves company. I don't think that's true. At least as Christians, we shouldn't feel that way. I want to see everybody lifted up. I want to see him lifted up and I want to see him praising God.

25:48Two things I'd really like to see first is praising God. The more people in the world that honor God, that love God, that accept Jesus Christ as their savior, that actually pursue God with passion and abandonment, that will lift the world up because there's more and more people embrace God and the strength of God and the values that God has for us and he enables us to do good in this world. Then we'll see the world lift up. I know I read the book. It's headed downhill from here. I'm sure, but he doesn't call us to sit back and say, oh, well, not and I can do about it. God said not that it's going to go this way, but he also said, do all you can do all you can. And in America, we are the last bastion of freedom of faith. As is seen by all the Muslims coming over here, as is seen by all the people who have their make up the religions daily as seen by the strength of the Christian church in America. We also don't know. There might be a lot of highs and lows in between now and the end.

26:49So I do wonder, Mark, is Robert perhaps saying trying to be comforting saying because if the US goes down so well, the rest of the world, the rest of the world has an incentive to prop us up in some way, not call us on our debt or something like that. Is that what he's getting on? Yeah. Good point, Sam. And there's two sides of that coin as well. Remember, if our government, which is smart enough to understand that, uh, uh, leans on that, it means don't just keep going down the wrong road instead of saying, hey, it's our responsibility not to let that happen. Too big to fail. Yeah. Yeah. The US is too big to fail. Nobody's going to fail. So they're not going to let us fail. No, they are because they want to take us over. They want us to fail. So we become part of the one world order socialist, uh, elitism where only a handful of people make all the money and get all the, and live in luxury while everybody else becomes their slaves and lives in a poultry, uh, lower class, uh, in, uh, lifestyle than them.

27:57It's, it's just disgusting to think about. But that's the way the enemy works. He'll say it's free and you'll enjoy it and you won't own anything and you'll enjoy it. And, and you, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. Sure is, Mark. Well, you know, Mark, we're getting a clear taste of this with one of our listeners, Frank from Florida has a really tough situation that he's in. So we can help him out. So Frank says this. I just found out this past week that the bank that my church has used for many years, which is TD bank, has refused to issue new CDs to the church. Now, after my church inquired why it was revealed that the bank knew we are a Christian church, which is against their DEI woke rules. My church is in the process of moving our money to another bank and I also have an account with the same bank. Mark, I assume that's the bank that the church is trying to move the money to. And so Frank says, what would be another financial institute to transfer and keeping with BRI? Now Mark, my question on Frank's behalf is what should they do? Because this sounds illegal to me. Well, I can say so. Not very inclusive of them. Isn't that what the eye stands for?

28:58The DEI. Yeah. Frank, I'm a little bit confused. When you say issues CDs to the church, effectively what a CD is, it's the bank borrowing money. If they're, if you wanted to buy CDs, you could buy them in your brokerage account. You can buy them anywhere from one because what you're doing, you're depositing money into this institution and they're using that money to lend it to others over and over again. However, I'm not sure that's what you're saying here. I'm not sure if maybe this bank actually was financing your church and issuing debt and for sale to others to help financial church. I'm not exactly sure, but if it's the CDs and they won't sell you CDs, I really, I'm not an attorney. But I'd say that's absolutely illegal that they would say, no, we can't sell a CD to your church and we can sell it to the LGBTQ 501C3 down the road.

30:00Now, I get it. It's easier to move on and of course you should. You should find the CDs elsewhere. If you want to invest in CDs, you should find a melt sword. But I wouldn't drop this. I would get a hold of the administration. I'd get a hold of a good lawyer. I'd get a hold of Matt Stavers at Liberty Council Council. So I was thinking to share this with him. This is a big deal. If this is what it sounds like, if they really won't let you buy a CD from that bank, then they are, I believe they are definitely breaking the law and they need to be held to account for it. Yeah. I would completely, completely agree with you there, Mark. Liberty Council would be, Mark, that would be my first choice. And Frank, I'm going to drop their website. Matt Stavers in Liberty Council are right there in Orlando, just north of Orlando, or Orlando, their offices are right there. So right in the middle of the state, you have an advocate there that this would probably,

31:04he'd probably jump all over this. He argues before the Supreme Court all the time. So this is in a small organization. Matt is a brilliant man. His wife is brilliant attorney as well. Their organization is very powerful. Frank on Liberty Council's homepage, you'll see a legal help button if you scroll down to the bottom under their contact. And that's their legal help request form. So fill that form out. That sends that to them. And that's basically you presenting kind of your case to them. Mark, like you said, I'm not an attorney either, but this just smells fishy to me. But Frank's move, I mean, I think this move that the church is doing is absolutely right. You want to get to a bank that's actually going to do business with you, but you also can't let this fly under the radar. This is wrong. This is wrong. What's happening? So, yeah, unless we're misunderstood. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, and then if the bank just won't lend you money because you're your Christian, that too, I believe, is illegal. Yeah, absolutely.

32:05Frank, we're standing with you, brother. You push updated how that all goes. And yeah, check out the legal help page over at Liberty Council. I think that's a great thing for you to do. Mark, we got a question here from Mary. Actually, she has a couple questions. Maybe we'll have to get to her second question on the other side of the break. But she said, I have a small credit card for travel, about $3,500 on it. And I received an ad for an Amazon card. My current card is with a different company. And I pay the balance when used prior to monthly interest charges. Here's my question. Are the companies that I'm using recommended, and if not, which card would you recommend? Now, Mark, I assume that Mary is talking about from a biblically responsible standpoint. I don't know if she's just asking for a recommendation on which business card to use, whether it's Amazon or this other one, Barclay. What advice would you give her? Yeah, Mary, first of all, I'd love to compliment you on doing the most important thing correctly. You're paying off your credit card every month. That's the way to use a credit card. You get points, you get cash back, and then you pay off your credit card so you actually come out ahead. Wonderful way to do things.

33:06On the other hand, the thing with the credit card, should you change credit card because somebody's going to give you a bonus to come into their credit card or because the initial rate is going to be zero, and then it's going to go up in a year to the 29 or 14 or whatever percent it's going to be. I wouldn't look at cards just for their one time bonus or whatever. I would look at for a card that works for you. Many different cards have bonuses that are ongoing for certain usage of it, which you buy, which what type of things you buy. It sounds like you already have a card that fits your lifestyle properly. If it does, that's great. I just stick with it and here's why. There are no BRI compliant cards. Every Mastercard Visa, American Express, Discover, whatever you want to call it, whatever card is out there, none of them screen clean. That corporations don't screen clean. They're all involved in a lot of ugliness in this world from sexual immorality to other

34:11things, with the primarily being sexual immorality, backing the LGBTQ and the six other letters they've added this last year plus agendas and confusing our children and using, abusing everybody. No, there's no card that I know of. Now, if it'd be really wonderful if Christians could come up with a card sometime, that'd be great. I know the new gold card, like they're trying to bring into Texas. I know Glyn from Europe is there where you put money into it and it's back by gold. That still runs through Mastercard for the transactions. Everything's connected somehow, kind of like your cell phone. Even if there was a company that made a great cell phone and they were Christian based, they're still using the same lines as all the major cell companies. Oh, well. Hey, I really appreciate that question, Mary, and it sounds like you had another question

35:11which we'll get to when we come back. We'd also like to get to your call, 610-363-1110. By the way, for us to get to them, you actually got to call them. Come. The opinions and recommendations expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of the station or any of the program sponsors. Additionally, all products or services offered by the program sponsors may not be known by the program. Give us a call today, folks. 610-363-1110. Mark, in that last segment, we addressed Frank's question and I did want to jump back there just quickly here because he did ask at the very end what would be another financial institute to transfer to and keeping with BRI. Obviously, Frank, you could shop around in your area and Florida, but there's a couple.

36:12I mean, Christian Community Credit Union, you've got ProLife FinTech, that's Nick Vuechitch's company. You've also got Old Glory Bank. Those might be ones that you look into. I guess it would kind of just depend on what the availability is in that region. Right. Yeah. Most of the credit unions, though, they're across the US. Yeah. And they use other people's banks to do transactions and usually like CCCU, they actually, almost in the ATM, you can do business at. So, and online, obviously. I had a little bit of a background working with CCCU many years ago. I really liked the way they did business. I liked their customer service. I liked the respect and the way they did things. So that might be a way to go for them. Credit unions are usually a little bit better working with churches anyway. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Frank, thank you for your kind comments, too.

37:12I'm grateful we were able to help you, brother. And God bless you and your church as well, man. I trust you guys will walk in faith and you guys will do the right thing here. Mark Mary has a follow-up question. We answered her first question in the last segment. Here's her second. She said, listen to your program. Trust your recommendation. She's not a partner yet, by the way, Mark. She says, I'm also interested in obtaining information about the Timothy Plan and information on investing. I'm retired. I purchased two houses in addition to my primary. I occasionally rent them out to friends and family, mainly to pay taxes and insurance. What should I do to obtain the information about Timothy Plan and some other investment type things, Mark? Oh, Mary, it's really easy. Timothy Plan information is available at TimothyPlan.com, obviously. But you could also give Timothy Plan a call. That's 1-800-Tim Plan. The people there are incredible. They want to help you. They want to give you the information you have. They can't do any financial advice. They can just tell you what the funds are. That's the way the laws are. They can only tell you what the funds are, what they hold, what their purpose is for,

38:16and those kinds of things. If you want to know what kind of funds you should be utilizing, obviously, somebody's going to need all your information. You obviously already have real estate as an investment. It looks like you have a heavy amount of real estate to two housing units that you have that you've invested in. Hopefully, they are appreciating. Although I did read recently that there's a pullback in real estate in Florida, but maybe it's not your area. The point is that it's really easy to get information out on their website. They have fact sheets on all the different ETFs and mutual funds. If that doesn't make sense to you, just give them a call. 1-800-Tim Plan. As far as an asset allocation, if the real estate is the majority of your funds, you'll have your investments. And yeah, it would make sense to diversify into the market. And maybe by using either one of the mutual funds or several of the ETFs to give you a

39:18broad brush on the markets. That's awesome. Good stuff, Mary. Keep on listening to the show. And if you've got questions, you know where to find us. You can call in a 6-10-3-6-11-10 or you can send a question via email or on the, hey, Mark Portal. That'd be great. Mark, we got one. Darrell is 66. He's saying, Mark, are there... There are following investment groups out there that a small company, ministry, or church could use to handle retirement and regular investment programs. This would be similar to how companies do 401K employee plans. I'd assume the Timothy Plan could do it. Do you know anything about faith investor services? Of course, the best way, I think, could be to set up brokerage accounts and self-direct using FISM. Mark, how would you help Darrell here? It's a good question. Well, Darrell, there are organizations specifically working in the Biblically Responsible Investing Space that can help businesses. Timothy Plan is one of those. We were just talking about Mary and her desire to get with Timothy Plan. They actually... And I know that they're a good company, what they did.

40:19Actually, through their master plan, they specifically work with churches, qualifying 501C3 companies, ministries, to establish BRI-focused retirement plans. So if you have 100 employees or less in your ministry or in your church, you could call Timothy Plan and for relatively nothing, they'll set it up. And they actually, Timothy Plan picks up the costs of the filings and all the things to help 501C3 ministries to set up these retirement plans for small churches and ministries. So that would be the one I'd look at first before anything else. Since they're going to walk you through it, they're going to help you with it. Since they're going to even pay the costs for getting it up and running. I just think it's a wonderful way to do it. So yeah, they are out there. That's awesome. If you're interested in the master's plan, by the way, brother, 833-634-8252 is the

41:20number to call in to learn more about the master's plan, Darrell. I agree with Mark. Robin over there is excellent and they're fantastic to work with. Yeah, Robin and I go way back. Do that. Yeah, see you, Mark. Yeah, nice. She just loves helping people. She's a servant. Yeah, she is. Regarding your question on faith investor service, yeah, I'm familiar with what they're doing. They are an SEC registered investment advisory service and they do describe their investment approaches, aligning portfolios, biblical values. They do have retirement plan services, but I would not give any organization a blank and endorsement simply because it uses words faith-based or biblical. I know Timothy plan intimately. So I know that their faith base absolutely is. I do the research and I'm on, you know, the founder and I are in contact on a regular basis. So I know that it's been years for me since I've spoke with somebody or since I did research

42:26on faith investor services, it's been at least a couple of years. So I would say before you do business with them, ask to see the actual screening methodology they use and the actual investments available inside the plan to make sure there be a R.I. Awesome. That's great one. Hey Mark, why don't we go to Maritza in Oregon? Actually, before we do, I just think that's just do diligence. That's just part of your due diligence of any company. You should do that along with the fees, along with wondering, you know, how much are they going to charge you for this? How much are they going to charge internally? What are they going to charge you for the management, all those kind of things? You need to know all that. That's just due diligence. Absolutely. Really is. Hey Mark, you know what? If Maritza, if you can hold on just a moment, we're coming up to overtime and I hate to rush you at the end of our show here. Why don't we, Mark, let's tackle a quick question here. Alex from Arizona is asking about relative strength. We discussed it. I think it was last week. He was saying, wouldn't it be simpler to just stack the stocks for comparison on a price

43:29chart rather than doing all the meticulous comparison calculations that you described? At a glance, it would be clear which one's performing better or worse over the chosen time period. And indexes could be included among the stocks on the chart. What do you think about that suggestion? The problem is it wouldn't be as fun. Exactly. Alex, if you don't make it complex and hard, you won't feel like you won't respect it. Yeah, you won't feel nearly as intelligent. Yeah. I think that's perfectly legitimate method you're talking about. And a lot of investors use it because it's simple and gets you to the point quickly. Overlaying several stocks, even in index, by the way, I put an index in there like the S&P on the same percentage performance chart can give you a very good visual for a certain time frame. You know, you see everything starting over here at the same point and then you see the line that ended up up here at the highest and that gives you that feeling that you understand the relative strength of it that one outperform. If the time frame is proper for the economic situation going on that's fine, I don't have

44:35a problem with that. It's a real quick way to do it. The only thing the reason I made it complicated, the reason I went into it is because here's something that can happen. Let's say that you took 12 months on that chart and you have 30 stocks and you have the S&P 500 index in there and you have cash. Those are two things I'd add to your relative strength calculation of money market and S&P 500. You look at that chart and it looks like a bunch of jumbo lines and then you can see the final one and where they all began. But you can't see what really clearly what happened in between or what's happened in the last three months, the momentum change. So here's why I do it the way I do. I can graphic and I can see through I use a point and figure charting graph. I know I we've talked a lot about this out the complexity of it. But I can see that let's just say the one that ended up at the top here that somewhere early on it was way above everybody, but then it leveled out and maybe even and then maybe

45:40really didn't go anywhere for six months, but it was so far ahead at one time that it's stayed above everybody. So relative strength wise really isn't being shown there. What's being shown is it's dominant that it had strong relative strength at one time, but then it lost it and the majority of them are catching up to it. You can see that possibly, but you really can't see where that turnaround is. And you can't see because there's so many lines and complications there. So I said, I think you can do it that way, Alex. I would keep it more of a midterm, like six months, they're so shorter. So you because the trends do change. And if if one stock does jump up early in your calculations and just wins the race over the whole time, you had a whole lot of other stocks that were ahead. Better momentum and did better returns for the second half of it. So yes, I agree, Alex, it's complicated and I don't think everybody needs to do that. But if you're going to manage money and or you're going to do analysis for thousands of

46:44people like we do at financial issues, we have to make sure we're looking at the bigger picture there. So yeah, I appreciate that, Alex. And I appreciate all of you. Don't go away. We have overtime coming up here. The number here is 610, 363, 1110. Marista, we're going to grab you right off the bat and overtime. Thank you for being on our phone. Thank you for loving God. Thank you for investing with biblical integrity. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we...