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573: The War on the Young and the Vanishing Middle Class
About this Episode
Imagine a world where your investments work smarter, not harder. Keith reveals the truth about why real estate trumps stocks, and how the current economic landscape is creating a once-in-a-generation wealth opportunity.
Discover:
-Why traditional investing wisdom is leaving younger generations behind
-Why owning assets is the ultimate key to breaking free from economic uncertainty
From the dying middle class to the rise of strategic real estate investing, Keith exposes the game-changing insights that most investors never see.
-Inflation is reshaping the economic landscape - and you can either ride the wave or get swept away
-Generation Z faces unprecedented economic challenges
Want to learn more? Your financial transformation starts here.
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Complete episode transcript:
Keith Weinhold 0:01
Welcome to GR, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, talking about real estate versus stocks, how housing has been in a recession that could now be thawing. Then why the war on the young and the vanishing middle class threatens to get even worse today on get rich Education.
Keith Weinhold 0:19
You It's crazy that most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money when they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation can eat six to 7% of your wealth. Every single year, I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments and their flagship program with fixed 10 to 12% returns that have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security. It's backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and healthcare. Ask about the freedom flagship program when you speak to a freedom coach there. And here's what's cool. That's just one part of FF eyes family of products. They include workshops and special webinars, educational seminars designed to educate before you invest start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. It's easy to get started. Just grab your phone and text family. 266866, text the word family. 266866, that's family. 266866,
Corey Coates 1:37
you're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 1:47
Welcome to GRE from Rocky Mount North Carolina to Mount Shasta, California and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, and you are inside for another wealth building week of get rich education. A lot of people have been building wealth lately. Do you even understand all the markets that are either at or near all time highs, real estate, stocks, gold, all recently hit those levels, also nested home equity positions of American property owners are at all time highs. Silver is also near an all time high, and so are FICO credit scores. All this means that the haves are in really good shape, and the have nots aren't more on that later. Let's then you and I talk about real estate versus stocks. I've invested in both for decades, and it's not something that I do on the side. This is the core of what I do and talk about with you every week. And I've never felt more inclined toward investing in real estate ever the resilience of residential real estate, a major reason is that I've always found real estate investing easier to understand than the s and p5 100, and it comes down to the mechanics of each one in The stock market, a company can be well run, it can be profitable, and it can even be growing, yet its stock price might fall anyway. Why? Because expectations weren't met for a quarterly earnings report, or investor sentiment just happened to shift for a while, people just tended to focus on the bad stuff instead of the good stuff, even though it was always there, and that's why the stock price went down. So what makes a stock move more often than not, is kind of laughable. It isn't a word sentiment, emotions. It's how investors collectively feel about a stock and that can change on a dime. One quarter's earnings miss an interest rate hike, geopolitical news or even a single social media comment from a CEO that can move billions of dollars of market value in an instant real estate, on the other hand, that strips away a lot of that noise and that ability for other people's emotions to ruin the price of your apartment building that cannot happen at its core, the value of a property is tied to its income stream and the market that It sits in, that makes it far more direct and way more controllable. If I buy a property, I can see the levers in front of me and ask my property manager to push or pull them or even do it myself. For example, I just asked them to replace flooring in three of my apartment units. With pricier luxury vinyl plank rather than new carpet, and that's because I plan to hold that building for another five years or more. I'll attract a better quality tenant that can afford to pay me more rent. So I know that if I improve operations and increase occupancy, reduce expenses or reposition the asset down the road. I mean, that is directly going to increase net operating income, and that increase will directly affect my valuation. So there's a logic to this that's almost mechanical, and that is not to say that real estate is without nuance or risk. The risk lies in execution. You have to underwrite carefully. Is the location of your property sustainable long term? Are the demographics supportive of Lent growth? What capital improvements are truly lucrative to you and provide the tenants with value, and what kind of improvements are only cosmetic? So real estate isn't just tangible, it's also something that you can interact with. You can walk a property, you can even speak to tenants, study the neighborhood and know exactly what you're dealing with. It's not a ticker symbol reacting to opaque forces that you'll never see or control, and for me, that tactile nature creates clarity. When you buy the right property in the right market with the right strategy, then the path forward is not mysterious. It isn't whimsical, it's deliberate. Real Estate is easier to understand than the S p5, 100. And that also doesn't mean that real estate is simple, because there is that due diligence and strategy, but it's the cause and effect relationship between what you do and the outcome that you get that's far more direct with stocks. You can be completely right about the fundamentals. I mean, you can nail it. You can Bullseye that stock target, and after all that, yet still lose with real estate. If you execute well, the fundamentals eventually do show up in the returns and see because of that direct cause and effect relationship, you can improve yourself as a real estate investor faster than a stock investor can, and that's because you can learn about how your upgrade drove your properties, noi, that information, that feedback that you got, that's something that you can either replicate again or improve upon in your own investor career. So between real estate and stocks, execution is the real differentiator, and control is a key one as well. To me, that sweet spot is control that I have. But through a property manager that way, control doesn't mean that you're losing your quality of life, your standard of living. Now, some people, they do, have the right handyman skills to maintain the property and the right people skills to maintain the tenants. So self managing it can work for just a few people. I sure don't have the handyman skills myself. Sheesh, if I even try to hang a picture on a wall, there's a 50% chance that it's going to end in a drywall patch job. When you can see the cause and effect between your decisions and the property's performance, it creates that level of control that stocks and bonds just don't offer. And I'm also being somewhat kind to stocks by discussing a benchmark like the s, p5, 100, even harder to control and understand are the Wall Street derivatives and financial mutations that the people invested in them don't even understand. Unlike stocks, you own, the levers you own, the operations, the expenses and the occupancy, both have risks, but real estate's risks are more perceptible, more knowable. You won't have to cringe when a company's CEO posts a tweet that's either pro Israel or pro Gaza. Billions of market cap is wiped out, and your investment goes down 12% in one hour. This is why we talk about real estate on the show. There is less speculation and conjecture. It is concrete stuff, and that's all besides how real estate pays you five ways at the same time, as if that wasn't enough.
Keith Weinhold 9:38
Now, when we talk about real estate investing in this decade, do you realize that we have been in a housing recession for two years? A recession in real estate? I mean, it might not feel like it with those home prices at erstwhile mentioned all time highs. We don't need to have falling prices to have a recession. Investors are obviously. Making money in this housing recession. The recession I'm talking about is the slowdown in housing activity stemming from less affordability, lower sales volume and less available inventory. But we do now have signs that we are breaking out of these housing doldrums. As far as affordability, national home prices are staying firm. But what's helping there is that mortgage rates have fallen, and we've also had wages that are rising faster than rents and wages that are rising faster than mortgage payments. In fact, wages have been rising faster than both of those for most of the last year now, and that's sourced by Freddie Mac Federal Reserve stats and rental listings on Redfin. Yes, year over year, American wages are up 4.1% rents are up 2.6% and mortgage payments are basically unchanged over the past year, up just two tenths of 1% and of course, these facts, combined with lower mortgage rates, all supports more real estate price growth. Now to kick off the show, I mentioned how real estate stocks and gold all recently hit all time highs. Well, that's denominated in perpetually based dollars, of course. However, one thing that affects you that certainly has not reached all time highs is the level of available homes, the number of homes for sale, that inventory is up off the recent bottom in 2022 yet it is still below pre pandemic levels. We have had quite a recovery here. National active listings definitely on the rise. They are up 21% between today and this time last year. Well, that means that buyers have gained leverage, mostly across the south, where lots of new building has occurred, and some areas of the West as well. Yet today, we are still, overall here 11% below 2019 inventory level. So nationally, we're basically still 11% below pre pandemic housing inventory levels. And in the Midwest and Northeast, the cupboard looks even more bare than that, since new construction totally hasn't kept up there, we will see what happens. But with the recent drop in mortgage rates, buyers might take more of that available inventory off the shelf. But here's the twist that I've heard practically no one else talk about no media source, no one in conversation. Nobody. It is the paucity of available starter homes. It's the entry level home segment that has the great scarcity, and it's these low cost properties that are the ones that make the best rental properties. Their paucity is jaw dropping, as sourced by the Census Bureau and Freddie Mac starter home construction in the US. I mean, it is just fallen precipitously. Are you even aware of the trend? All right, defined as a home of 1400 square feet or less, all right, that's what we're calling a starter home. Their share of new construction that was 40% back in 1982 Yeah, 40% of new built homes were starter homes. Then by the year 2000 it fell to just a 14% share, and today, only 9% of new built homes are starter homes, fewer than one in 10, and yet, that's exactly what America needs more of. So although overall housing inventory is still low, it's that entry level segment that is really chronically underserved, and that won't change anytime soon, we remain mired in a starter home slump because builders find it more profitable to build higher end homes and luxury homes. Yet for anyone that owns this workforce rental property, which is the same thing we've been focused on doing here on this show, from day one, you are sitting in an asset class that's going to remain stubbornly in demand over the long term. And when it comes to starter homes, the ones Investors love most, they are more scarce than bipartisan agreement in Congress, really. That is the takeaway here.
Keith Weinhold 14:39
So last week, I had an interesting in person meet up at a coffee shop with a 19 year old college student because he's a real estate enthusiast, rapping Gen Z there. He's an athlete too, an 800 meter runner. Well, his dad read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and his dad has 60 rental properties. Where they're from in Wisconsin, and maybe you're wondering, oh, come on, what could I learn from this 19 year old? I don't think that way. Now, I told him about some foundational GRE principles like financially free, beats debt free and things like that. It was also insightful to get his take on how he sees the world, and for me to learn what his professors are teaching him about real estate investing in his classes, he talked about how his professors show them, for example, what affects apartment cap rates. Also about how, whenever they run the numbers on a property, it always works out better to get the debt, get that mortgage, and how that leverage increases total rates of return. I was really happy that he's learning that over there at the university, but I was really impressed how at age 19, he's responsible and understands so much about society, politics, investing, athletics and even diet. I mean, this guy is rare, talking about his preference for avoiding food cooked in seed oils and choosing beef tallow instead. He also lamented on how Generation Z is so screwed up, saying that no one reads, no one's having kids, no one can buy a home, no one's going to be able to buy a home, and that people his age are so used to looking at screens that they're anxious about in person interactions, even in person, food ordering from a waiter at a restaurant gives them anxiety. He and I are planning to go running together next week. We'll see how that goes. As a college 800 meter runner, he's going to have the speed advantage on me, but we're running up a steep, 40 minute long trail where I've got a shot at an endurance advantage. So it was rather interesting to get his take and see what college professors are teaching on real estate. I mean, this generation that's coming of age now, Gen Z is the worst generation since George Washington to have it worse off than their parents. I'm going to talk about that today, shortly. next week, on the show here, I plan to help you learn about what's going on with some real estate niches and what their future looks to be over the next 10 to 20 years, including mobile home park real estate and parking lot real estate, one of these asset classes I really don't like the future of That's all next week on the future of some certain real estate niches. Straight ahead today, I want to tell you about mortgage rates in a way that you've never thought about before and more about the war on the young and the vanishing middle class. I'm Keith Weinhold. There will only ever be one. Get rich education podcast episode 573, and you are listening to it.
Keith Weinhold 17:53
If you're scrolling for quality real estate and finance info today, yeah, it can be a mess. You hit paywalls, pop ups, push alerts, Cookie banners. It's like the internet is playing defense against you. Not so fun. That's why it matters to get clean, free content that actually adds no hype value to your life. This is the golden age of quality email newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor. It's direct, and it gets to the point, because even the word abbreviation is too long, my letter takes less than three minutes to read, and it leaves you feeling sharp. And in the know about real estate investing, this is paradigm shifting material, and when you start the letter, you'll also get my one hour fast real estate video course, completely free as well. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be simpler to get visit gre letter.com while it's fresh in your head, take a moment to do it now at gre letter.com Visit gre letter.com
Keith Weinhold 19:06
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President Chale Ridge personally. While it's on your mind, start at Ridge lendinggroup.com that's Ridge lendinggroup.com
Todd Drowlette 19:38
this is the star of the A E show the real estate commission, I'd roll that. Listen to get rich education with my friend Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
Speaker 1 19:49
Welcome back to. Get Rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, as a reminder that show the real estate commission starring our friend Todd Drolet, who is a guest on the show here with us at the beginning of this month, it starts October 10, on A and E, that's that reality based commercial real estate show. Late last year, the Fed lowered interest rates, and they're doing the same thing again this year, when interest rates rise and fall, think of it like a wall that's being raised and lowered. Cutting rates is like lowering the height of a wall or a dam. That's because it allows for the free flow of capital. Savings rate accounts. Well, since they'll now pay at a lower rate with this rate cut, they're more likely to get shifted out and invested somewhere and flow into something else, driving up that other asset's value. Mortgages are more likely to originate because you pay less interest. Lowering rates lowers the impediment to the flow of money. It eases that flow. Oppositely, raising rates is like increasing the height of a wall or a dam, because if your savings account rate goes from 4% up to 5% oh well, you more likely to keep it parked there a higher wall or dam around your money, and raising rates makes your mortgage costs higher, so you're more likely to stay put and not move money around, constrained by the higher wall, that's how interest rates are like walls and lower walls also increase inflation, since they increase The flow of money, and hence the demand for goods and services. Well, then why did the Fed cut rates, lowering the wall opening the door for inflation this last time? Well, I think you know that was due to the evidence of a sputtering job market. You know that, if you follow this stuff, a slowing job market slows the flow of money, hence why they lowered the wall to increase the flow. Now this might translate to even lower mortgage rates. It does have that loose correlation anyway, and this should lift the housing market. But here's the real problem. Inflation is higher than the Fed wants already, and it's still rising, and they cut rates, making it more likely to rise further. This is like pouring gasoline on a campfire while yelling, don't worry. I got this sure the fire burns brighter, all right, but you might lose your eyebrows. The risk here is that these rate cuts will make inflation spike, since lower rates makes everyone less likely to save and more likely to borrow and spend, this pushes up prices even farther and faster, and this is the Fed's dangerous game. This is the crux about why the Fed is between a rock and a hard place. Ideally, the Fed only cuts of inflation is at or below their 2% target, but understand it hasn't even been there one time in nearly five years. Now, year over year, inflation was 2.7% last month and rose to 2.9% this month. The price of almost everything is up even faster than it usually goes up, beef, housing, haircuts, flamin hot, Cheetos, everything as we know this inflation that's now positioned to pick up again. However, for us, this is the long term engine that makes our real estate profitable. It makes it easier to raise rents, all while your principal and interest payment stays fixed. Inflation cannot touch that like a mosquito buzzing against a window, and let's be real, official inflation numbers are like Instagram filters. They are shaved down, touched up and airbrushed. The government massages them with tricks like hedonics, the wave of inflation that peaked at 9% in 2022 that has already widened the distance between the haves and the have nots, like the Grand Canyon, eviscerating so much of the middle class. And now the powers that be are setting up a scenario for another wave of elevated, long term inflation. This could get dire. Look like I was saying earlier the generation coming of age today is the first one since George Washington to have it worse off than their parents. Do You understand the profundity of this? They had the lowest home ownership rate, and they're the poorest, often leaving them directionless, anxious, depressed, drug addicted and even suicidal for. The first time in US history, Americans are on track to be poorer, sicker and lonelier than their parents. They will make even less than their parents did at the same age, and that's despite having a college degree. Inflation is a big reason for that, and that's what I help you solve here. I can't really help you with the depression stuff. That's not really my role with what I do here in the show. But inflation, in getting behind is one contributor to all these things. Understand, in 1989 those under age 40, they held 12% of household wealth. Today it's just 7% older Americans got rich, and they basically locked the gates behind them. Those over age 70 only held 19% of US wealth in 1989 now it's 30% Harvard's endowment has grown 500% since 1980 that's adjusting for inflation, but yet their class size hasn't grown. I mean, this is just more evidence that old money wins and young people are losing and cannot get ahead in 2019 the federal government spent eight times more per capita on seniors than they did kids. We all know that Gen Z is delaying marriage, home ownership and family formation in 1993 60% of 30 to 34 year olds had at least one child. Today, it's gone all the way down to 27% in about 30 years, that's fallen from 60% down to 27% this is not a resource problem. It's a values problem and an inflation problem, and also the tax code, values owning assets which older people have over labor, which younger people have. This is the crux of the war on the young and the war on those that don't own assets. You've got to wonder, is it even fixable? Some of it is, but no one really wants to fix inflation, and now they're lowering rates to open the door for even more of that widening that canyon, yes, the wave of inflation that started four to five years ago that broke down the middle class, and now it's set up to widen even more. I want to tell you what you can do about that shortly. But first, have you ever wondered, why do we even stratify upper, middle and lower class based on somebody's income? Why the income criterion, if you say that someone's upper class, everyone knows what that means. It means that you have a lot of wealth or income. But why is that the basis? Why do we classify it based on income? Well, it really started forming during the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s and 1800s that began in Great Britain. Before that, class distinctions were usually based on land ownership or nobility or occupation, for example, aristocrats versus peasants. But as industrial capitalism spread out of the UK, wages became the dominant way that people made a living. So tracking income, it sort of became this natural way to map out class. And then this notion spread in the 1800s and 1900s that was propelled through both economics and social science. You had thinkers like Karl Marx and Max Weber that were deeply concerned with class. Marx emphasized ownership of the means of production. You've probably heard that before, capitalists versus workers. But as societies modernized people in the world of both Economics and Psychology, they agreed that income was an easier dividing line than ownership alone. And then, starting last century, in the US, the 1900s income statistics, they became rather central in all of these policies that we make, like our tax system and poverty thresholds and qualifying for housing programs and even welfare benefits. See, they all rely on income bands. And over time, this normalized in our vernacular, these strata of upper middle and lower class sort of this income based shorthand that we use, throwing these terms around. So whether we like it or not, classes are based on your income level, and that's how it came into being. Well, with. A quick history lesson with the eroding of the middle class, with the war on the young. What can you actually do to make sure that you find yourself on the upper income side of it without falling to the lower side the lower class? Well, we know who the future financial losers are going to be. It is anyone not owning assets, and it's also savers clutching their dollars as those dollars quietly melt like ice cubes in July, right in their hand. Those are who the financial losers are going to be. Who are the winners going to be? It is asset owners riding the inflation wave, and the winners are also debtors who get to pay back tomorrow with cheaper dollars today, especially with that debt that you have outsourced to tenants. Here's the big takeaway, if you did not grab enough real assets during the last wave of inflation don't get left behind this time, because the longer you wait, the harder it is to jump aboard this moving train that keeps getting momentum and moving faster. The bottom line here is that at GRE we advocate for simply doing it all at once. Use debt to own real assets while inflation pushes up your rents. That's it, right. There it is. That's really the most concise way to orate the formula. Look in your mortgage loan documents. It does not say that you have to repay the mortgage loan in dollars or their equivalent. It only says you have to repay in dollars. That's your advantage. As dollars keep trending closer to worthless. To review what you've learned so far today, real estate is easier to understand and has more control than stocks. Housing has been in a recession, but there's more evidence that it is thawing, and a setup for more inflation has America poised to exacerbate the war on the young and widen the canyon between the haves and the have nots, and it threatens to get even wider as the middle class keeps vanishing and struggling.
Keith Weinhold 32:23
Now, if you like good free information, like with what I've been sharing with you today, and you find yourself doing a bit too much scrolling for quality written real estate and finance info. I mean, yeah, it can be a mess. It can be tough. If you want to get the good stuff, you hit paywalls and pop ups, and you get these push alerts and cookie banners. It's a little annoying. It's like the internet is playing defense against you. Not so fun, and that's why it matters to get good, clean, free content that actually adds no hype value to your life. This is the golden age of quality email newsletters. I've got one. I write every word of ours myself, and it's got a dash of humor, yet it's direct. And it gets to the point because, as I like to say, even the word abbreviation is too long. My letter takes less than three minutes to read, and it leaves you feeling sharp and in the know about real estate investing, this is the good stuff, the paradigm shifting material, the life changing material, you can get my letter free at gre letter.com Where else would you get the GRE letter? Greletter.com and along with the letter, you'll also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's completely free as well, and it's not to try to upsell you to some paid course, there is no paid course, there's just nothing for sale, no strings attached, free value. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be simpler to get as you know, I often like to part ways with something actionable for you, visit gre letter.com while it's fresh in your head, take a moment to do it now one last time it's gre letter.com until next week. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
Speaker 2 34:24
nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.
Keith Weinhold 34:52
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get richeducation.com
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