The Weird Thing About GenX and How They View Money

How do you approach your finances?

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Transcript

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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Radical Middle with your host, Jack Atlas. And today we're gonna talk about something a little bit different here than just politics, although politics and and economics have everything to do with each other. We're gonna talk about, you know, some people's financial situations as in groups. Generations, so to speak. And even though I hate the modern definition and how they do political generations, because it makes no sense. I mean, you know, there's Gen X, Gen Boomer, Gen Z, you know, all that kind of crap, and they're nice little neat lines of when one begins and when one ends, and they kind of use it as horoscopes. So if you're within this realm, you must be everything in this personality, and you know, it's it's the new, it's just the new fad. And it's a terrible way to describe political generations, just an awful way. First of all, there's no such thing as a generation outside of a familial generation, so it's just made-up crap with made-up arbitral lines of when that generation will start and stop. Anyway, there's something unique going on out there financially, and I thought we'd discuss it a little bit. And you know, it's it's kind of weird, like these videos, and like I said, I don't really believe in these modern, you know, horoscopic, if that's even the right word, or you know, I mean, they're like horoscopes, you know, reading off the stars. If you're a part of this generation, you must be part of this. I don't really believe in that, but for the sake of this video and to to to get the communication as far as who I'm talking about in other people's minds, because most of the people do, unfortunately, and do think it makes sense, we're gonna go ahead and do that for the sake of this video. And in in the financial thing, it's really weird. I mean, we all know that you know America since 1945 has been pretty much the financial center of the world. We're in control of the world's bank. We're in the control of the world's currency. The United States dollar is the international standard for currency. Whenever economies would go bad and depressions or recessions would hit, they'd run into two things, big time investors. They run into precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or they run into U.S. bonds, being uh two of the safest assets from recessions. The problem is the everything's changing now. The United States built up an empire, and that empire is in decline. We can do another show on that on whether we're an empire or whether we're in decline if you want later, but no longer. We have a we definitely have a recession coming up. Every single chart, every single indicator shows it. When it's gonna happen, none of us can tell. And if you ever are watching a YouTube guide and are going, this is when the recession is gonna happen, you can't tell. If they're right, they'll say they're smart. If they're wrong, they'll say, well, you know, it's gonna be coming up soon, and they'll make up some kind of excuse. No different than a reader, right? You know, I'm reading, uh I'm seeing that you have a uh an uncle named John. Jim, Jim, John, John, John, Jim. Uh oh, they see your eyes and go, oh, yeah, yep. See, I'm right. See, I'm right. What they're doing is they're very perceptive in their guessing. But there is no doubt, if you pay attention to the charts and the actual market and the actual economy, not just your own economics, but the actual economy, that the United States is 100% in decline. We now have a larger national debt than our gross GDP, interest payment, which means we are 100% guaranteed to default. And when we do, we'll have higher interest payments over a long term. Think about it as turning a 15-year mortgage with lower interest into a 40-year mortgage with high interest. That's what's gonna happen. It's gonna screw us even more. I mean, the United States, you know, the 50s and 60s, had the best economy the world has ever seen. It had the first middle class that the world has ever seen. On the local level, you could be a mailman and you could raise a family of six, send every one of your kids to college, retire with a paid-off house and a 30-year roof, and enough in retirement to get you through old age, and especially those final few years that are so, so expensive because of all the medical bills and needs. Now most post office workers either are single, have to have dual income from a spouse, or have a second job. And none of them can afford a college for their kids on top of that. This is just to survive. Basically, the baby boomers inherited the greatest wealth and the greatest economic setup in history as a people. In history, they inherited it. And the minute they came to power in the early 70s, the minute they came to power, they started changing things. They started changing laws and they started regulating things. Pretty soon our jobs were going overseas. I'm not gonna go into the whole thing because there's so much, but they screwed it. And I'm not talking about if you're a baby boomer or consider yourself a baby boomer, I'm not talking about you personally. This is what I hate about collectivism. This has nothing to do with you personally, so please don't take this personal. I'm just saying as a generation, as a political generation, they inherited the greatest economy the world has ever seen. Probably the fairest economy that the world had ever seen. And it took one generation who inherited it to piss it away. And right now we're seeing the results of that. Over the next 30 years that they were in political power, they did everything they could selfishly to spend, divest, and just piss away on stupid programs all of that wealth. Not only did they piss that away, but now they're spending our wealth and my kids' wealth. They even skipped a generation they already spent my generation's wealth. This is my parents' generation, they already spent my generation's wealth. Now they're spending my kids' generation's wealth. You know, another thing I don't know how they're still in power. All right, most political generations last 15 years to 20 years in political power. They have lasted 40 and they're going on 50 and they're still in power. They don't know how to retire. Oh, you know what? That'll be another show too. And I'm going off on a tangent. But basically, our economy is going through the rocks. If you really pay attention to the markets, people don't know what to do. There's obviously a recession coming, and they're not running into government bonds, to U.S. bonds. They're looking elsewhere. There's a reason that BRICS has been gaining so much power, especially in the last, you know, six, seven, eight, ten years. Yeah, about ten years. We're losing all of our allies. Our economic allies are starting to distance themselves from us and take on contracts of their own. They're gonna beat us. And we're no longer the safety net. Oh, and no longer can the world trust number one our numbers, because uh US government numbers were always gonna be as accurate as they could be, regardless of how bad or good they look. Now we have leadership that only wants good numbers and present good numbers because it's more of a propaganda leadership instead of truth, and therefore we don't even know if the numbers are right. We can't tell. We can't believe them, not with all the lies that constantly going on. So we don't even know if the numbers are right, which means neither do big investors or other countries. And there's also no trust in our government. Right now, the rules seem to be up in the air. It seems like corporations and the big guys are getting away with everything, and the government is coming down on small businesses and individuals to just steal our wealth at gunpoint. That's what it feels like, especially in these last, I don't know, two years, year and a half. We're seeing the biggest wealth transition from poor to rich in modern history. The largest. The reason we had the largest economy that the world has ever seen is because most of the wealth was scattered amongst the middle class. Now most of the wealth is in the top 2%. And we have a government that's obsessed on doing everything to make sure whatever little bit that we have left is getting transferred over to those people into their pockets. So even if the the government crashes, who's gonna run into U.S. bonds if you can't trust it? I mean, the IRS is about gone, so a lot of these companies are getting away with tax-free stuff and in and a lot of illegal activities and uh accounting in. The consumers, uh, the consumers, you know, divisions and stuff have all been gutted. So now there's no rules and regulations running these businesses as far as what they're doing. You just can't trust it. You can't trust our government and you can't trust our big businesses right now because there's zero regulation. And not that I'm a big fan of regulation, but the way it's going about right now, it's all upper end corruptness. This isn't capitalism, this is cronyism, and there's a difference. So in this recession that's most likely coming up, and again, I didn't, I'm not gonna say when, but it's gonna be something new because for the first time since, well, 1929, people aren't gonna be running into government bonds. People aren't gonna be running into American government bonds, which helps America see through that recession. They're gonna run to gold, they're gonna run to silver, and they're gonna run to foreign bonds, specifically countries and bricks. You're gonna see Canada really gain on this. You're gonna see Brazil really gain on this. Canada's safe. You know, I've been throwing a little bit of money toward oil service companies, and I won't touch an American one right now. It's all big Canadian oil service companies because the American ones keep buying back their stocks. And I mean, we're not gonna get into that, okay? Basically, it's about as corrupt as it's been, at least since the Harding administration, if not ever. And we're we are gonna pay for it. Not the people who's doing the corruptness. The president, all of his minions, and the people who are capitalizing every time he makes a statement on Iran and they're buying and selling oil off of inside information, all those people who got crypto accounts and are gaining money in through the presidency and through being near the president and all that kind of none of these people who are creating the problem and contributing to the problem are going to suffer. We are. I'm going to suffer, and you're going to suffer. They will not. Want to know how I know? History. Let's go back to 2008. Companies borderline legally should have been le illegal. Uh data back. Clinton uh signs the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Now, the Glass-Steagall Act was put in place after the Depression because they wanted to put a firewall between two banks, uh, two kinds of banks, all right? They didn't want savings and loans banks to be able to take your money and invest in a risky market, and vice versa. And so what they did is they said you can either be a savings and loans bank. And this is just simplistic, you know, I know it's not more nuanced than this, but the simplistic version is you can either be a savings and loans bank, which means you take people's savings, you give out loans, you make money on the interest, or you can be a capital investment bank. But you cannot be both. You cannot take people's savings and put it into the market, and that's what they're doing. That's what the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act did under Clinton with a Republican Congress and Senate. So this isn't a party thing again. This isn't a Democrat and Republican thing. This is a all of them. They're all the problem. Both parties are the problem. And between that and NAFTA, not only did our jobs go overseas, but our banks started giving some private mortgages and all this kind of stuff, and the 2008 crashes happened, and it was their fault. People should have gone to prison for that. And yet only one person did it, and it was a low-level mid-manager that had nothing to do with the overall crisis. One person. As if he designed the whole thing, and he didn't even get rich off of it because he didn't know it was coming. All of his bosses, and here's the worst part, all of his bosses, all of these banks, they all did this. Every person in those banks was okay with this. And then when the crash happened, not only were they okay with all this illegal activity that they get away with, but they go to the government and ask for a bailout, get bailed out with our money. So not only did they steal our money, but then they turn around and the government gave them our money with no prepercussions coming back. It was horrible. No business should be bailed out ever. I'll do another video on that one, but no business should ever be bailed out by our government. There's no such thing as a business too big. People don't understand what free market capitalism is, is if they think that a business should be bailed out. So in 2008, rich people did illegal things, got away with it, got their money back. So not only did they steal that money and ruin people's livelihoods in the first place, then they took money to keep themselves afloat through the government, sanctioned by the government, at the cost of us even further. It was the biggest wealth transfer up to that point in history. We're going through another one right now, and it hasn't even been that long. But believe me, we've lived through this. And this is why I want to get into this little video here, and that's like how different generations kind of deal with finances, because you got the baby boomers who inherited literally the greatest economy in the world and in 20 years, you know, set up all this, I guess, the traps to blow it up. You got the Gen X, which is kind of my generation, who had to suffer this, and then you got the generations that are paying for it. So I'd like to go through that for a little bit. And I thought it was weird, you know, because financially wise, if you look all over on, I don't watch a lot of YouTube videos. I think they're mostly stupid. But um I was doing some research on this, and not just on YouTube, but everything, everywhere I looked, there's a financial obsession with millennials. I don't know. But there's this there's this obsession over millennials, and then they analyze the Gen Z like their laboratory rats and how they're spending their finances, right? I mean, we make fun of them, right? Like there's so every week there's uh another article about avocado toast, side hustles, burnout, you know, all that kind of stuff. Uh uh toxic workplace and you know, all this kind of stuff. Like, do you guys even care about money or what's the more values? I mean, there's this constant analyst on this on this Gen Z stuff. But there's this entire generation. I mean, Gen X doesn't really get talked about a lot except for with jokes like, yeah, we drank out of the hose and bubble. You know what I mean? Uh, we're the last gener and the last analog generation, and and I'm actually kind of not even Gen X or Gen Millennial. Um, I'm kind of in the middle, right? End of Gen X, early millennial. I got both word worlds. But anyway, let's go back to it. The Gen X is kind of the generation that nobody talks about. Everybody loves blaming the baby boomers for everything. Everybody loves making fun of the millennials for, well, a lot of things. And they really like analyzing Gen Z. But nobody really talks about Gen X. And especially the way that, you know, when I looked at all these financial videos that other people are putting out, and most of them are not very good, uh, they don't talk about Gen X in the way that they make money, or the way that they see money, I should say, because they make some of the strangest money decisions um other than any other generation. I mean, these are people with like, you know, 25 grand in savings, you know, or even 50 or 75 grand in savings, but they refuse to replace a 15, 20-year-old vehicle that's rusted out, barely running on the road, and needs a lot of work. You know, in this generation, you see a lot of people, I guess, that, you know, that invest extremely aggressively into retirement accounts every month. Well, at the same time, I think we simultaneously believe that we're never going to be able to retire. And a lot of these behaviors that we're gonna talk about with Gen X are they're different. They contradict each other. A lot of people think it's weird. But a lot of the way that we look at money around my generation seems to be uh contradictive, but they're not. It's cautious and risky at the same time, and that's the contradiction. The question is where is it risky and where is it cautious? Look, financially, studies have shown that the Gen X people tend to be both skeptical and loyal, independent but deeply anxious. I mean, we distrust every institution in America, and there's good reasons. But here's the thing none of this is random, it's not random decisions, you know. But you gotta remember, our generation didn't just experience economic change. We've experienced economic betrayal, full out betrayal. I mean, we were raised in believing in one financial reality, and then as we grew up and in our 20s, early 20s, we watched that reality literally disintegrate in real time, like a bridge collapsing right below our feet. And the worst part is it happened during our peak earning years. We are right now the only generation alive that did not have peak earning years so far. Ours got taken away from us. That's when the economy changed into we don't know what it's going to become because it's still the volatility of that change, is what's going on right now. But we it was our peak earning years when that change was happening, which means our peak earning years wasn't investing in savings, it was the government and businesses literally stealing all those earnings from us. And it really traces back to I hate to say one moment, it's always a multiple catch of things, but it really breaks down to one moment that that really broke our relationship with money. So I mean, picture this. It's like 1985. You're, I don't know, 10 years old, and your dad works at the same company that he's been working at for 30 years. Your mom's been working at the same company that she's been working at for 20 years. Your mom and your dad know exactly how much money is coming in every month. Exactly. They know exactly how many hours they're gonna work. They know they can pull it out their schedule to hang out with their kids every month because they both work eight hour days or nine hour days. From finances to schedule to time, they have their entire month planned. It's secure, it's safe. There's no question about it, there's no volatility. I mean, the house payment is manageable. It's about a quarter of your income, which is impossible for most people today. The house payment is actually manageable. The electric payment is actually manageable. Of course, you gotta remember this is before cell phones, data centers, and all that crap that's eating up all the electricity. But the bills were manageable. The families were able to take a vacation every summer. And retirement wasn't even a question. It was uh, you know, am I gonna be able to do it at 63, 65, or 67? But the fact of retirement wasn't even a question. The fact of having enough through retirement wasn't even a question. And it was easy back then, right? And it's what we got told. The formula felt pretty permanent. You do good at school, you go to college or trade school. You do good there, you buy a home. After you buy a home, you put some money into savings that uh turns into a pension, which most pensions have gone away and have gotten screwed over by the government and businesses. Or in my generation, it started going to like 401k and stuff in the 90s, and eventually that was the formula. You go to school, you get a job, or college, you know, you college trade, get a job, buy a house, save for retirement, and you should be there. And in that case, all the money and everything you do slowly compounds upward, just like our parents and their parents before them. But all that got taken out under our feet. I mean, it wasn't glamorous, but it worked. We grew up believing in being told that just like our parents, if we put in the effort, that life is basically like a machine. That if we put in the effort in school and in work, we'll get security back out. Now all of a sudden it's 2008. You're 32 years old, let's say. You've done everything correctly. You've gone to school or trade school or gone into service. You got out, got a good job, started a family, started putting money away, bought a house. You work hard, you work a lot more than your parents ever did, because in order to make the same amount of money for some reason, because of stagflation, um, in because of stagflation and income, for some reason you gotta work 12 hours where your parents had to work eight to make the same relative amount of money. So you're seeing signs, but the but the path is still there. Okay, I just gotta work a little harder. But the path is still supposed to be there. You know, you're 32, everything's correct, you got young kids, you've taken every extra cent that you can and try to invest in the market while you're young, you just bought a house, and all of a sudden, it's 2008. All of a sudden, one morning you wake up, anchors are panicking on television, while you look at your retirement account, and even though the banks are allowed to sell their shares, you try to get on and sell your shares for your retirement account, they won't let you do it. They shut down for their own thing, and you watch your retirement account, everything that you've built, everything that you've built in there get drained and drained and go farther down and farther down and farther down until there's almost nothing left in there. It's the equivalent of years of your life. The prime income years, the years in your life where you actually make the best and the most income has just been stolen from you. Now they always say the market comes back, but that's only for the big banks who got bailed out and the rich people who can hedge through those kind of things. Most of us have to sell out what stocks we have or just take the loss, lose our job because a lot of jobs got lost, then mine included, and then lose your house, which is what happened to me. None of it my fault. And yet I didn't get a single dime back. And then while losing my house, my job, and all this stuff thanks to this 2008 crash, I then had to continue to pay taxes to support the people who caused it and to keep them in their rich lifestyle. So all of a sudden this happens to you, and it's not just a punch in the face, it's a stab wound in the neck. You guys, unless you experienced it from this generation, like the baby boomers could carry through it. Unless they were really done with their money, they had enough compound wealth to just ride it out. The younger generation wasn't making any money yet. We were screwed. This was our primary earning income that all got taken away from us. And we never recovered. And that's why Generation X is a total. That's a good reason why we do not trust banks, that we do not trust government, we do not trust institutions. I mean, hell, on a personal level, I don't even trust my local public school. I don't trust any institution anymore. And this is this is actually one part of it. It's not just because of the 2008, but financially wise, what 2008 told me and taught me was that we are not capitalists, we are not free market, we're not even socialists, we are cronyism only. We're a new kind of economy that has never been actually defined. And if you are not a guest at the table of this economy, you are on the menu. But anyway, in a matter of just a couple weeks, you watched people, including myself, with 30 years at companies get laid off with no end in sight. You saw foreclosures go up everywhere, you saw families have to move out of their out of your neighborhood, you saw homelessness go way up, you saw retirement accounts wiped out. I remember a guy that lived down the street from me was 86 years old, had to go back to work at the coal mines after being retired for 20 years because of that 2008 crash. He had to go back to work working swing shift days and nights, days and nights every time you come on shift. 14 hour days, 12 hour days. I mean, there were even a lot of suicides then. And the only people that suffered was the working class. And then they turn around, the institutions are always like, oh, trust us, bro. Yeah, we've experienced it. The younger, the millennials didn't experience this, or at least the mid-younger millennials. Gen Z hasn't experienced this. They're seeing kind of like the results of the volatility where it all started. And I noticed that Gen Z and millennials still have a lot of trust in the institutions that carry around them, but they just haven't experienced this. They didn't experience a complete wipeout of wealth. And then the people who did it, instead of going to prison, getting all of their wealth back on the backs of our wealth in the first place. So it was a double steal. They stole from us and then they stole from us again. And since that was in the prime years of our life where that bulk of money starts earning compound, we got screwed. There's no retirement for us. They wiped it out. There's no coming back from that kind of lack of compound interest from that age and that kind of income. There is no coming back. I mean, watching the banks and the bankers and the rich people get bailed out while ordinary people were drowning was. It felt like something out of a utopian experience. I honestly cannot believe that there wasn't a violent revolution. Or at least a bunch of lynch mobs going after these people at the time. I I I you know, I really can't believe that, tell you the truth. I thought it would be going to chaos because that's the one thing you don't do is mess with people's money too much. But it didn't. And I think it's because everybody was so worried about homelessness and gone, they just didn't have time to fight. And it happened so quick. And nobody still knows exactly what happened. Nobody still knows who was actually behind it and who was helping each other out. The only thing we do know is that at least three presidents and probably four, but Clinton by signing, you know, by deregulating the Glass Steagle Act, Bush by doing the bailouts, and he had a horrible economy, Obama by continuing those bailouts. Unjustly and not holding anybody accountable. And then Trump gets in and he does more bailouts. And then Biden gets in and he does more bailouts. And then Trump gets in and he does more bailouts. You cannot trust your financial institution anymore. And if and if you didn't live through 2008 and you're and you still haven't recovered from 2008, then you need to listen and learn from history. You need to find out about this. Start out by going to watch the big short. I mean, I know it doesn't have all the information. I mean, because it left out a lot of things of like who should be in jail. But do your research because the only way that you're going to guard yourself from your wealth being taken away by these same people is by knowing what they're doing and what happened last time. I don't think people realize what that does psychologically to a generation or to a person. And that's why we're so different with our finances now, or at least I am. I don't trust banks. And so I tend to put my money in like six or seven different banks. If I had money, I would never put more than $100,000 in an account because I wouldn't trust that the bank would ever pay me. I do not trust banks. I do not trust our government. Our government has shown to mishandle money and screw us over and over and over again. And the only people who seem to do well when that happens are the people who fund their campaigns and them themselves. Again, this isn't a Democratic Republic thing. This is an all of them thing. Look at how much the current president has made off the presidency. He has tripled his wealth since he's been president, all due to corruption. All because of corruption. And it's not just the president, it's senators, it's congressmen, it's the last president. Look at how much wealth the Obama's gained while they were president. Look at how much wealth the Bush has gained while they were president. Now, this president has taken that to a whole new level. But it's not anything new. And the worst part is when they're telling us they're they're going to help us during the campaigns, they're actually showing us, if you're paying attention, that they're here to screw you. That they're the guy playing the three cup Annie or whatever the hell that is on the street corner and saying, you're not going to win this. I may make you think you're going to win a couple times, but you're not going to win this. But why don't you come play with me? I'm going to set all the rules and I'm going to have the hidden ball. No matter what, I'm taking it well from you. Basically, our government has turned into casino owners. If you do start winning a little bit, they'll kick you out of the casino. It's only designed for you to lose. And they've proven it to us. And if you don't believe me, they proved it to us in 2008. And they've proven it to us multiple times since then, but they truly proved it to us in 2008. And if you weren't affected by it in 2008, good on you. But for those of us who lost our home, who had to move out of our wonderful neighborhoods, who lost our job, who lost everything that they built, our entire savings, our retirement, everything. Not only do these people owe us some judicial accountability, but they owe us 10 years of our life plus the compound interest since then. And what that was in 2008, that was a betrayal. That was a betrayal of everything we were taught. Go to school, work hard, buy a house, save for retirement, be able to retire, and you can raise a family and do everything on that. It was a betrayal of everything we learned, everything we were taught, everything we were told. You know, trust plus principle in time does not equal stable growth anymore. There's nothing stable about our economy anymore. Sure, you can pinpoint little things like, oh, we got the highest, you know, Dow average, whatever. You're not looking at the big picture. The economy is completely volatile. It has been since the 2008 crisis. Things just don't make sense. And it's not one person doing it, it's all of them. Our institutions are not only tainted, but they are diseased. They are poisoned, and they have been for a long time. The only thing Trump's doing is taking advantage of that. Trump wouldn't exist in this presidency doing all the bullshit and corruption and money money laundering and all the kind of stuff and actual fraud. He wouldn't be able to do any of this stuff if the institutions weren't already poisoned and toxic from the beginning when he got in there. From Clinton. From probably Reagan. From Bush. From Obama. They poisoned the institutions. They contributed. I'm sorry, they didn't themselves in all the senators and congressmen and the bankers, they poisoned the institutions that we were supposed to rely on. And then they're surprised when somebody like when some idiot corrupt guy like Trump comes along. And people vote for him. They're surprised. They don't know the damages that they've done. And that was during a time in 2002 is when I got out of the military. You couldn't keep a job because there was the manufacturing crisis before the 2008 crisis. If you lived in a union state, they'd hire you for you know after 89 days and they lay you off. So at 90 days they wouldn't have to bring in the union at a higher price. I went through, I got out of the military and went through job after job after job after job, and everything was, you know, 80 days laid off, 75 days laid off. Because they didn't want to hire anybody. That's why I ended up out in Wyoming working on the oil patch. It was the only jobs that were secure left available. But uh the the ability to have a career to work for one company for 30 years, that was gone. That was gone. No longer will I personally be ever loyal to a company because I've been laid off so much, and they never give you a two-week notice or anything. We can talk about that another episode, but I've been laid off to cut costs or you know whatever so many times that there is not a single company out there. There's no loyalty to us, but they demand loyalty to them. Not gonna happen. I have zero loyalty to any job or any company, period, because of this 2008 crisis, because of the toxic institutions that have been created. Because now I know better and learn from history. You cannot trust these people, and you cannot, cannot trust these institutions. I'm not gonna get screwed over by them for the rest of my life. So a weird thing about, you know, this kind of generation in money is there was a study that shows that they're simultaneously the most anxious of any generation about retirement and some of the most disciplined. I know, contradictory, right? You know, there was a, I think it's Trans America. Let me look it up real quick. I had it on a tab. Yep, Trans America study found that nearly 70% of Gen X workers believe they will not have enough money for retirement. Yet it's interesting because we consistently maintain some of the highest long-term retirement contribution rates than any other generation. Now, on paper, that sounds contradictory, right? Sounds hypocritical. I mean, if we're so pessimistic, why are we still investing? And there's actually a psychological term for this. It's called defensive pessimism, which I know it sounds clinical, but the translation is simple. Why do you think there's a lot of preppers? Because it's just doesn't go in economics, it's a mindset because we've been screwed so much by institutions and we've seen this. Why do you think there's so many preppers also in the Gen X generation? You know, those people who who uh have bunkers and they're preppers, they're preppers for world-ending institutions failing. Why do you think that most of those preppers are also in this generation? It's because we no longer trust the stability of our institutions. And when they say they're not saving and investing because they feel confident, we're saving and investing because we feel vulnerable. So, so and it's a weird twist. So, like millennials invest with optimism. Boomers kind of invested with expectation. Gen X, we have to invest with a different mindset, and that's tension. You know, for different generations, contributions feel like it's building, but for us, especially since we had to go through the manufacturing crisis of the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble, the the big 2008 crash. The I mean, we've gone through so many. For us, it's not building wealth. Like, like for most people, for baby boomers, for millennials, and even Gen Z, or from what I've seen, what they're talking about, every contribution feels like you're building wealth. Well, for us, every contribution feels less like building wealth and more like building a bunker. All right, we're not building a tower, we're building a safety bunker. Imagine that in your head. I don't know a holler way to explain it, but a lot of people are going, I'm building a home and I'm building up and up and up, and eventually I'll be living on top of a castle. The way our mentality is, is we are building to protect ourselves. We're building a bunker. We're building for when the institutions fail, not if, when the institutions fail that we're protected, that we're not on the streets completely desperate. It's a different mentality behind investing that's pretty much universal in this generation. And let's just be honest, that kind of psychology makes complete sense given the history that this particular generation had to go through. I mean, imagine being told for 30 years that the market always recovers while also simultaneously watching entire lives get financially wiped out. So when we're when we're checking our retirement accounts, our investments at 145 in the morning, we're not being irrational, like a lot of people would think. We're trying to protect ourselves and to make sure that we can jump on top of an economy, you know, that's gonna go away, that we feel it's gonna go away because it has on us before. We're trying to make sure that the economy, again, doesn't permanently take away everything that we built since the last time they took it away. It's a protection measure. I don't think it's pessimism. I think it's former optimism. And I think uh that optimism just got blindsided by well, institutional reality, the actual quality of institutions and the reality behind it, not the idea or the romanticism behind it. And I think they got punched in the face or blindsided too many times by that kind of reality, which makes them not pessimists, just realists. And another thing that goes on top of that is this Gen X area has a almost paranoid relationship with income streams. And I and I know I do. I have multiple income streams. I'm still kind of poor, I'm still pretty poor relatively, but I have multiple income streams because in my life I have found that you cannot trust the companies we're working for. They will never give you a heads up, they'll just need to cut costs, they'll eliminate positions or do whatever. I've never actually been fired from a job, not once. But I have been laid off of over 30. And since you don't know what's happening, you don't know when it's coming, you all of a sudden get a phone call and like, whoa, by the way, right as of right now, you don't have a job, you don't even have time to prepare, you don't have time to save, you don't have time to prepare your resume, to get your heat fund. They never ever they don't give you a two week's notice, they have no respect for you. And so putting all your eggs in one basket has been proven in my lifetime at least to be a really stupid thing. Now, baby boomers could do this. You again, you could have one income, one job for 20 years, and they have that security. We don't have that anymore. There's virtually no workers' rights, and the companies no longer care about their product and service or their workers, they only care about the profits and then bankrupt themselves out of it, keep the profits, screw all their investors, and then do it again. It's just not the same anymore. And so relying on one, but that explains why the people in my generation and specifically me will not just go out and get one job anymore. I've been screwed too many times. That mantra that companies put out and the government puts out, it doesn't work. I'm not gonna lose a job anymore and lose everything and be there. I'm gonna lose a job and lose 20% of my income. I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket anymore because you just can't trust the institution. You can't trust the company that you work for. You can't trust your government to do the right thing. You can't trust your bank to not steal from you. You just can't trust these institutions. And that explains why Gen X has really done a big thing on doing multiple income streams. Not because they want more income. That's more of a millennial and Gen Z thing. It's because they want the security from having that income taken away. But look, your job, they're not going to create safety anymore. Those days are gone. We were taught that those days still existed, and then we got slapped in the face and said, those days are gone. There's just no loyalty anymore. They demand loyalty. We're in times where government, president, companies, they demand loyalty, but they will give zero, zero back. And when you lose that safety, when you lose that sense of safety so many times, you start buffering yourself. This is what hedging is. Instead of having all your eggs in one basket, you hedge. I get 20% of my income from this, 20% of my income from this, and 20% of my income from this. I'm gonna have a rental house on the side. Because putting your eggs in one basket and trusting an institution in our lifetime has been the stupidest mistake that we could have ever made. But it was dangerous. You know, it was for the first time in American economic history, at least uh of recent history, that you know, um since World War II, for the first time, it was dangerous to work one job. It was dangerous to rely on one salary, it was dangerous to rely on one company. It was fiscally dangerous. You were messing with homelessness by making a hundred grand a year for one company. And that's something none of the other generations can possibly understand. We're basically became, out of necessity, economic preppers, building our own safety nets. Not with savings, but with income streams. And why is that why is it like that? Well, it's driven by the fear that again, we're gonna wake up one morning and everything will be wiped out. That all of our money will be stolen from us by bad policy and by illegal action. That the next step is losing our jobs and then driving your kids away from your house to go live in a van. Because that's happened to us before. And diversifying out, hedging your income is the safety net that you can provide against these horrible institutions and these god-awful governments that only exist seems nowadays to take your money. I'm not gonna wake up and be wiped out again. I can't go through that a third time. And I'm sure most Gen X people can't either. Well, I'm sure we can, but we're not going to. I mean, if you do go through it a third time, you're just not learning your lesson. This is why we have multiple streams of income and we have that, and we drive old cars because what if I can't make my house, my car payment? Well, I got a 15-year-old car. I don't have a car payment. It's changed us mentally. It's not ambition. You know, a lot of this can compare, well, millennials do this too, or Gen Z does this too, or baby boomers do it. Sure. But the mentality is different. They do it out of ambition. We're the only generation doing it out of a sense of survival. And that's why our generation, more than any other one, according to that same study, has almost zero institutional loyalty. But that doesn't mean that individually we don't have strong personal loyalty. Loyalty is not all-encompassing. I mean, I'll leave an employer in a second. I'll give my two-day notice. If if I see that they're messing up or they're doing things shady or they're about to do something or whatever, I'll leave an employer in a second nowadays. I have no loyalty to an employer. If I don't get my paycheck, if they screw around with our contract agreement, all that kind of stuff. I'm gone. I'm giving my two-day notice. Do you know what the two-day notice is? I'm quitting two-day. I have zero loyalty to institutions in our government anymore. And yes, I even served. I have loyalty to the constitution, not necessarily the institutions. I have zero loyalty to banks, I have zero loyalty to any job I have. I will do a damn good job while I work that job, but I will not sacrifice anymore for a company or an institution that will never have an ounce of loyalty back at you. Loyalty is for personal relationships only, not business. Which is really interesting because um that same study found that Gen X, more than any other uh, you know, baby boomer and millennial and Gen Z, uh, Gen X is more likely to stick with a brand that they've trusted for decades than any other generation, which is again contradictory according to what I was just saying about not trusting any kind of institution or um workplace, right? But look, there are psychological reasons for this contradictory. I mean, institutions betrayed us. They all did. They knowingly did, and then none of them had any repercussions for doing so. Which also continually made them think that it was okay because a lot of them are doing it again, and a lot of the same people are doing it again, and they raised, they brought up people to do it again because they didn't learn their lesson because there was no accountability. But look, in our entire life, from when we started in the workforce until about now, we've seen markets extremely drop, bank instabilities, pensions fading into oblivion, promised pensions, legacy brands just creating crap, crap, crap products. I mean, it's just been one thing after another. But here's a very simple lesson that we learned that the older generations, especially future generations, can learn from. And that is giant systems can and will fail overnight. Companies can and will abandon you. Banks can and will panic, and markets can and will collapse. Pension promises can and are evaporating. But personal experience, your personal experience for all that, that still not only feels real, but is real. If a product worked reliably, for instance, for 20 years, you're gonna trust that more than any advertisement, right? You know, like for me, if a mechanic did me right once, I'll drive across town to use, keep using them for the next 20 years. That's that hyper local trust. Instead of trusting big foreign, and I don't mean foreign as in a different country, but foreign as far as outside your community, institutions, say in Washington, D.C. or the bankers out of Virginia or whatever, instead of trusting those, what we trust now is a hyper local, hyper-local, hyper local trust. Your local business owner. You find a good business owner that's honest, that does a fair free market deal for you and provides a good service or a good product, and that's who you stick your loyalty to. And then here's the strangest contradiction of all of them economically. And that's how unbelievably cautious that we can be with money, at least to right up till they're not. So, for instance, like me, I'll delay upgrading a phone until that phone is no longer supported or it's broken. I will absolutely refuse to finance a car. I will spend hours comparing insurance deductibles to try to save 40 bucks, and then all of a sudden drop a thousand dollars, you know, or thousands of dollars into a once-in-a-lifetime vacation without even blinking. I mean, to younger generations, that probably looks like you know random. But psychologically, it's perfectly consistent of what we were talking about. And so there's this uh um, I think it's called a Ventex. Uh, let me look it up. Yeah, it's a Ventex consumer report that um did a report that says that Gen X spends more money on live performances and travel than any other generation, including the generation previously. The other generations like to spend their money on things. Gen X seems to be the only one to hate spending money on things and decide to spend their money more on experiences. And I think that's that's really different because of how they value their money given their circumstances. But here's why. We learn that assets can disappear in a blink of an eye. All your assets, everything that you think you've built, all your stuff all it can be gone in the morning. And not only is this this underlying maybe theorical belief, we've experienced it. It's not just some out there possibility, it has happened and recently, and it can all be gone. So I think what it is is a mentality of why spend your money on stuff? Spend your money on investing in the stuff that you need, and then take any extra and get that life experience before life runs out. Because think about this banks go under, companies vanish, retirement accounts get cut, homes can lose value. Everything you buy other than a house is going to lose value for the most part. But experiences, actual life experiences, those are things that institutions and governments cannot take away from you. And I think there's something to say that those survived the brunt of the economic clashes or the crushes was that economics and being rich and all that stuff started mattering less. And it was more about having the security so that you could spend that extra time on family. And here's here's another one of those things that drives financial advisors insane. Um, Gen X is the only generation to either completely outsource their financial decisions or to complete control. One or the other, it's one extreme or the other. There's no middle ground, which makes them go nuts for the financial advisors. But Gen X people are significantly more likely, I mean significantly, as an 80% to 20% more likely to manage their retirement accounts themselves, to manage their investments themselves, because they do not trust financial advisors, because financial advisors trust institutions. They're extensions of institutions. Financial advisors, once the baby boomers are gone, are already targeting, they're not targeting Gen X, which is interesting because they're the ones that are next to retire. They're targeting millennials and they're targeting Gen Zers because Gen X, as an overall, does not use financial advisors. Not everyone, but overall. They won't make any money on us because we don't trust the institutions that they invest in. But we're also the generation that watched experts detonate everything and be wrong about everything. And remember, not a single one of those financial experts really took a loss. Only their clients did. I mean, we we watched it. We watched analysts miss recessions, and even to this day we're watching it, but we watched the beginning of executives walking away with giant bonuses while running the company into the ground and filing bankruptcy and walking away. I mean, they they they come in, they destroy a company, they walk away with huge bonuses, and then the company goes under. The workers, the investors, they're getting screwed. But look, these financial institutions, they sell certainty. And in our experience, what they're selling, well, it's a lie. And all this goes down to a psychological presence with us, with Generation X. Not with all of them, of course, and I hate that characterization, but you know, get back to it. And it's not that Gen X believes that they're smarter than the experts. It's simply a fact, historical fact, that we will protect our future more carefully than they will. So when we try when we spend like six, ten, twelve hours studying mortgage rates instead of trusting a broker, that has nothing to do with us thinking that we're smarter than them. It's simply that we're protecting ourselves. We're protecting ourselves from them. And it's not ego, it's not stubbornness, it's self-defense. It's only when you get your ass kicked a few times that you realize you really need to buck up and learn some self-defense and learn how to fight. And you know, that really speaks for a lot. That speaks that that self-defense, that need constantly for self-defense, that prepper attitude, that's not a result of a generation. That is a result of the it the failure, the complete and utter criminal failure of our banks, of our government, of the companies, the bigger companies that run this country. It's a complete and utter failure, all of our institutions. And so, what does that tell us how Gen X's money thing is gonna relate psychologically really tell us, right? What does it tell us? It tells you that you know, we're not confused, we're not irrational, which is what all the contradictory stuff probably would tell people in analysis, right? But as a result, it's actually not contradictory. What it is, is adaptation. Every strange different financial behavior that makes no sense to boomers and millennials and Gen Z makes perfect sense to us. But it makes sense once you realize that we were trained for one economic reality. And that was through our institutions of school, through our parents, through companies themselves, and through the government. Everybody told us that there was one economic reality. And the whole time they had our hands in our back pockets. Because as we were told and brought up and reared that there was one economic reality, that economic reality Fell out from under us, was taken from us, and we were forced to survive a completely different one. I mean, go back to the person that we were talking about at the beginning. Massive savings account, but a 15-year-old junker with no car payment. The person that's terrified about retirement, but still diversifying and running his own investing and doing it aggressively. The couple or people like me who distrust every single financial institution on earth. But that doesn't mean I won't spend thousands taking my family on a really good, meaningful trip. Look, these aren't random quirks. They're survival responses. Because we are the only generation in a unique position in our lives to learn something psychologically unique compared to almost every other modern generation. Systems are temporary. Jobs are temporary. Markets are temporary. Corporate loyalty is always temporary. Even economic rules themselves, if we've seen in the past year and a half, even the good ones, they're temporary. So you had to become, in a financial sense, emotionally diversified. You save aggressively because stability can disappear. And will disappear. Not just can, will. You maintain side income, multiple streams of income because employers can and will disappear. You know, and that makes it much more valuable to trust personal experience over institutions. Because institutions can and will fail. And why do we spend on memories and not stuff? Because memories can sometimes be the only thing that can survive crashes. And let's just be honest, there's something incredibly well rational about that worldview. Because while other generations were taught to optimize for growth and to buy stuff and to be consumers and all that kind of stuff, we were forced to become optimized for resilience. And that's the real story. It's not fear, it's not cynicism, it's adaptation. You know, we had to we had to learn a hard lesson that the other generations really didn't have to. And we've also learned that, well, everybody should be learning this right now in the past year and a half, that let's just be honest, the system can change the rules whenever it wants. And it's always going to change the rules in its own favor. Hey, that's that's the end of this episode. I'm really glad you joined me. Do you have any thoughts on the matter? Are you Gen X or are you millennial or are you boomer? Do you have any different thoughts on the matter? You can email me at Jack Atlas T R M. That's the Radical Middle. You know, the T R M. That's Jack Atlas T R M. The Radical Middle. So Jack Atlas T R M at Gmail.com. I'd love to hear your comments, maybe even read some of them on air or some questions. But I really think that Gen X, and I again, I don't really like going into the, you know, nice and arbitrary lines of political generations. It's been kind of made up again. It's more like a horoscope thing, and they collectively put everybody under the same banner. But for this particular video, and I was thinking about finances and I'm looking at what's going on in the market right now because I was doing some stuff earlier, and I just thought, you know, the Gen X, the arbitrary Gen X is a little bit different. And I thought that we'd probably go out and share why. Anyway, I will see you in the next episode. This is Jack Atlas, your host for The Radical Middle. I hope you have a day of you daimania.