October 25th, 2025 - Four Index All Time Highs

Hosts Steve Van Wie and Joey Loss discussed the recent record highs in the market, emphasizing the positive impact of easing trade tensions, strong Q3 earnings, and lower-than-expected inflation. They also highlighted the ongoing government shutdown’s effects on the market and shared insights on effective financial planning strategies, such as handling required minimum distributions and assessing long-term investing. Throughout the discussion, they touched on broader economic trends and the potential implications of various financial decisions.

Transcript

Steven H Van Wie 0:01

It's Saturday morning, it's 10 o'. Clock. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie. And Adam is out today. Had a family issue and he will be back next week as usual. And for today, Joey and I will get it going. And Joey has some personal feelings about why the market was so good and it got involved because Adam wouldn't be here.

Joey 0:06

And I'm Joey Loss.

Joey 0:26

Yeah, yeah. The truth is he's out of office right now in the radio station, just making sure the market stays up.

Steven H Van Wie 0:33

I love it because George just wanted to do the market rap today.

Joey 0:36

Oh, yeah, he made a big mistake. His trend has been letting me tell the bad news. And now I've got three indices at all time highs to talk about, so. Four. Okay. The Russell.

Steven H Van Wie 0:44

Let'S make it four. Throwing the Russell 2000. Yeah, I've been tracking that lately too. Anyway, I digress. My middle name is Digress practically. Anyway, for all the regulars, thanks for always being here. You keep showing up, we keep showing up. That's the way it works. Thank you so much. Anybody out there that's new, try to stick around for the entire hour. We will promise you that you'll learn something you didn't know. Won't promise you that'll make you rich and famous, but it might never know. We can't rule that out. So just try to make it a habit. And I've told the audience many times that I start the show the same way all the time. It's Saturday morning, it's 10 o' clock, and this is the van we financial hour. I want that to be one thought. So if for any reason you're not thinking about it, you look at your watch and it's a Saturday morning and it's 10 o' clock hour. I could have had a PA turn on your radio. We'll be right here talking to you, with you and at you. So that said, we will have a trivia question, of course, right after the first break and between now and then, Joey can just go on and show you what happiness looks like.

Joey 1:59

Yeah. So four indices reached. I had three. So you got me to four. Four indices reached intraday and closing highs yesterday with the Dow touching above 47,000 for the first time in history. As mentioned, this means Adam made a big mistake letting me tell you good news when he loves to make me share bad news. But as Steve was talking a minute ago, Adam texted me and said, I'll get you on a down week next time, so rest assured I'll have bad news to share at some point, but that day is not today. These new highs have once again confirmed that the bull market run that began three years ago now with the launch of ChatGPT, is still running. What contributed to the highs to close the week? Easing trade tensions after initial tough talk two weeks ago. So far, very impressive Q3 earnings reports and cooler than expected September inflation numbers, largely due to falling rent prices. And this cooler inflation further boosts confidence in a September rate cut by the Fed. So looking at actual numbers, S and p closed at 67.91. That's up just under 2% for the week, up about 1.5 for the quarter and up 15.47 for the year, which is just kind of hard to believe as I say it out loud. The NASDAQ closed at 23 204, up about 2.3 for the week, up about 2.4 for the quarter, up over 20% for the year. The Dow Jones closed at 47 210, so it blew right by 47 and it's up 2.2% this week, up just under 2% for the quarter and up over 10 now almost 11 for the year. Gold and Silver had a bit of a bummer at the beginning of the week. We with silver taking a particularly strong beating on Monday and Tuesday, analysts attribute these movements to a strengthening US Dollar and profit taking in the wake of historic runs for both assets. On the earnings front, Coca Cola, IBM, Procter and Gamble and Zions Bank Corp. All reported this week and beat earnings expectations for the quarter. Perhaps the most surprising in this list is Zion's Bank Corp. Which last week we mentioned had a $50 million charge off related to two commercial loans. It's good to see that this was in fact an isolated incident which is what the bank had claimed. On the losing front, we have Netflix, Tesla, Texas Instruments, all of which missed earnings expectations. Tesla beat on revenue but missed on profit, citing pressure on operating margins as they continue to prioritize growth and robotics development over short term profitability. That's kind of a trend we're seeing across tech right now as the big companies spending a lot of money on the future. Netflix attributes their miss to a single ongoing tax dispute in Brazil, which is interesting, creating a large one time expense. Despite this earnings miss for Q3, their subscriber growth and ad tier revenues remain positive. They don't expect this tax issue to materially impact future results. On the government closure front, the government remains closed, which Jacksonvillians probably know if they plan to attend the Blue Angels performance today as the Blue Angels will not be flying. That's a bummer as we're going there, but there's plenty of other events that will be going on in the area. The closure has led to investors focusing more heavily on company earnings, describing the upticks we saw this week in the absence of continued government reports. However, one report did come out and that was the September cpi, which is federally required in support of putting out Social Security inflation numbers for the next year. That number came out yesterday and it's at 2.8% and will take effect in January of 2026.

Steven H Van Wie 5:30

Whoopee.

Joey 5:32

It's funny how inflation is a different number depending on what we're talking about.

Steven H Van Wie 5:36

Yeah, funny. Let's talk about Medicare inflation.

Joey 5:38

Yeah.

Joey 5:40

Right?

Steven H Van Wie 5:42

I'm going to get 2.8% increase in my Social Security in January and a 12% increase in my Medicare B. Thanks guys. Where do I sign?

Joey 5:54

Overall, the push and pull of October is following historical norms for the month. I think a week or two ago we mentioned that I texted Adam, it's volatile today and he just said October. So that's the way that goes. Overall, sentiment about the market seems to reflect some tension between seemingly unstoppable momentum of continued corporate growth against the concerns of some investors remembering bad endings to soaring bull markets. Past history rewards the long term investor and appropriate hedges for each investor's financial situation make the ride more tolerable.

Joey 6:25

So that really, I think wraps up the market. And that last bit was just our thoughts on how to handle it. I think it's easy to kind of lose your shoes when you see volatility like this. But if you take a long term gaze, I think investing is a much different experience than if you're trying to make money for next week.

Steven H Van Wie 6:39

Yeah, we're going into what is typically a very good end of the year season. Nobody knows exactly what day it will start. Nobody knows for sure if it actually will start. But if history is any indicator, and it is, it's no guarantee, but it's an indicator. There's a name for that history repeating itself. I can never think of it. But anyway, it should be right about now that things are looking good. And look around, things are looking good. There's some differences now that have been occurring recently and a lot of that is in attitude, which we were seeing during all the discussions of the tariff time. And they said, well, he never makes up his mind, he always caves all those things. He's playing a gigantic chess game out there with the entire world and knows exactly what he's doing. So with all the whining and crying about tarifflation and so on, strangely enough, tariff goods are rising slower than non tariff goods. And all of a sudden people are breathing a sigh of relief with every good number that comes out. Like the CPI this week and the world is.

Steven H Van Wie 7:54

You can tell if you. If you look up, they. They did an analysis of all the corporate reports, the earnings reports, and they're looking for key words that involve fears of. They're disappearing daily. All right, we got to take a quick break and pay some bills. A lot more about this and a lot more about everything else as soon as we get back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Joey 8:24

I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 8:26

That pause was Adam not being here.

Joey 8:27

Yeah, I almost. I'm so used to hearing that. I almost just introduced myself as Adam Van We.

Steven H Van Wie 8:32

You know, the old Jimmy Buffett line. If the phone doesn't ring, it's me that's hired him today. A couple more things we just want to wrap up on the market. I was discussing with Joy the odds of a Fed cut. And I've got it at 95% that he will cut. And my reason, kind of a backdoor reason, but I think he would have to explain in public why he didn't do it. And it's very uncomfortable trying to explain negative things. I think that's why they're gonna just go ahead and do it. Do we absolutely need it? No. Would it be better for those of us who have money in the money market if he didn't do it? Yeah. But I think in general, the only thing that I see out there, the difference between things being really good right now, which they are, and being really, really good, would be to have mortgage rates coming down. And if that happened, the problem with buying right now is kind of twofold. The first one, obviously is the cost of things like the house itself and the money. But the other one is the inventory. There's a lot of people out there who would move, except they have mortgages at 2 and a half, 3%, and I'm one of them. And I wouldn't move until I can get a replacement for that. I wouldn't move on purpose. So if I had to, like most people. But if you're sitting on a comfy little 3% mortgage, I tell people all the time in the office, it is not prudent to pay an extra penny on your mortgage when the rate is 3%, right? Put it in the money market. And if you want to pay a lump sum down, when rates come down, that money market money is going to be sitting right there waiting. You can just move it on over. But there's just no economic justification for paying off a 3% mortgage. Now there is a subset of the world out there who for social reasons, meaning they can't sleep at night with a mortgage, pay the darn thing off. That's what we do when new people come into the office and we talk about that kind of thing. Say, well, no, it's crazy to pay off a mortgage. And then they'll say one thing that tips you off, that it's one of that little subset. Oh, it's more important to you. Pay it off. That's it. Having a discussion. We got a friend in town right now. We're having a couple discussions over the last couple days about that kind of thing. And we talked about that part with the 3% mortgage, among other things. One of the other topics that I thought was very interesting, she was kind of, I guess she was kind of dejected that she hadn't had the economic opportunity lately to, to do Roth conversions. And I said, why? They're highly overrated. She looked at me like I was from another planet, which I am because they're from Mississippi and we're from Florida. But she asked me why and I explained the whole thing. She said, I'm glad I asked. And I said, well, I'm glad you did too. I spent 20 years on the radio explaining to people who were touting Roth conversions for the sole reason that you're going to have a much higher tax bracket in retirement than you do now that there has not been in 20 years a significant tax proposal in Congress that proposed higher tax rates. They were all, lower tax rates, less deductions. Why do a Roth conversion? We'll go to the phones. Good morning, Bob.

Joey 9:04

Sure.

Bob 12:12

Good morning, gentlemen.

Steven H Van Wie 12:13

Well, you can't watch the, the Blue Angels. So what are you going to do today?

Bob 12:19

Well, I'm kind of tired. I, I've been chasing foxes all night, so.

Steven H Van Wie 12:25

Sounds like fun.

Bob 12:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the two legged variety, the four.

Steven H Van Wie 12:32

Okay, I take it back.

Bob 12:33

My fox is actually away. She's in Cleveland. The two legged variety. Celebrating. Celebrating 70. Her best friend's 70 year old birthday today.

Steven H Van Wie 12:37

On purpose.

Steven H Van Wie 12:44

Well, that's nice then. It is on purpose. I can only think of one reason to go to Cleveland. Have to be a really good friend to watch them.

Bob 12:51

Fire department put the river out right.

Steven H Van Wie 12:58

Those river firefighters.

Bob 13:00

Oh, yes. Hey, quick, I'm just interested in your guys opinion as financial advisors and fiduciaries. I have to take a distribution before the end of the year and I'm need your thoughts on coaching me what, what to do. You know, I. Fortunately, I don't really want to take a distribution because I don't really need it, but I have to by law. But what are your thoughts on if you, if you, if you're not going to spend the distribution, what are your thoughts on reinvesting it and appropriate

Steven H Van Wie 13:00

What's happening?

Bob 13:44

vehicles to do it?

Steven H Van Wie 13:45

Okay, I've got, I'm going to. We'll, we'll address that momentarily. But I want to interrupt for a minute because I forgot the trivia question. Shame on me. So, okay, I'll give it to you. That way you can take a shot at it first if you want to.

Bob 13:59

I may have to think real long because I've been up all night chasing this.

Steven H Van Wie 14:03

One's more of a guess. Anyways. Thursday, Joey talked about gold a little bit on Thursday. Gold lost more than 5% of its value in a single day. That's very rare. How many times in history has that happened? It's just a whole number greater than one. So if you want to take a shot at it, fine. Okay.

Joey 14:22

Three.

Bob 14:23

Three.

Steven H Van Wie 14:24

It's not that rare. That was low, but thank you. Okay. All right. The, the bottom line on the distribution starts with the top line. Make darn sure you have to take it. The law's changed a couple times. I'm sure in your case that's been covered. But there we see people in the office all the time who don't realize it has been raised to 73 and then that it has been raised for some people up to 74. And that it's very important that you understand that. Don't take it if you don't need it and you don't have to. But in your case, yes, you have to and you don't need it. So we'll come at it from that standpoint and I say pay the appropriate amount of taxes on it, not that there's a law about that that pertains to an rmd. You can do pretty much what you want. They default at 10%. But that's meaningless for most people. Figure out what your marginal tax rate will be. Make sure you withhold that much unless you have another method of getting the taxes into the irs. And then I say, and I'm going to turn this over and have Joey give you his input on it. Too. But I say keep it in a brokerage account, keep it invested just like you would have, because otherwise you're undergoing an opportunity cost. And I would keep it in a method that said, I'm emulating my portfolio, trying to maintain the portfolio balance. That's also true when it comes to taking the money out. If you have highly appreciated assets, sell those. It's a form of rebalancing inside your 401k. And when the money comes out, then look at your overall portfolio and say, okay, what hasn't performed? Let's get into that now. With that said, let's hear from Joey on this one.

Joey 16:16

Honestly, that was a perfectly thorough explanation. The only thing I'll add is that the reason that Steve advocated for withholding taxes from your IRA is unlike an estimated tax payment, which is treated as occurring in one quarter of the year, withholding acts as if it's happened evenly across the entire year. So let's say you have a $50,000 required minimum distribution and you withhold $10,000 that goes against that contributes to your safe harbor in basically a perfect fashion as far as the IRS is concerned. To help avoid any penalties, it's not uncommon for retirees to be penalized because they took income all in one quarter and they didn't perfectly spread out their tax payments to accommodate that. It's a silly way that the tax code set up, but withholding is a great remedy against that.

Bob 17:05

Okay, yeah, that's good advice. All right. Yeah, I don't think my distribution is going to be that much, but very sound advice, gentlemen. Thank you so much and look forward to completing the paperwork later.

Steven H Van Wie 17:19

Another thing, just a little aside. If, for instance, you were to sell something high, like gold, and you've got it sitting in a tax deferred account, and then you come out and you say, well, I guess I really should because I sold off some of this. I'd like to get back in. Something like silver don't hold precious metals in a taxable account. They have their own collectible tax rate of 28%. You want to find something that you need to keep your balance and income from, whether from dividends or. Or even capital gains gets you in a lower tax rate. Qualified dividends are good if it's something you're going to hold for a while. So there's a few considerations like that. And there's going to be a heck of a lot of people in your shoes very soon in the next few weeks who are going to undergo this. So I appreciate the question and we'll, well, of course, take care of it when we see you next. All right, thanks so much. Good to hear from you.

Bob 17:45

Oh, okay.

Bob 18:18

Okay, thank you.

Bob 18:21

Thank you, guys.

Steven H Van Wie 18:25

Planning to sign off for anybody who called today and said we'll enjoy the.

Joey 18:28

Air show, although there still will be one, just not. Not the epic Blue Angels.

Steven H Van Wie 18:34

You know what the Cajun Navy is? It's all the boaters from places like Alabama and Mississippi, and whenever there's a problem flooding anywhere down in that area, they just all pack up their boats and haul them over there and rescue people. They do it in Texas and all over the place. And I'm. I'm thinking we're going to have a Jacksonville air troop today of some sort.

Joey 18:36

What's that?

Joey 18:59

Yeah, there'll be a bunch of civilian planes, and I think Red Bull's got a plane and there's going to be parachuters and stuff. There'll still be plenty to see.

Steven H Van Wie 19:05

Yeah. So don't, don't fail to go out there and have a good time. It is a classic northeast Florida day. I'm very grateful for that. But go have some fun. You know that we finally got to experience some problem related to the government shutdown. But I tell you, the way things are going, the market loves a government shutdown. Now tell me, let's see, would you rather have the Blue Angels air show or an extra few grand in your 401k? I'm going B. And I also say, any of you who are in the habit of not looking very often at your 401k, I'm with you all the way. We love clients who never look. They come in and say, how'd I do? But, you know, sometimes I might even say, well, if you haven't looked lately, you might want to do that today. I think you'd be really, really happy. And it is flowing over into the attitude of the people. The things are just good. We're having a good time out there. All right, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the band Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie and I'm Joey Loss, and I remind Everybody, lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 20:23

Trivia questions still out there. Gold lost more than 5% in a single day on Thursday. How many times in history has that happened? And it's a number greater than three. All right. I was just talking to Joey in the break and said, you know, you've been here now for quite some time and everybody's getting used to your voice and your name and wisdom and all that stuff. But not many of you know where he came from or how this whole thing happened. We've touched on it here and there, bits and pieces. So I thought just take a couple minutes and introduce himself to the world as and then we'll give you some thoughts on. We've had enough time now. We've had 10 months since the merger and our view of what the firm has become, which is in my book, very, very

Joey 20:33

Three.

Steven H Van Wie 21:16

comprehensive, I guess. Anyway, take it away. As I told him, nobody toots your home better than you do.

Joey 21:17

Yeah.

Joey 21:23

Well, firstly, regarding the merger, I mean, it has just been a pleasure. There's a lot of scary stuff that goes into, you know, I had my own business. You guys have built this great business and I think we both saw what it could be and we, we took the risk, you know, we had all the conversations and we took the plunge. And it's been, at least from my side and what Adam has shared, you know, everything that we'd hoped it would be. And a lot of that stems from the three of us having our own unique expertise which we can now bring together and raise all the boats and feedback suggests that's exactly what we've done. So I went to Virginia Tech and initially planned to be an engineer. Actually, I just loved math and ultimately made a jump after a pizza party on a college budget. There was a group called the Financial Planning association, student chapter. They had free pizza. I was in the market until I.

Steven H Van Wie 21:53

Where were you educated?

Steven H Van Wie 22:12

Became a Young Republican. Free lining kugels.

Joey 22:15

Yeah. And I'm sorry to say that's all it took to get me in the room. But man, when I was in that room, I just loved that they were talking about blended math and people and talking about the future. I've always been a future oriented person. So anyway, studied. Ended up studying Applied Economic Management with a focus on CFP education, financial Planning option, and loved that. Graduated initially worked in the Arlington, Virginia area for a small RIA fee. Only did that for about two years and then made a jump down to Jacksonville and did the same thing for another firm for a great number of years. And then about three years ago made the jump to start my own firm and went through that humble, fun process that I know you guys know very well from your early days. And Adam and I had been friends the whole time. We met about seven or eight years ago volunteering on the fpa, the Financial Planning association of Jacksonville's executive board together. And we just kind of became fast friends through that. Never really thought we'd have any overlapping business interests or anything. We just shared notes and kept up. And a couple years ago, you guys had the problem of success weighing on you pretty heavily. And Adam reached out and said, hey, would you like to grab a bite to eat? He was pretty cryptic in his invitation,

Joey 23:37

and I thought, well, sure, happy to do it. And we went and had lunch and he kind of flew. Floated the idea out there, and we both chewed on it for a year before we really did anything. I think we just knew, you know, it was exciting, it was scary. And then we really started meeting regularly to have conversations about what would this look like? And we did that bi weekly for nearly a year to make sure that this was really the right thing to do. And thank God it has been. And thank God we were thorough.

Steven H Van Wie 24:03

Yeah, when Adam and I started, pretty small. But as it grew, we became victims of our own success in one at least big arena. And we were registered with the state of Florida. And when you get to a certain size, you have to register with the sec, and the SEC will look at a small outfit like us, and they pull Adam aside and say, what's your succession plan? He said, well, anything happens to me, my dad will take over. Well, as I hit 70 and then some numbers bigger than that one, over time, it was pretty obvious that I was no longer going to be the backup plan for a business that size. So as. As the old saying goes, when the only situation that's intolerable is the status quo, do something. So he started the search quite some time ago, and now we have 10 months of look back on it, and it has continued to grow and prosper. And I think it was. It has turned out just maybe not better than any expectations, because we expect a lot, but it certainly matched or exceeded expectations.

Joey 25:16

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, it has been, you know, at the end of the day, we're all people, we're all family people. And you can kind of measure what is the impact of this been on my family, what has it been on my clients? And I think, you know, it's been great for. For my family, and it's been great for clients in the sense that I think there's more excitement in meetings because we're all capable of doing all the parts of the financial planning process, but we each really like certain parts of it. And so when we get to be excited about those parts and contribute to a kind of a whole service I think that really raised the boats.

Steven H Van Wie 25:47

Another thing that I like lately, and I'm not sure how many people would even have any reason to know or care about these things until they get involved. But when I started in this business in. In 01,

Steven H Van Wie 26:04

the financial planning thing itself was some software elements, and each one was kind of independent. And the output of that would be these beautiful colored graphs, the line graphs and the bar graphs and the mountain graphs and those pies and all that crap. And you get a binder and put all these results in it and give them to the client who would take them home and thumb through it and say, man, they're pretty, and stick it in a drawer and dust it off every 10 years. Yeah, that was it. And the problem has always been with planning that life moves faster than the software at the time. So through the years, people develop software packages for financial planning, and then they were consistently mediocre. We tried and we tried and we tried, and everybody I know tried. And there just wasn't anything that was worth a darn, truly. But at least it was online enough. You could go in and redo it without the hassle and the result from the old static kind. But in the last few years, planning software has become very good. And Joey can sit there in a client meeting, they can say, well, something changed. I bought a car or something like that and goes tap, tap, tap. And the whole thing just does it. It's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Joey 27:25

I think that's true. And advisors have gotten better about couching the right way to talk about planning. I think to your point about the binders and the dust on them, you know, people used to put together these grand plans, like a constitution for the future of your life. And to your point, the markets don't care about that. Tax law doesn't care about that. Your employer may not care about that. You know, things can change on a dime. And so good financial planning has to do with setting goalposts based on everything we know to be true today and what history suggests we can expect for the future? And then analyzing. Okay, if this happens, are we okay if this happens? Are we okay if this changes in this way? What would happen? What opportunities do we have that we're not tackling? And what is the impact to the goal posts?

Steven H Van Wie 28:06

And what's the percentage probability that this is going to work for you? And then if I change this, does it change that percentage or not? And this is all done instantly. As fast as you can talk, this is done. I've been enjoying the process because I was so frustrated over all those years by trying to find something that worked that it's just kind of interesting. It's even more interesting when somebody else is doing it. You get to witness it. I like it. Let's see.

Joey 28:09

Yep.

Steven H Van Wie 28:36

Adam says his son just got into Ole Miss, so.

Joey 28:40

Oh, wow. Congratulations, Justin. That is fantastic.

Steven H Van Wie 28:42

News of the day, huh? Pretty good. All right. Anyway, that I just wanted to kind of bring everybody up to date. The. The firm is much more capable than it used to be, and there's more of us covering things. Our response times have gotten better. Our custodian is Schwab. And when we were with Schwab originally in. In my previous career, and they're pretty good. And then we had Schwab, and we started this company. But then TD came in and made us an offer we couldn't refuse. And we really enjoyed our years with TD. Love their. Their systems and their people. They're all just really good. So then Schwab bought TD.

Steven H Van Wie 29:29

Chuck Schwab, you can say anything you want to about that guy, but this guy is brilliant and has been forever. He set his sights way back when on commission free trading. So he was the first one that got into your house when the Internet line came into your house, and they were like 29.95. A trade in his. In his bottom of his soul. He wanted that price to go down and down and down until it was zero. What was getting right down there? In the days before Schwab bought td,

Steven H Van Wie 30:06

he pulled a major coup, and he lowered his trading costs for Schwab people a lot. I mean, it was desperately low, and the other companies were going, oh, we're not even going to match it. Well, they start looting business, they matched it. And TD took that attitude and said, well, we're not going to match that. And then a little while later, oh, yes, we are. And it. It cut into their profits a bit and the size of the firm. And then Schwab bought them. You knock them down, you know, they said, there's no better time to kick a man than when he's down. So the Schwab kicked him down and bought them out and build them back up. But we still didn't get our old TD software back completely. So Schwab has been integrating that for years now. And they're really a pleasure to work with most of the time. And I see things happening faster and faster in our business all the time. And that's their tech people doing what they're supposed to do. Just a little inside baseball from the financial planning standpoint. So I should remind everybody, too, that one of the credos of doing what we do with the independent fee only registered investment advisor,

Steven H Van Wie 31:21

anybody can make an appointment to talk to us for an hour in the office for absolutely no cost and no salesman will call. As they say, it's completely free. And the worst thing that can happen is you spend an hour of your time and you go away with some good advice. So don't hesitate to do it. The the website strive uswealth.com

Steven H Van Wie 31:43

and the phone number 904-685-1505.

Steven H Van Wie 31:48

And if you want to come and see us, we look forward to doing it. Other than that, you can always call the show or anything you want to do. And we are having a very, very good time these days. So we'll hope to keep it up. All right, one more quick break. We got all kinds of things to do right there after. And we'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. Excuse my chuckling. We're just telling stories. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Joey 32:14

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 32:16

There's when you deal in finances for a long, long time and you swear you've heard it all and then somebody comes up with something that proves, yeah, you haven't heard it all yet. Got to go to work another day if you want to hear it all. Yep, lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 32:37

How many times in history has gold lost 5% or more in a day, including this past Thursday? Give us a call and give it a shot if you like.

Steven H Van Wie 32:51

Why don't you? I'm kind of in the mood to do a few bad stories. Why don't you start out with the one you had? How would you like to make a 401k contribution and see it disappear?

Joey 33:04

Yeah. This was actually a submission from Adam this week. So there's a woman who is on a quest to recover more than $50,000 in missing 401k money. And you know, this is such an unusual story. This is just something I've never even imagined. She made a contribution.

Steven H Van Wie 33:20

When you brought up the topic to me in the break, I said the same thing.

Joey 33:24

What she so this woman, Amanda Otter, was used to her 401k fluctuating in balance, of course, as the markets move up and down, which she was not used to, is seeing a $50,000 contribution never hit the account. And this is a small retirement plan run through a major custodian. And I Think. One of the things that this points out, it's really interesting. There's a lot of company activity that happens between the moment you say I'm going to defer this amount of money to my 401k and then it hits the actual account. It's not uncommon for a company employer to hold onto the money for. I think the rule of seven days is the maximum amount of time that they can wait before they contribute the money to the account on your instructions. It's very unusual for that money never to get there and obviously illegal. And for some reason in this case the bookkeeping effort is not really working well. They're having a very hard time tracking down what exactly happened to this money. And I'm not sure if it was an issue with direct deposit or what, but I think it just points out an interesting thing. You know, we always tell people, don't be looking at your accounts all the time. There's not necessarily a need to because you're just going to drive yourself crazy watching fluctuations and reading headlines and trying to draw wrong long term conclusions out of whatever's happening on a given day. But with that said, you know, this, this kind of does raise the importance of every payroll. You should probably check your 401k, just make sure things are landing okay appropriately. I want to be clear, this is super rare, but the fact that it can happen is an important point.

Steven H Van Wie 34:57

Yeah, and what I said about the perfect clients being the ones that never look, that there's a downside to that for sure. And you know, most people are like me and you kind of can't wait to look at it. I remember times when it was a better idea not to. At the, at our previous gig many years ago, it was probably in the.08 range when things were falling super fast. I remember being on the previous radio show, we had a caller call in and he started with the line I just opened. I just looked at my 401k balance, just opened my 401k statement or something like that, and before he could say another word, I practically screamed at him. You did what? Why would you do that? That's craziness. And of course I was being a little facetious, but only a little because things were falling that fast. But like all times that are tough, those who stick it out get rewarded. If you look at what happened between the 9th of October of 2007 and the 9th of March 2009, it was a bloodbath. 50% in layman's terms of the equity market just disappeared. But if you look what happened in the next six months and you weren't in it, then you get the box of Kleenex for free because you're going to need it. So it's tough. It's very, very tough. The hardest days in the business that we've all been in for a long, long time are those where things are looking real, really bad. And you go in and you talk to each other and you say what is going on that justifies this. And Adam and I have had a long term pack. That said, if neither of us can answer that, we ride it out for sure. And even if you can answer, then you see what should we do about it? But generally speaking, it happens. That's it. And I love all the newsletter people. Harry Den stocks are going to lose 90% of their value this year. I've never been more certain about anything in my life. And I was right about the Japanese market crash in 1988 or something like that. Oh good. So was I. I just told about it afterwards.

Steven H Van Wie 37:21

Let's see other stupid things.

Steven H Van Wie 37:26

This one. Social Security is in trouble. We all know it. We've been talking about it forever.

Steven H Van Wie 37:33

And every one of the brilliant people in Washington D.C. comes up with the same idea. Tax the rich. That's all you ever hear. Some of them are so brilliant that they actually want to expand benefits which just shortens the life of what's already there. But here's a new one. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Now anybody have a little light bulb come on in their mind? When I read a name like that, you had no idea who these people are. You had to read their board of directors. It's got every wacko from every side of the, the political aisle you could think of on it. But I digress. They say they have an idea. We're going to tax employers on the value of all the, the fringe benefits that they pay to their employees. How's that? And that's going to go into Social Security. You will stay, you'll still pay your 6.2. But they will be paying that tax on all your fringe benefits. Well, what the average level of fringe benefits is in the total compensation package of an employee. It's more than that. It's always been somewhere in the neighborhood of a third. And imagine now if you're getting a, a comprehensive health insurance package that can run a couple grand a month. Let's tax that and put it in Social Security. The employer can Afford it. Right. That's. What is it, what Zorro Mamdani said. Anybody can pay a couple percent more. That's no big deal. This would be unbelievable. What do you call a fringe benefit? Vacation?

Joey 38:49

It's got to be over 20.

Joey 38:52

Yeah. I mean it's a lot. Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 39:27

Sure I do. Well, what if you got a company car and a certain percentage of that is personal use? That's a fringe benefit. Got to tax that, right? This is insanity 101 right here in my hands and it can never ever happen. That's the plain and simple. If you hear anything about it and I'm going to give you a name to remember. There's a woman named Nancy Altman. She's the president of Social Security Works. If you hear her name, listen very carefully because she is trying to take your money away from you to save Social Security. She's one of those well meaning people who is always, always wrong. Just beware. I don't mind naming names because she's all over the news, very public person and she's really wrong. So there's one for the dumb pile.

Joey 40:28

I would be remiss if I don't toot my population horn over and over again. This is a topic I'm super passionate about. And you know the long term cure to Social Security is make America a place where people want to build families. If you raise the next generation and that generation goes into the working population and then they pay normal payroll taxes exactly as they're designed, now all of a sudden you have more revenue for the people currently taking benefits. And guess what? You have more Americans as well.

Steven H Van Wie 40:58

Yeah, speaking of more Americans, Joey was talking last week about the Chinese problem. They're the birth rate has to be about 2.2 to. To just maintain your population. China is now at 1.0, you said.

Joey 41:14

Yeah, one one flat.

Steven H Van Wie 41:16

Did you see what they're doing about it?

Joey 41:19

I did not. Was there news yet?

Steven H Van Wie 41:21

It's brand new. They're going to start paying women to have babies. You've exhausted everything you can think of. So you pay the women the equivalent of $500 a year for the first three years. One of them quit back. I think about it for 10 times that.

Joey 41:42

Yeah, I know things in China are a little bit different than America, but there ain't no way for $500 is going to cover that.

Steven H Van Wie 41:49

That is going nowhere. All right, how about another entry from the the bad pile? The gender pay gap is growing again. Why? Efforts to close it are falling short. How many years do we have to put up with the gender pay gap? The simplest way that people can lie is through statistics. Women only earn 84.6%

Steven H Van Wie 42:19

of what men earn. They do not look at job to job. Equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land since 1963.

Steven H Van Wie 42:31

These people have been in the business of scaring people since 1963 and a half. They come out of the woodwork when there's something like this. It is about who's doing what jobs. It is not about equal pay for equal work. If you want to know what's really going on in society, go to any graduating class from law school or medical school and look at the gender makeup. Women are getting most of the advanced degrees that eventually pay real well because they're great students. They want to do it. Hallelujah.

Joey 43:11

Yeah. Women are crushing men in education and virtually every sector of upbringing. And if you want to read an interesting book about that, there's a book called the Demise of Guys by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. It's a fascinating book.

Steven H Van Wie 43:26

Cool. Well, on Thursday, the gold lost over 5% of its value for the 33rd time in history. It's rare. It's not unheard of. I am not going to say today that I'm predicting that gold's going to crash again. But historically, when gold does decide to go down, it falls like a lead weight. Be a little careful with your precious metals right at the moment. Maybe even take a little profit. That said, we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Have day a great.