November 22nd, 2025 - Market Jitters

Steve Van Wie, Adam Van Wie, and Joey Loss discuss investment strategies, market trends, and financial news ahead of Thanksgiving. They analyze the significant wealth tied up in unencumbered real estate, provide insights on navigating market volatility, and caution against scams, particularly in the cryptocurrency market. The meeting emphasizes the importance of strategic financial planning, particularly in light of potential interest rate changes and economic disparities that affect different income levels.

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.

Adam Van Wie 0:06

We're Adam Van Wie.

Joey 0:07

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 0:08

And we are all together here on this very special Saturday. We're gonna have a short week with Thanksgiving coming up and I want to state publicly that we have been okayed to do a show next week live. So I for one plan to be here. And I got a couple other people sort of nodding. So. So do not just fail to turn it on next week thinking, well, they'll just be playing a rerun anyway because that's not going to happen. So maybe by then we'll have some better news in the market. Yesterday was a, a little bit of an improvement. So we'll see what's going on.

Joey 0:40

I'm pretty sure we're on before football, so I'm not sure there's any excuses.

Steven H Van Wie 0:44

There you go. Yeah, well, to all of the regulars, as I quit to someone earlier this week, you keep listening, we'll keep talking. So, so those are the rules, folks. You stay listening to us, we'll be here having a good time. And if you're new, whether you found out about it by happenstance or somebody nudged you a bit, then try to stick around for the hour. And of course, if you do have to miss the show for any reason, you can just go to the website Strive as well dot com. And we have all the shows canned by Monday. I believe this one will be on. So you can pick up on the blogs, you can pick up any programs you missed. And there's no reason to stay ignorant. And there's way more reasons to know everything these days. It's a change in the world out there real fast. Anyway, we will have a trivia question after the first break and I do want to apologize to everybody, but last week when I forgot to answer my own question, we were talking about the. Which one was it? It was the value of residential real estate that is not mortgaged. And I can't remember which way we.

Adam Van Wie 1:55

Did it, but this is a, this is a little tricky because it sounds when you say that like you're talking about houses that are owned free and clear. But we're not.

Steven H Van Wie 2:03

We're talking about aggravate value, the total.

Adam Van Wie 2:05

Value of all residential real estate and the total value of all mortgages. And then what isn't covered up by a mortgage?

Steven H Van Wie 2:11

And Bob had called in and said his guess was 34% and I told him it was too low. The actual number, 72.6%, which means there's a lot of wealth in real estate. A lot of wealth that is not encumbered. That is an excellent thing.

Joey 2:28

Yeah. Honestly, that shocked me. That was much higher than my bad mental math estimated.

Adam Van Wie 2:33

Yeah, for sure.

Steven H Van Wie 2:34

But it's also indicative of some trends because so many homes during and after Covid have been selling for cash. And there's a lot of people that have a lot of cash. And those things, of course, are 100% unencumbered. Other people are paying them down. I think with the lower mortgage rates, the payoffs might be accelerated a little bit because it's not taking so much cash flow from people. But for whatever reason, the number 72.6%

Steven H Van Wie 3:02

of our real estate, residential real estate, has no encumbrance on it. I think that's a marvelous thing.

Adam Van Wie 3:08

Yeah. And also, people that owned their homes before COVID then saw a huge run up in price. And if you didn't sell or refinance and take cash out, you're sitting on a bunch of equity as well.

Steven H Van Wie 3:19

Absolutely true. So I just wanted to get that out there because it was one of those could have had a V8 moments on the way home. Oops, I forgot to say that. So after the break, you'll get this one and we'll. We'll get it answered today. In most good deal that's happened to me twice that I can think of. But in 11 years, that's not too bad. Excuse me. I don't know what it is about this room, but it brings out the worst in my allergies anyway. This week in the market, I'd rather not talk about it, so I'm just not going to. And I'll let you do it.

Adam Van Wie 3:34

All right.

Adam Van Wie 3:53

Well, I'm not that concerned about it. From April up until a few weeks ago, the market rallied more than 30% with a maximum drawdown during that time of just 3%. That's only the fifth time that that has happened in the modern era of stock trading. And that type of rally is really fun, but it's also unsustainable. There's just. No, that doesn't make sense. You cannot have a market that just goes up. It just doesn't work that way. There has to be buyers and sellers, and when the buyers take over, it's great. You make a lot of money, but eventually the sellers are going to kick in. People, people are going to take profits. It's just. It's inevitable.

Adam Van Wie 4:33

It's. When this happens, when these rallies come to an end, the market is typically weak over the next month and even three months. But over six months in a year it tends to get back on track and just become a normal market again. In the middle of these week periods also come big rallies like Friday. So trying to time the market is going to be impossible because on Thursday you probably wanted to sell but on Friday you would have regretted that decision. So if you're a trader, do what you're gonna do. But if you're a long term investor, just don't. Do not try and time the market or play with your holdings. Now the one caveat to that is take a look at your portfolio, double check it, see if you need to rebalance. You've probably made a ton of monies in equity over the last three years and you've probably made a little bit of money this year in bonds. But I bet that if you had a 60, 40, you're probably sitting on a 65, 35 right now or something along those lines. If you want to rebalance that, we're still only 3 to 6% off of all time highs. It's a fine time to rebalance. But look at it as a rebalance, not as selling to time the market. That that is not what you want to do in this situation. So just a couple of things you want to think about. If you're a 401k investor and you're buying every month, don't change it if anything, when things go crazy like this, up your contribution if anything, but do not change it. Just continue to buy. You will get an opportunity to dollar cost average into the market. When the market goes down, it's kind of your best friend because you're buying more shares for the same amount of money that you were a month ago, you're getting a better deal. So it's going to come back. You know, don't just don't make any crazy changes just because you see a little volatility.

Steven H Van Wie 6:19

Only 20% of 401k and IRA owners actually max out their, their contributions. And especially true if you're over 50 and you have catch up contributions, it's only 20%. So if there's more to come in, your ability to pay and, and your ability to contribute both get some more in by the end of the year.

Adam Van Wie 6:40

Yeah, and we got some good news on that last week that the max contribution limit is going up to 24,500 next year. So that's a huge amount of money that you can put away and really pack away money for your future. And if you're in the catch up contribution. It now has to be done in a Roth starting next year. But it's. What is it now? 8, 500. Is that the catch up?

Steven H Van Wie 7:01

It, it went up this year's 8,000, it's going up to 85. And if you're 60, 61, 62 or 63 on December 31st, your catch up contribution is 11,002 50 in your 401k.

Adam Van Wie 7:05

That's what I mean next year.

Adam Van Wie 7:15

That's a huge amount of money. Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 7:18

Especially that means you've already put in what, 31 and a half I think from this year. So you can have a, a fantastic year tucking money away. And then if there's a match on top of that, you know, on and on and on could be a profit.

Adam Van Wie 7:29

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 7:33

Easily be $100,000 between the, the employer side, your side over the next couple years if you're in that special three year period where you can do that extra catch up contribution too. So really packing away money for retirement, you know, can't ever go wrong with that. So take a look at that. But really my most important, I think thing to just remind people is don't do anything drastic. Don't, please don't try and time this market and sell right now because you might do us all a favor if you sell. You're probably going to sell at the lowest point and then we'll all rebound and you'll be out of the market.

Steven H Van Wie 8:08

And there is a lot more to say about that. So after the break and after the trivia question, we'll get back into that aspect. I don't want to talk about certain aspects that are transitory, so to speak, but there are some things that we have plenty of room to deal with yet this year. And we'll get to it. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 8:30

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 8:32

I'm Adam Van Wie

Joey 8:33

 And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 8:34

I'm sorry, I was getting ahead of me even.

Joey 8:36

Sorry. You got 10 years of routine.

Steven H Van Wie 8:39

There you go.

Steven H Van Wie 8:42

I want to get back to the or. I want to get to the phones because we do have a call waiting. But I want to give out the trivia question first. Give them a chance. Brought to you as usual by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm. And you can get a hold of Paul at 904-636-7888.

Adam Van Wie 9:00

What?

Steven H Van Wie 9:01

This is a terrible time of year to talk about this, but I think it's why it's relevant. What percentage of people earning 300,000 or more a year admit to living paycheck to paycheck?

Steven H Van Wie 9:13

Yeah. Okay. Good morning, Bob.

Bob 9:18

Sixteen percent.

Steven H Van Wie 9:21

Too low.

Steven H Van Wie 9:23

I like the fact that you're always willing to put a floor on it, though.

Bob 9:28

Sometimes I put a ceiling on it, too.

Steven H Van Wie 9:30

Sometimes. Yeah. Just depends what kind of a generous mood you're in, I guess.

Bob 9:34

Yeah, I guess. Hey, Adam, are you calling this a correction or just volatility, what we're seeing right now in the market?

Adam Van Wie 9:41

Yeah, right now it's just volatility that they're not. Not. I'm sure there are stocks that are in correction, and I know there are, but the. None of the indexes are in correction.

Bob 9:52

Okay. Okay. All right.

Steven H Van Wie 9:54

Yeah. I think the technical term 5 to 7% is a pause.

Adam Van Wie 9:59

That maybe.

Steven H Van Wie 10:01

I'm not sure. Pretty sure that's how they define it. I don't usually look at that stuff, but if you read enough stuff, you catch it along the way.

Bob 10:08

Well, isn't there a bright side to this for those of us that have to take distributions before the end of the year if our value of our portfolios are down?

Steven H Van Wie 10:18

I was joking about that before the show came on, actually.

Adam Van Wie 10:21

So ideally, you would have taken your think ahead. Yeah. But to make that really make sense, you would have had to take your RMD about three weeks ago at the peak, and. And then your value would be down for next year, and it would lower your RMD for next year. But most people haven't done their RMDs because it's just most people wait until the end of the year. It's still not gonna be a bad time. Like, if you were up 12% three weeks ago, you're probably up 8 or 9%. I mean, you've still had a good year. So it's not. All is not lost.

Bob 10:53

That's true. Well, the next thing on my list is to get online and look at the special that's coming about on a. On extraterrestrial visitors that we're having. Fox News is all about this. And I guess there's a big special and Marco Rubio is the. The expert on this. I'm wondering if he's having diplomatic conversations with these people that we don't know about.

Steven H Van Wie 11:12

I saw that.

Steven H Van Wie 11:18

Have you seen Men in Black?

Bob 11:21

Yes, I have.

Steven H Van Wie 11:23

Maybe it's going on, huh? Life imitating art.

Bob 11:26

Yeah.

Bob 11:28

Yeah, that's true. Well, you guys have a great show. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Steven H Van Wie 11:34

Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Thanks.

Bob 11:36

Same to you. Same to you all.

Steven H Van Wie 11:41

Rubio is an interesting one to be talking about that. I've seen a couple of the ads for it. There's. I don't know, there's a lot of us who believe not only that such things exist, but that there's basically no chance that they couldn't. When you look at all the stuff around the world and everything that's going on, all of the things that have been so well hidden from us. So we'll see.

Joey 12:04

I think that documentary is called Age of Disclosure.

Steven H Van Wie 12:06

Okay.

Adam Van Wie 12:07

I think they're just setting up for when the Epstein stuff turns out to be the big dud that it's going to be. I think this is the next media. There you go. Yeah. Aliens.

Steven H Van Wie 12:17

Harry Reid spent $25 million a year studying this stuff. He was in the Senate. Nobody knew about it, but he had it allocated every year for study of this thing. You never know. And as I mentioned to Sarah yesterday, I think it was said, you know, if it's so common, why is everybody so worried? If they wanted to get rid of us, we'd all be gone a long time ago. So who knows?

Adam Van Wie 12:27

That's funny.

Joey 12:42

I think our best defense is it's probably a lot of fun just watching us.

Steven H Van Wie 12:47

Probably.

Adam Van Wie 12:47

Right.

Joey 12:47

You know, or like a ant farm for them.

Steven H Van Wie 12:49

It's their own personal.

Joey 12:51

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 12:52

The Truman Show. Yeah.

Joey 12:53

The whole planet Truman Show.

Steven H Van Wie 12:55

That's right. All right. We had a few more comments on the market and. And how really how good things are. I wanted Adam to take some time.

Adam Van Wie 13:03

To wrap that up. That's the really wild thing about this week is that all the news was amazing. It wasn't just good, it was like off the charts good. On Wednesday after the close, Nvidia had an earnings call that it kind of was going to define. Define the market over the. That's what it felt like going into. Well, no, even into the overnight and into an hour the next day. The re. The results they reported were way better than expected. Nvidia popped pre 5% in pre market. Then Thursday morning, we saw the delayed government jobs report released and the expectation was for 50,000 new jobs. And instead we saw a headline number of 119,000 new jobs off the. I mean, double the expectation. More than double. And then Walmart reported much better than expected results across the board. And they even raised their forward guidance. I mean that's. Walmart's the biggest retailer in the world. That's great news. Walmart sells to all levels of economic. It doesn't matter if you're poor, rich. Everybody shops at Walmart.

Steven H Van Wie 13:19

For an hour.

Steven H Van Wie 13:56

It's unbelievable.

Steven H Van Wie 14:04

Did you know that, did you see this one? That they're moving over to the Nasdaq? I didn't know the, the new, the CEO was retiring. They will get a new one coming in but he announced that they're going to move to Nasdaq because in reality Walmart is now a tech company.

Steven H Van Wie 14:23

I said it was his announcement.

Adam Van Wie 14:25

Okay. I mean I, I, I don't hate the move, but I just also don't.

Steven H Van Wie 14:30

Really think it's true. Market loved the comment. Okay, you see their, their shares went up massively this week.

Adam Van Wie 14:37

Well, that was because their earnings, they had a great, amazing earnings and I.

Steven H Van Wie 14:41

Think he's crediting a lot of their earnings to a lot of their technology because let's face it, that's the biggest.

Adam Van Wie 14:46

Logistics company anywhere outside of Amazon.

Steven H Van Wie 14:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joey 14:51

I mean it's, I see the move as smart for their stock price because how many NASDAQ funds are now layered on top of an S P fund in, in portfolios? You're only going to have more people dipping into it.

Adam Van Wie 15:04

I definitely don't hate it. I just don't necessarily agree with the comment. 100% I agree with that.

Steven H Van Wie 15:09

So if they pay him, he better be right.

Adam Van Wie 15:11

On Thursday morning, the market digested all of that news, opened much higher and then crashed. It was actually a 5% reversal just about from peak to trough and there was absolutely nothing that caused it. I couldn't find a thing just happened.

Steven H Van Wie 15:29

The two bad hours of the day lately, from 10 to 11 and from 3 to 4. So if you're thinking of doing any selling, don't do it then. And if you're thinking of doing any buying, look at the end of each of those hours for opportunity.

Adam Van Wie 15:44

It actually was one of the worst intraday reversals in history, like top five, top 10. And when these events have happened historically, kind of similar to what I said earlier, the short term outlook for the market is kind of flat to down slightly. But longer term, the outlook looks pretty much fine. It's really not a indicative of we're headed into, you know, the end of times or anything like that.

Steven H Van Wie 16:08

Absolutely true. If you look at the earnings season that just wrapped up, the beat rate for earnings per share was 73.3, which is really good. And, and the revenue beats were 72.8, which is really unheard of. Yeah, that's, and that's nothing without guidance. Guidance came out positive. 13.89%.

Adam Van Wie 16:25

Excellent.

Adam Van Wie 16:33

That's a huge number.

Steven H Van Wie 16:34

The average guidance Over a long period of time is minus three. So not only are the current statistics good, the expectations are even better. And that includes Nvidia. He's sold out of some stuff.

Adam Van Wie 16:39

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 16:49

Yeah, definitely.

Adam Van Wie 16:51

Yeah, I saw that. Imagine that he actually said they barely sold anything into China, but it didn't matter because we're sold out anyway. So it's not like they lost those sales, they just went elsewhere.

Steven H Van Wie 17:03

How fast can you put those factories up?

Adam Van Wie 17:05

Yeah. Crazy.

Joey 17:06

If you had told me that there would be a 5 trillion dollar market cap company full stop, you know, two years ago, I might believe you. And then secondly that that company would also grow revenue at 20% a quarter.

Steven H Van Wie 17:18

Right. It is, it's just absurd.

Adam Van Wie 17:18

Crazy.

Joey 17:20

It's growing bigger than a lot of small companies.

Adam Van Wie 17:23

And over 60% of every dollar they make would flow to the bottom line. Incredible.

Steven H Van Wie 17:27

Wow. And speaking of trillion, that sort of thing, welcome to Eli Lilly for joining the trillion dollar club. The first pharmaceutical company to do that. Yeah. Good for Indianapolis. So lots of good things out there. Now if you just read the news that we or listen to the news that we report, you wouldn't know that the world is apparently going to hell in a handbasket. But apparently they are because hey, look what's going on in the news. I, you know, the politics of the situation right now is as goofy as I've ever seen it.

Adam Van Wie 17:40

Interesting.

Adam Van Wie 18:08

That's going some and I can, this is, I, I think exactly what you're talking about. CNN's Fear and Greed index is sitting at its most extreme fear levels in over the last decade. The University of Michigan consumer confidence survey, it's sitting at its second lowest level ever on record. That's insane. It doesn't.

Joey 18:27

It doesn't make any sense. You had, I mean leading up to the tariffs like that should be higher than whatever's going on now.

Adam Van Wie 18:36

Right. Because we are going on now.

Joey 18:37

We didn't know thing we didn't know enough about. Like everyone was pretty at some somewhere on the spectrum of concerned.

Adam Van Wie 18:44

Absolutely. I was very concerned.

Joey 18:45

Yeah. And like regardless of what you thought of tariffs as a general principle, I think we all were a little concerned about how it was going to play out. And if the index wasn't as high then, then as it is now, I'm very confused.

Steven H Van Wie 18:56

We're looking at it all wrong. There's an explanation for that. But first I want to mention also New York manufacturing took a sharp jump that no one expected. Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 19:06

All, all five Fed regional Fed surveys were better than expected. Food prices are moderating the fact The Thanksgiving meal is down 5% year over year. It's just such the jobs numbers are just fine. Like the weekly reports are not spiking. There's just nothing indicating that this should be the case.

Steven H Van Wie 19:27

Oh, and by the way, on those jobs numbers, the. The household survey was up, I think, 245,000.

Steven H Van Wie 19:38

And the CES birth death adjustment that we like to refer to as made up jobs, that was minus 150, 45,000. So all these numbers that you're seeing are, are. They're even bigger than they appear to be. Now, that is not paving the way for a recession in my book. Anyway, on tariffs, the. The problem with tariffs, we've been studying it against the wrong variable. Tariffs affect the unemployment rate, not the inflation rate. There is a difference. We can talk more about that after the break, but right now, got to take a break. So we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 20:20

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 20:22

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 20:23

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 20:24

And remind everybody that lines are open 904-222-8255

Steven H Van Wie 20:29

where you can take a stab at our trivia question, which is what percent of Americans earning 300,000 a year or more admit to living paycheck to paycheck? And thanks to Bob, we know it's more than 16%.

Steven H Van Wie 20:46

Well, quick side note here that I wanted to get to.

Steven H Van Wie 20:52

There's a woman named Charlie Javis. Don't know if anybody's ever heard of her. I had. She started up a financial company of some sort and she called it Frank.

Steven H Van Wie 21:06

Who knows why? Okay, sold it to JP Morgan Chase for 175 million million in 2021.

Steven H Van Wie 21:15

But she misrepresented how many customers she had and was convicted of fraud this March. In her contract with JP Morgan, it said that if they had a problem of this nature, J.P. morgan would be obligated to pay her legal bills. J.P. morgan signed it and did. They just got hit with their legal bills. Wow. It was, let's see, $142

Steven H Van Wie 21:46

million in legal fees. Which she called

Adam Van Wie 21:49

Whoa.

Steven H Van Wie 21:53

very reasonable. Okay. She w. Did not agree with JP Morgan or they didn't agree with her on that one, I should say on.

Joey 21:56

Wow.

Adam Van Wie 22:02

Earth would JP Morgan have signed a contract like that?

Steven H Van Wie 22:04

That is, they must have really wanted it. The second question that's related to that is what happened to their due diligence?

Adam Van Wie 22:12

Seriously?

Steven H Van Wie 22:14

That was in Covid. It was 2021. But that doesn't mean that you don't at least audit the customer base of somebody you're paying 175 million to, does it?

Adam Van Wie 22:24

I, I believe some people probably lost their jobs over that one.

Steven H Van Wie 22:28

If they didn't, they should, plain and simple. What can you say? All right,

Steven H Van Wie 22:36

what are we going to get into first? How about pig butchering? Anybody want to talk about pig butchering? Sure. I know most people don't know it by that term, but you know what it is and here's how it works. You're online, Facebook, something like that, and an initial contact gets hold of you with a wonderful profile. So for a woman to be a good looking man or something like that, or a rich man, and they get to know each other casually is step one, which is just called the initial contact. This is the steps in pig butchering. Number two is building trust. This is called the fattening. So it can take weeks or even months. They build up an emotional relationship, lots of daily contact, voicemails, text, that can be whatever. And strangely enough,

Steven H Van Wie 23:35

they're very compatible. His interests are just like yours, or vice versa. So you got a lot to talk about. And then one day comes the introducing crypto and investing. This guy on the other end of the line, the rich guy, has an inside contact or an uncle or something who gives great tips about crypto investing. And it's a slam dunk guarantee that you make money on it. So they start out small. In step four, small wins. They, they have their own fake trading websites and they trade a little currency or cryptocurrency here and there, crypto money, whatever. And you can withdraw bits of money from your account, but they want you to keep depositing more and more and more. And when it gets just so big and the trust builds, so the contribution level goes up and up and up as they start showing all these wonderful profits. And then comes the slaughter. This is pig butchering. And here's how it goes. Real simple. Drain the account and vanish.

Steven H Van Wie 24:43

Or demand huge fees, taxes or verification deposits to withdraw. And then the platform you're on suddenly crashes or freezes your funds. That is pig butchering. And I think most people know someone who will have fallen for something along those lines. One of the friends of the show has had that problem. There are many others. So it's almost always in crypto, not always, but almost because it's hard to reverse those transactions. They're always fake trading platforms looking very professional, very snutzy. Scammers claim to be living somewhere else, notably, usually Singapore, Hong Kong, Hong Kong or they can be US based, but they're traveling abroad. Heavy use of translated scripts. In other words, the English isn't all that good. And that's, that's one of your first clues for every kind of scam out there. Read the grammar on it. And you can almost always tell when you've got a non English speaking, native English speaking person on the other line. Because English is very complicated in the grammarian part. And unless you're married to an English teacher will slap you up if you mess up it. It's easy to not be very good at it. Let's see. Many operations run by human trafficking victims who are working as slave labor doing this isn't that special. Now let's see. The UN and the FBI estimate these scams worldwide cost 50 to $100 billion. And, and just in the US alone in the. In the year 23 and 24 victims lost $3.9 billion to pig butchering. SK wow, that's a lot of money. So here are some things to watch for. Someone you've never met in person pushes you toward crypto. That's kind of a. An eye raiser, eye opener. The rush. They rush you to move conversations off the dating app to WhatsApp or Telegram. Now I have never used either of those. I don't know much about them, but they, they prefer that for whatever reason it is. Maybe something about the visibility, I'm not sure. The trading site isn't a known exchange. It's not Binance or Coinbase or anything like that. It's their own thing with a fancy name and a real good look. Just doesn't really exist. You're seeing impossible returns of 10 to 50% per week. Now, how many times have we said this over the years? If it sounds too good to be true, fill in the blank. They get angry or emotional if you try to back off or stop your deposits. And I can understand that too. But if you, if you know someone or if you have been scammed, don't feel like the Lone Ranger

Adam Van Wie 26:40

It is.

Steven H Van Wie 27:48

number here. 57 of adults say that they've been scammed or tried to be scammed in the last year. The scary part of that is 23% actually had their money stolen. That's American adults. 23% lost money to scams. Not all pig butchering, obviously, but still. So, you know, you just, you gotta, you gotta be alert. Just don't trust things that come through. You're gonna lose. You have to be able to go somewhere you trust. Like when our clients want to See their money, they go to Charles Schwab company. Everybody knows them. They're always online, they're always trustworthy. They see their money, they see everything that happened to it. Nobody's skimming off the top or anything like that. If you don't have that same arrangement with a Schwab or a Fidelity or something, perhaps you have the wrong advisor. Possible, more than possible. Very, very dangerous. Don't be one of the 23%.

Adam Van Wie 28:08

Wow.

Joey 28:57

One of the big tells too is if you're looking, if this is happening through social media, look at the age of the account and how many posts they have, the nature of the posts. I mean, first of all, if someone's reaching out that you don't know, I think you should be very cautious to begin with. But a lot of times you can tell that something just isn't right. If the profile has like two pictures on it, it says made in July of 2025, you know, and they're in their 40s or 30s or something. It's very unusual for a 30 or 40 year old to just get on Facebook in 2025. There's other signs. And if your gut says it's wrong, it's probably not a real person.

Steven H Van Wie 29:38

I am Facebook and all other ways for social media impaired

Steven H Van Wie 29:45

made a conscious effort when all this stuff started coming out to not do it because I knew it would take a lot of time that I didn't want to give it. And besides being on a highly regular regulated business, I don't want people looking anyway. But you guys, your generations have grown up with all this stuff and you understand how to work them a little better. So if anybody out there feels like they're in some kind of a position where this might be going on in their accounts, please, if you need any help, you can call the office and get one of these guys. You can call the FBI. There are lots of ways to, to get help. And once it happens, it's very hard to get it back. Especially if you're doing crypto. Oh yeah, when it goes poof, it goes poof, poof. Although it probably never existed anyway, so. But they, if they sent, you know, if they want you to feed those accounts, if they want you to feed crypto into them, that's one thing. But if they want you to feed cash into them, that cash goes in the pocket. The crypto never gets purchased. So you can lose on this any number of ways. Let's see. Financial misconduct targeting older investors. In 2024, state securities regulators received 3,613

Steven H Van Wie 31:04

complaints for. From elderly people that thought they were being scammed. Okay, that doesn't sound like a whole bunch, but, you know, $4 billion sounds like a whole bunch. So, you know you're going to get targeted the more money you have. That's the bottom line on it at the federal level. If you add in the federal complaints, it comes up to about 8,800 active cases right now at the FBI and so on. So it. It's not just a big problem. It's a real, real big problem. And one last thing you should be looking out for, for sure. Real estate scams. These apparently are taking over the world. I'm not sure exactly how they work, but between AI blockchain and real estate, there are a lot of people out there looking for your money, and I would suggest you don't give it to them. How's that? Okay, good news. We've got to take a quick break again. I don't know where it all goes, but then I'm going to turn these guys loose on some news and see what they think. All right, don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. We'll be right back. 

Steven H Van Wie 32:12

Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 32:14

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey 32:16

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 32:17

And we do have on the phone. Good morning, Mike.

Mike 32:22

Hey, good morning, guys.

Steven H Van Wie 32:24

What's happening?

Mike 32:27

I haven't called much lately because unfortunately I've been having some breathing issues. They took 120 milliliters of fluid out between the lung and the lung cavity at Baptist Speeches Hospital, so. But they analyzed the fluid and I didn't hear any words like malignant malignancy or big C. So I think I'll probably be okay eventually.

Steven H Van Wie 33:00

Good. Feel better.

Adam Van Wie 33:01

That's good. I'm sorry. Sorry to hear you're going through all that.

Mike 33:04

Thank you. Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate that. Anyhow, guys, I. Take a shot. Okay. I'm going to say 40%, huh?

Steven H Van Wie 33:10

Sure.

Steven H Van Wie 33:16

And why would you say that? Just because you have a reputation for always being right.

Mike 33:24

Steve, you're too kind. I'd laugh, but then I would gag.

Steven H Van Wie 33:30

I'll tame it down. That's funny.

Mike 33:34

It doesn't matter. I'm sure that Adam, Joey, or, you know, either a deserving group or person that could use it.

Steven H Van Wie 33:44

Well, this time of year, that's a slam dunk guarantee.

Adam Van Wie 33:47

Yeah, we appreciate that. Thanks, Mike.

Mike 33:49

Yeah, you got it, guys. Have a great show.

Steven H Van Wie 33:52

Thank you. And feel better, okay?

Mike 33:54

Thank you.

Steven H Van Wie 33:56

40% of Americans earning $300,000 or more admit to living paycheck to paycheck. Notice the keyword in there. Admit. What's the real number?

Adam Van Wie 34:06

Yeah.

Joey 34:08

I bet it's higher. Like.

Adam Van Wie 34:09

Yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, just in California and New York alone, where half of that's going to various state and federal governments. And then you've got mostly private schools because the publics aren't that great. I mean, it's actually pretty easy to do in a high cost state.

Steven H Van Wie 34:28

Like, you got lifestyle expansion.

Adam Van Wie 34:30

Yeah, definitely. That is another culprit.

Steven H Van Wie 34:34

Yeah, definitely. There's, there's a lot of, a lot of things can go into it. And one of them, I, you know, I think about Joey all the time with this one. Just child care. Imagine if you got a family of three young kids and you're making 300.

Adam Van Wie 34:45

Oh, yeah.

Adam Van Wie 34:50

000 in a high cost state for.

Steven H Van Wie 34:52

Yeah. Send a third to the government. Send a third daycare. And then you do whatever you got left for houses and cars and clothes and food and like that. It's. It's kind of scary. It's not your income that you got to work on. If you're having trouble financially. It's one way. A second job is good. Making more money is always good. But you got to look at the, the everybody hates the B word. Got to look at some budgeting to try to get it back under control.

Adam Van Wie 34:55

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 35:23

I mean, if you, if you're in California and you had three kids and they were either in daycare or private school, would it surprise you to think that you were paying 60 to 80 grand a year in tuition fees?

Joey 35:34

It's definitely possible. I mean, here, here in Jacksonville, where it's not nearly as bad as it is in places like Philadelphia or other bigger cities. Three kids daycare. In my head, that's easily 50,000. Easily after tax money.

Steven H Van Wie 35:48

Yeah, that's the other thing that if you make enough money to be able to afford it, you don't get a deduction for it. That's.

Adam Van Wie 35:54

Nope.

Joey 35:55

No. And even if you get a deduction, it's, it's pathetically small. You save like 600. It takes you like. I don't know. I mean, I'll just be candid. Last year, I think we spent 18,000 on daycare and got like a $300 credit for, you know, it doesn't really help.

Steven H Van Wie 35:59

Right.

Adam Van Wie 36:12

Did you spend that all in one place or.

Steven H Van Wie 36:15

Really?

Joey 36:15

I think the day's diaper wipe that out. Yeah, they, I filed.

Steven H Van Wie 36:19

Well, the,

Steven H Van Wie 36:21

the problems that people face, especially when they're young, are the demands that. The various and sundry demands for cash. And you guys are especially Joey with the young kids. Adam's got demands on cash from his kids, too, but they're older kids. Older problems. Very expensive problems. They.

Adam Van Wie 36:43

They are, but they're not daycare. Like, they're just. It's a totally different ball game.

Joey 36:47

The advantage I have, though, is I wake up every morning knowing what that cost is. You get. I don't know, you get the pleasure of having no idea what's coming your.

Adam Van Wie 36:54

Way, especially right now. My son going to college. I don't know where he's going to go. I don't know. I don't have any idea how much it's going to cost us.

Steven H Van Wie 37:00

Yeah, it's either going to be an arm and a leg or at least one of the other. Or maybe two in one. Right in that range. Fair enough. Okay.

Adam Van Wie 37:08

Yeah, I mean, anywhere that. Yeah, that's fair.

Joey 37:10

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 37:15

What do you guys want to talk about? It's Thanksgiving. We should talk about something good, maybe.

Adam Van Wie 37:21

Well, I don't have anything good, but. Yeah, I will. Over the last year, I would say that bitcoin has been a very, very popular topic in our office. And people. People have been asking about it over the last three weeks. I would say 0% of people in our office have asked about bitcoin. It switched on a dime. It's really crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 37:23

Okay. Well, go bad then.

Steven H Van Wie 37:39

And it's.

Adam Van Wie 37:44

It's crazy that bitcoin is now down over 30% off its peak, and the historical average drawdown in Bitcoin is 32%. So not. This is not an unusual event in the history of bitcoin. What's unusual is that it's so pretty pervasive. Now. The Harvard endowment disclosed a $500 million position in the. The Bitcoin ETF IBIT at the end of the third quarter. So that's now a $350 million position in IBIT.

Steven H Van Wie 38:14

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 38:14

But if endowments and all of these, if it's that widely accepted for it to still exhibit the same trading patterns, it's pretty wild.

Steven H Van Wie 38:24

It's nuts. Yeah. But, you know, it's not there. I keep coming back to the same argument. It's not there. This thing is ethereal as anything you could ever quote, invest in. It's just not for me. Now, we've. We've talked in the past shows about the stablecoin version where there's actual money and it's. It's a means to an end, meaning a transaction device. Fine, good. Wonderful. Love it. But as an investment, I don't think so.

Joey 38:25

Yeah. That is a.

Adam Van Wie 38:57

Yeah. And then here's another bad one. But does this concern you at all? 6.65% of subprime car loans are more than 60 days past due. That's a record dating back to when they started tracking this in 1994. Is that cause for concern?

Steven H Van Wie 39:16

Not for me personally, but yes, it's huge cause for concern.

Adam Van Wie 39:20

I mean, is that, is that one of these things that could. Well, we know what happened with subprime in 08 and that was in the housing market. This is in the car market, which is a much smaller market, but still. Definitely. It raises the antenna a little bit.

Steven H Van Wie 39:36

Yeah. Repo man's getting his job back. You look out your window one day and all of a sudden there's a truck out there and loading your car onto the truck. Not a good day. Really not a good day. And again, interest rates would help this a lot too if we could get them down. Do you know how many Fed, they're called the individual chairman, you know, the Fed offices, You know how many of them have resigned just under Powell for insider trading? No.

Adam Van Wie 40:08

5. Wow.

Steven H Van Wie 40:11

That. It's kind of reflecting on him as a manager. And by kind of, I mean directly. And he's getting a lot of grief for it right now and I think he deserves it. That's just a little tidbit I thought everybody might be interested in. He will be gone. This one. One just announced that he will be gone in January, I think, and Powell's term is up in May. I think there's a lot of good looking candidates for this job and I don't know which tack they're going to take. But Trump wants him down and he's going to make the appointment. I got a feeling that Powell's probably. I go back and forth on this. You guys feel free to disagree, but I think he's probably going to do the December cut quarter point. What do you guys think?

Adam Van Wie 40:59

So the rates of that spiked on Friday. That's one of the reasons the market was up. I, I think so. Just based on those consumer confidence numbers and the fear and greed index and the general malaise that seems to be out there right now. This consumer sentiment data in October showed a really sharp divergence based on income. This backs up this theory I've been talking about for quite some time now, the post Covid world. The winners were people that already had assets and were somewhat wealthy and the losers were people that were renting and didn't have any Assets that would grow didn't have stock market portfolios. Those people are not doing very well. So check this out. Confidence among consumers making more than $125,000 a year had its largest monthly increase in a year, rising to the highest level since January, while those making less than 75,000 were the least confident since January, April.

Steven H Van Wie 42:01

So money can buy happiness.

Adam Van Wie 42:03

More divergence. I mean, it's, it's like we live in a, in a, there's two levels of society at this point.

Steven H Van Wie 42:09

The, the term that's been coined for this, that I've been reading a lot lately is the K shaped economy.

Adam Van Wie 42:15

That's actually the title of this little blurb. So. Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 42:18

Yeah. So those on the upward part of the K are doing better and better, and those on the downward part are still spiraling down. And I frankly don't know how to change that, except with lower interest rates.

Adam Van Wie 42:31

I mean, that's, it may help some, but it doesn't solve the issue.

Steven H Van Wie 42:37

No, it doesn't. And what we're going to see going forward is much more construction jobs and that sort of thing. And I think this economy will wind up a lot better than it is right now once all these policy things kick in. There's, there's what, $18 trillion coming to this country to build things, make things and so on. But it's, it all starts with a Caterpillar tractor mowing down the trees, and it takes a long, long time to build a factory and outfit it and build the equipment and so on. So I, I fear that the, the upshot of this whole thing will be that Trump's going to run out of time to prove himself right before the, the November elections. I worry about that. It's another reason I'd like to see the interest rates come down, to maybe give it a little more of a jump start in the economy. So that's where we are at this point. All right. It's over already. I don't know how that happens, but it seems to get faster and faster. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and remember, you got quite a bit to be thankful for, especially if you're on the upper side of the cane. Then call us and we'll talk. Take care, everybody. We will be back next week live, as I remind everybody, so don't fail to listen. This is the Van Wie Financial Hours signing off.