February 21st, 2026 - Double Dose of Van Wie

In this lively Saturday morning meeting, Steve, Adam, and Joey take over Angela’s usual real estate show to discuss the whimsical world of finances with an unexpected real estate twist. Listeners are encouraged to call in and discuss anything on their minds, reveling in market oddities like a stock pickers’ market that feels both volatile and stable at once. Through the chatter of NBA legends turned entrepreneurs and tax tips, the hosts keep the energy high while unraveling the mysteries of the economy.

Transcript

Steven H Van Wie 0:00

It's Saturday morning, it's 9 o' clock, and this is not all, all things real estate. This is the hour number one for today only. This is a one off of the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 0:15

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:16

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 0:18

And Angela couldn't be here today, so she graciously offered us the ability to do a two hour show today. And we accepted, of course, because why not? And we will discuss anything you want to discuss. And real estate is included because one or two things will happen if you call them with a real estate question. Either we'll know it and answer it or we won't. Angela's listening and she'll get back to you. How's that? So don't be afraid to call. We were talking right before the show started. I know Angela has a set of regular listeners. We have a set of regular listeners and there's an overlap in between. But I know that there will be people listening this hour who don't normally listen to the second hour and vice versa. So we're not planning to repeat ourselves, except we are going to do a market rep at the beginning of each hour so that everybody gets it. But we honestly don't care who calls and what they ask. We just like you to call. If you've been listening to any amount of radio talk radio, you know that most shows that have to do with finances are pre recorded. And it's just not the same when you have the ability to take phone calls and you use it and people actually call and express what's on their mind. It's right up to date and it just, to me, it puts all the fun back in talking about things like that. So do us a favor, we got a couple hours to sit here, give us a call today. Meanwhile, for our regulars, if you are also an Angela fan, I hope you appreciate the, the second hour and all of this. And for hers, if you normally listen to Angela and then tune away, then stick around and listen to this hour and then if you like it, do the next and then become a regular at the 10 o' clock hour. Okay, enough of that said, I guess this is, this is another week where we come in smiling a little bit. But in my mind it was one of the strangest, craziest weeks ever. You agree with me?

Adam Van Wie 2:32

I don't know about ever, but it was a strange week. It definitely felt worse than it was. And I think there's a number of reasons for that, one of which the market really hasn't done anything in four months. It's been stalled out, it's been flat, it's been consolidating, whatever you want to call it. And that's okay. We had three years of really, really, really good stock market returns. In fact one of the best three year periods on record. And I really, I don't, I haven't been around for another three year period that's been as strong as the last three years. So seeing a bit of consolidation doesn't worry me at all. It's probably pretty healthy for the.

Adam Van Wie 3:19

So that I think that has something to do with it. The market also feels very volatile, but in reality the opposite is true. Even this week, which saw decent gains across all the indexes, it just, I don't know, it felt really weird.

Steven H Van Wie 3:32

It did. And I imagine you did the same thing I did this morning when we were putting the numbers on paper for show prep. I looked at the numbers and I said, really? I didn't feel like that.

Adam Van Wie 3:43

Yeah.

Joey Loss 3:45

And you know, like the big reason for that is if you look at the weed level, like just down in the weeds, like things are moving like crazy. But then you look at the, the index level and it's like, oh, it's pretty sleepy.

Adam Van Wie 3:56

I think yesterday is a great example because I was watching the market in the morning and it was bouncing around like crazy and it was down, it was up and it felt like a really volatile day. But it was all within about a 200 point range on the Dow.

Steven H Van Wie 4:11

And those 100 point jumps took place in seconds. And red, green, red, green.

Adam Van Wie 4:13

They did.

Adam Van Wie 4:16

But, but it was only. It was down 40 and up 70 and down 100, then up 100. It really didn't move outside of that range very much. So. It's weird to see volatility that doesn't have a greater effect on the overall market.

Steven H Van Wie 4:30

It sure, sure makes you think. I, I've heard a lot of people describe a market like this as being a stock pickers market. To me it's the opposite.

Joey Loss 4:38

Yeah. It's a stock picking, losing market. Yeah. I don't want to make a bet anywhere. I just want to own the index and wait.

Steven H Van Wie 4:42

No.

Adam Van Wie 4:44

No.

Steven H Van Wie 4:44

Diversification is your very best friend when things are jumping around like that.

Joey Loss 4:49

For sure.

Adam Van Wie 4:50

Yeah. And Friday turned into a good day too. And it seemed to calm down in the afternoon a bit. But man, the morning was just wild. The Nasdaq ended up 1.5% for the week. The S P was up 1.1% and the Dow was up 0.3%. For the year, the Nasdaq's still a little negative while the S p is up 0.9% and the Dow is up 3.3%. So I mean, not incredible numbers, but not really terrible either.

Steven H Van Wie 5:18

We're only, what we're in the final week of the second month and things are good.

Joey Loss 5:25

Yeah, and the Mag 7's down 4% year to date, so that means everybody else is. Yeah, kind of quietly rising.

Adam Van Wie 5:32

Right. And some of the Mag 7's down significantly more than that. Well, some is not. So it's, it's, it's definitely a weird, a weird market. The market may be trading in a tight range, but there's a ton of dispersion between sectors. And you really have to look no further than the two consumer sectors over the last year to see that. A year ago, consumer Discretionary was tanking while consumer staples traded sideways. Then Discretionary rebounded while Staples fell. And recently Discretionary is trading sideways while Staples is rallying. So just nothing has been moving in tandem. The net effect of that though is that both sectors are up year over year, but they took really different paths to get there. Software and semiconductors year to date could not look any, any more different. And those are both in the technology sector, but man, is it different. Software is just absolutely, I mean it's just getting crushed while semiconductors are reaching new all time highs. So things like that, usually you see those sectors move in tandem but, but right now just, just couldn't be any more different. So interesting to follow that as well. Earning season unofficially closed this week and so far it's been solid. Over 1200 companies have reported with over 70% beating on their earnings forecast and 73% beating on revenue. More than 10% of companies have raised their forecast. Forward guidance will just 8.2 have cut. And financials and technology have had the highest beat rates. And tech also has the highest percentage of companies raising guidance. Despite that, tech and financials have been the most out of favor with investors. Conversely, materials companies have been the lowest beat rates and are the second worst when it comes to forward guidance, but are heavily in favor with investors. Go figure.

Steven H Van Wie 7:24

Fickle these days.

Adam Van Wie 7:25

Well, everything is about what AI will disrupt or it won't disrupt. And I normally don't jump right to economic data, but in honor of this being the real estate hour, I will say that new single family home sales declined 1.7% in December. So you all are not buying enough homes. You need to call Angela and go buy a house.

Steven H Van Wie 7:47

That's right. Do your part. It's like when we get into some bad economic times and we go to Costco and then right then and there, the whole economy starts bouncing. You got to do your part as an American. Right. All right. What do you is this. Yeah, we got to take a quick break. We'll be back with a real estate trivia for this hour, so don't go anywhere. This is the unusual first hour, the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 8:14

Angela loved that song and I really like it, too. She did well choosing that. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour, Hour one, filling in for all things real estate this morning. So if you're surprised to hear different voices, don't be. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 8:33

I'm Adam Van Wie. 

Joey Loss 8:34

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 8:45

And we are here to talk about anything you want to talk about. The lines are open 904-222-824. And we have a, you know, we're slanting this hour a little toward real estate just for purposes of because, because we can and we will and we do. Brought to you as usual by Paul Lloyd at First Coast Alarm, 904-636-7888.

Steven H Van Wie 9:02

You got to listen carefully to this one. What father of a famous son by the same name engineered and moved an eight story building and turned it 90 degrees at the end of that?

Adam Van Wie 9:19

Okay.

Steven H Van Wie 9:19

Not a story people probably are familiar with, but you'll like it. The father of a famous son by the same name. All right, a few more things to talk about. We're not going to go, go too far deep into the market until the second hour. But I did want to mention that jobs, the job losses, initial unemployment claims fell again to 206,000. And if there's a quandary that most people have regarding this economy, I think a lot of it is about the job market. It's just labor turnover isn't happening.

Joey Loss 10:00

Agreed.

Adam Van Wie 10:05

No, it's, it's people that have jobs are sticking with them. They're not quitting, they're not getting fired. Generally, there isn't a lot of turnover, but they're also, there isn't a lot of new jobs available either. And so, yeah, if you have a job right now, you're probably more likely than not to just stick with it.

Steven H Van Wie 10:24

And there seems to be an overwhelming amount of pessimism that I find unjustifiable.

Steven H Van Wie 10:32

Joey, what do you think is causing all this?

Joey Loss 10:35

I mean, it feels like for a while. I think there's a couple of things. One, there's always a political climate, right? There's a political angle. There's the way media talks about things, which in any administration is going to say things are awful. And that's certainly the case about how they're talking right now. But then there's also, I think, just a bit of superstition carrying forward about, you know, things have been so good in the stock market and other places for a while. I think people are kind of waiting for the shoe to drop. Last year in particular to tie this into AI. Like, you know, we just got a gust of wind in the market related to AI excitement, the initial infrastructure build out. And it feels like across the board, you know, we're kind of looking out and saying to ourselves, okay, well, where is AI going to show up first? I mean, it's hard to predict which sectors are going to see the initial profit boosts from AI technology. And we've seen. Oh, do we have a caller?

Steven H Van Wie 11:29

Yeah, go ahead, finish your thought.

Joey Loss 11:32

But I think we're just kind of in a place where now we're taking our breath, we're looking around and people are kind of waiting for the shoe to drop. But the reality is the economic data just hasn't given us that shoe drop yet.

Steven H Van Wie 11:41

That's right.

Adam Van Wie 11:42

Yeah. We're still at full employment, by the way.

Joey Loss 11:43

Everything's. Yeah, inflation's okay.

Steven H Van Wie 11:45

Yeah, yeah, everything. Good morning, Bob.

Bob 11:50

Yes, another great trivia. And you did throw me when I heard y' all's voice.

Steven H Van Wie 11:58

I'm sure there were quite a few people thinking that.

Adam Van Wie 12:01

You should have seen the look on our producer's face when we showed up this morning.

Steven H Van Wie 12:05

Yeah, he's always the last to know. So what's on your mind?

Bob 12:07

Exactly.

Bob 12:11

I was going to take a shot at your trivia. Yeah. The movement of the building, that was probably done by Kurt Vonnegan's family.

Steven H Van Wie 12:21

Well, you're probably right. It was. You're probably right.

Bob 12:26

Yeah, yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 12:30

I've been told for. I've been told for two weeks now. This, this is for Roger that. When I'm talking on this particular phone that it's garbled and it's soft and people can't hear me. I don't know if you can do anything to clear that up.

Bob 12:44

It's not you. It's not you. It's my phone. I'm just you.

Steven H Van Wie 12:47

Okay, that's good. And maybe it was just happenstance.

Bob 12:51

No, no, no. You're coming through.

Steven H Van Wie 12:53

Okay, good. Kurt Vonnegut the senior was an engineer, the writer was junior, and the architect was Kurt Vonnegut Senior. And he. He pulled off what most people said couldn't be done. He moved a building,

Steven H Van Wie 13:16

took it off of what was a basement and moved it over across the street and turned it 90 degrees. And this was how long ago? 52ft sideways. 90 degree turn from there. And it was an eight story, 11,000 ton building. And not only did it work when he got it planted there and turned, but they kept working the whole time, even during the move. Now that's an interesting feat. They didn't have all the things we have today to do it with, but he got it done and it was, it was finally demolished in 1963 because the company was growing so much. But I, I got a kick out of this. It was for Bell Telephone and The year was 1929.

Adam Van Wie 13:29

Massive.

Bob 14:04

Wow. Bells were ringing.

Steven H Van Wie 14:04

Isn't this something. Yeah, they, they had manual Jackson and essentially rollers, I guess. And they moved was. It was really, really slow. I'm not sure if I have that handy, but it was so 15 inches per hour. It moved. So they just kept it going. And everybody came and went and kept working. They set it down and locked it down. Everybody was still working to, to get it to turn. They did the same thing with the rotations they did with the move. Just little tiny nudges.

Adam Van Wie 14:22

Wow.

Bob 14:42

We got people nowadays here that can bring building down, you know, like 9, 11.

Steven H Van Wie 14:46

You know, that's the truth. Yeah.

Bob 14:48

You know, but to move something that gargantuan.

Steven H Van Wie 14:52

Well, they basically said it couldn't be done. Pardon? Kept it functional. Yeah, it was amazing. It's the first time I'd read it. I don't even remember how I happened upon this, but I had to bring it up. And then when Adam told me that we were going to do the real estate hour normally, I thought, well, what the heck, I got a real estate trivia question right there. So that was it. All right, we'll get your address off air. If you don't mind. I'll just put you on. On hold and enjoy your day.

Bob 15:23

Well, thank you and thank you for picking up Angela's.

Steven H Van Wie 15:29

Anytime.

Steven H Van Wie 15:31

All right, that was kind of fun. I got another trivia question for the regular. Okay. Financial hour too. So I just, I saw an opportunity open up here and took it. All right, let's talk more about pessimism. I can think of some reasons, you know, when the USS Gerald Ford and its accompaniment is steaming toward Iran and Trump is giving them a couple of handful of days, and when Trump says or else, what he means is or else. Now that wouldn't be all that bad except that Russia is heavily siding With Iran, of course, and there's some negotiations going on on that front too. And as much as little, I think as I believe most people pay attention to international affairs, this one's kind of important.

Adam Van Wie 16:23

Yeah, but this pessimism thing has been going on long before this happened. This has been a, I mean this has been a multi year problem at this point. And yeah, there is a lot of interesting things about it. One of the best theories that I've heard is that the post Covid k shaped economy and I've talked about this a lot on our regular show, but essentially the theory is that if you went into Covid with a white collar job, that could be converted to a zoom job and you had assets, you had a 401k, you owned a house, all of those assets appreciated in value and in some cases doubled or even more. During the last five years, your job probably stayed the same or got better and you didn't have to go into the office, so you were saving money on commuting, you could work from anywhere, your life essentially got better. And yeah, things cost a little bit more, but you had enough money to cover it. And so those people seem to come out doing quite well and are probably as rich as they've ever been today. On the other hand, if you went into Covid with a blue collar job where you had to be physically on site and especially if it wasn't deemed, what did they call it, essential back in the day, and so you got furloughed or you got, or it went away for a while and you then finally were able to come back to work if it still existed, you were a renter, you didn't have a 401k or substantial savings, you probably are in the worst shape you've ever been in because in your case your rent probably doubled and you don't own the underlying asset, so you don't have a net worth increase to go along with that, your cost of groceries is up like 40%, you're probably in the worst shape you've ever been in. Now things may be improving slightly with rents stabilizing and wages going up and outpacing inflation for the first time in four years, five years, but you're probably at the worst point you've been at. And so I think the pessimism stems from that part of the economy as well.

Steven H Van Wie 18:33

There's an old saying that says a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose your job. And I think there are a lot of people who feel like we're in a depression. Even though you don't measure an economy by one person, you measure an economy by what's actually happen happening. And I don't trust a lot of the numbers we get day to day, but I can appreciate what goes on. They're trying to, trying to monitor this thing and even predict it, but it's very unpredictable. So I wonder what's going to happen in November. You can't divorce the political aspect of this because if people are feeling good, there won't be any problem. If people aren't feeling good, then Trump is not going to get anything except impeached.

Adam Van Wie 18:41

That's right.

Joey Loss 19:24

Yeah. Well, and if you remember a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the second year of any presidential term is always the worst. And the data is very interesting. The other three years, the stock market averages 9% in the year of a president's second year of his term. It's closer to zero.

Steven H Van Wie 19:40

Yeah. That past performance and all that stuff doesn't mean it, but it is a pattern. I'm going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 19:53

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

Adam Van Wie 19:55

Hi, I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 19:56

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 19:57

And if you just tuned in, don't be shocked. Angela couldn't make it today and she offered us the time slot and we said sure, thank you very much. Because you know, radio time isn't cheap and we are. How's that? Frugal.

Steven H Van Wie 20:14

Okay. We had the trivia for this hour answered so we can move on to other things. I've got a thousand things to talk about and I'm sure the other guys do, too. So we're, I thought one of the things we do today is just kind of throw out some random stuff. Adam, you had another piece of real estate.

Adam Van Wie 20:32

Yeah, I somehow missed this one. But there was another piece of real estate data released this week and that's housing starts, which rose 6.2% in December. So that's, that is good news. And if you look at, if you look at home builder stocks, they've been doing quite well recently and that might be part of the equation. Maybe there is a little bit more interest this year in buying houses. And part of that is probably come on by the fact that the 30 year mortgage, I believe, dipped just under 6% this week.

Steven H Van Wie 21:04

Right. So there are good news. More than half of the mortgages in this country that are in the 6% and up range. So it's been happening.

Adam Van Wie 21:14

So, I mean, that could really spur some refi activity too, because going from 7 to 5.9 is probably a decent savings.

Steven H Van Wie 21:23

Yeah. And we, of course, always have to put things in perspective with the Fed. And the Fed chair is done in May, and the new one has already been announced as the meeting gets confirmed. And he's going to be a little more aggressive. But Powell is not, in my opinion, going to lower rates on his way out. Now, that would be like admitting that Trump was right all along. And I do believe that for Powell, it's 100% personal at this point. And he's done, as we've always said, he's done a reasonably good job, especially compared to most of his predecessors. But it's not ending well. I don't think that dropping interest rates 1 or 2% or something like that overnight is the answer to what's going on right now.

Adam Van Wie 22:15

Well, I will say that the s and P500 has averaged over 12% under his tenure, so I will be forever thankful for that.

Steven H Van Wie 22:22

Yeah, exactly. So there is a lot going on. It really bothers me that so much negativity is. Is permeating everything. And a lot of individuals, if you ask the individual on the street how the economy is, it's horrible.

Adam Van Wie 22:42

As they make their way to a fully packed restaurant to go.

Steven H Van Wie 22:45

Exactly. Yeah. And when you listen to people like Schumer just standing there and blatantly lying, and it. It bothers me. In England right now, there is a virtual crisis based on free speech, or lack thereof. And there are people who look at that. The same thing in France, too. People look at that and say, that's what we need to do. We need to control free speech. Well, no, we don't. First off of. And you can make me as angry as you want to by having Schumer and company say stupid lies, but they're protected as long as they're saying it from the floor of the Senate and the House. So you're going to hear it. If you know it's not true, it's because you're listening to better outlets like us, mostly Fox News. Mostly, yeah. If you want to know the truth, it's real simple. Just turn your radio on a Saturday morning.

Adam Van Wie 23:38

Mostly.

Joey Loss 23:44

Well, in a predictable political fashion. I mean, there's clips of Schumer talking 20 years ago about free speech.

Adam Van Wie 23:49

Yeah, almost. You see that? Yeah.

Joey Loss 23:51

And it's like, man, you could.

Adam Van Wie 23:54

I don't think there's been a topic in the last 20 years that he hasn't gone flip flopped on. I mean, illegal immigration.

Joey Loss 24:02

It's just the way of the legacy politician after 20 years.

Adam Van Wie 24:05

This is why term limits should be a thing.

Joey Loss 24:07

Yeah, I think it's best.

Steven H Van Wie 24:08

Yeah. You know, we had them, we had them in our hands in the 90s and it, it got tossed out. You know, Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House back then and Newt came up with a proposal called the Contract with America. And of course, the opposition immediately called it the Contract on America. But the truth was that people liked it. What the contract said, for those of you who are too young or have forgotten the contract said that they would. He promised to get a vote in the house on every one of the ten points within 90 days or whatever. He didn't promise to pass them all, but he did get the votes. And there's more to the story coming. But first, good morning, Marshall.

Marshall 25:02

Gentlemen, I was shocked at looking at something in the news this morning. The daily records. Real estate sales are always fun to take a look at. A little Champ store or former little Champ store has got to be at least 40 years old, maybe 50 at the beach on Third street went for $3 million.

Adam Van Wie 25:28

That doesn't surprise me. Too much Third street real estate is very valuable.

Joey Loss 25:34

Yeah.

Marshall 25:34

But I mean just,

Marshall 25:37

I'm just guessing somebody's going to continue it. Adam, I want to say you nailed it on the dichotomy we've got right now in our economy between rich and poor. And I'm trying to kind of get my brain the solutions and ask you all a question about it. I know the Trump counts. I think that's a long range super help. The non school real estate tax. I understand

Marshall 26:03

the legislature had a wide vote for eliminating that. That will be, I don't know if you all realize it, but we got a lot of longtime residents in Florida that that would be amazing for. And make a major difference in their life. A booming economy obviously is going to help. But my question for you in this real estate perspective of this hour is how do we get those under 40 who haven't bought their first town, first home into their first home?

Adam Van Wie 26:18

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 26:21

No doubt about it.

Adam Van Wie 26:39

Yeah. Great question. I'm so glad you brought that up too, Marshall, because that is a, a great topic for today about the elimination of real estate taxes. And I want to delve into that after we talk more about the, the, the first question you posed, which was really how do you get young people into homes? Well, the, the first thing is affordability just has to be better. And that can happen several different ways. One of which would be from for interest rates to come down. Another one would be for wages to go up or for house prices to come down. Well, house prices have been incredibly sticky post Covid and we saw this huge boom in prices and then we saw a leveling off. But we really haven't seen much downward pressure yet. Is it going to come? I don't know. People are making more money so that's helped. But the biggest lever I think that will get younger people into homes is lower interest rates which are do appear to be on the way or even here somewhat.

Steven H Van Wie 27:41

The direction is pretty obvious. Yeah, it's just speed that we're concerned about.

Marshall 27:47

Well you know in, in California I saw this through a company I worked for maybe 15, 20 years ago. I mean if a young couple wanted to buy a house, they had to have mom, dad, grandma, grandpa on it with them.

Steven H Van Wie 28:05

I've got a, I got an article in my left hand Marshall. It says want to buy a house that'll be double your income up front. That's a problem.

Adam Van Wie 28:14

Yeah, that, that is the other part of affordability that's really making things tough is that down payment that, that is even harder than ever to save for because of the cost of say rent. If you're paying 40% of your income in rent, that doesn't leave a lot of money left over to save for a down payment on a house. So, so that's another issue that, that needs to be addressed. And I, I don't, I'm not really sure how to address that one because there is no magic. There is one to say for there

Marshall 28:46

is one old fashioned method that could be available if mom and dad are in that larger group.

Adam Van Wie 28:54

Sure, sure. But that's a lot of people.

Steven H Van Wie 28:57

Gift.

Marshall 28:57

Yeah, gift the kids. I mean it used to be many of the first time home buyers that I dealt with before we had the state down payment assistance.

Marshall 29:10

It was mom and dad on a gift for the 5 or 10%. It took some put a bunch more down just so they wouldn't have pay mortgage insurance.

Steven H Van Wie 29:19

It still, it still happens. Yeah, we deal with that every once in a while. And not everybody knows how, how much is available easily. Then usually they're kind of surprised. But 19,000 per person to any person, not even any tax reporting on it. You just do it. That, that helps if yeah, like you said, you're saying okay, let me see That's one thing to have. Go ahead.

Marshall 29:40

if I get this right.

Marshall 29:45

If you have two sets of Parents

Marshall 29:48

and you have a couple that's wanting to buy a house. Each of those parents could give $19,000

Marshall 29:58

to each. Or each of those could give 38,000.

Adam Van Wie 30:02

Yeah, they could.

Joey Loss 30:03

Yeah. So each parent, each individual parent could give the couple 38,000 because they can give 19,000 to each member of the younger couple. So you can give 152,000.

Adam Van Wie 30:14

So if you were really fortunate to have, you know, wealthy parents on both sides of the relationship, you could get up to $152,000.

Joey Loss 30:23

Yeah. And that honestly, we've seen a lot of generous gifting. We've never seen that situation.

Steven H Van Wie 30:23

And that's per year.

Adam Van Wie 30:28

No, I haven't either.

Steven H Van Wie 30:29

No, I, I think that's part of the. Maybe it's because they don't.

Joey Loss 30:36

Yeah, maybe they should call us.

Adam Van Wie 30:38

For sure.

Steven H Van Wie 30:40

Maybe they'll help them.

Marshall 30:41

Maybe they need to have financial planners helping them navigate their.

Steven H Van Wie 30:45

Get into that. I'm going to get into that in a second hour today. What's the.

Marshall 30:49

Thank you all very much.

Steven H Van Wie 30:52

Thank you, Marshall. We appreciate it.

Joey Loss 30:53

I want to throw one extra thought in there. Another tailwind that I think will start showing up this year is the tax law changes. I mean, a lot of the people who are in this part of the K shaped economy we're talking about are those that are about to get no tax on overtime, no tax on tips.

Marshall 30:59

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 31:07

Right. And, and refunds are up 11% on average over the last year.

Joey Loss 31:11

It won't change things immediately, but if you're talking about discretionary savings, the perception

Steven H Van Wie 31:17

of wealth is rising. 401k plans are high. There are, there's a movement in some parts of the administration and the Congress to allow withdrawals from 401ks for purchase of. For some.

Adam Van Wie 31:31

I also think expectations play a big part in this. Let's talk about it after the break.

Steven H Van Wie 31:35

Yeah, we got to take a quick break. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 31:41

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

Adam Van Wie 31:43

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 31:44

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 31:59

And for anybody. Oh, I'm sorry, Joey. See, I'll get into a rhythm here. That served you both right for missing a show once in a while. Get me off my game. I apologize. Anyway, we've been having some interesting discussions about real estate. Marshall kind of opened up a big old can of worms and I certainly appreciate him doing it because this is really important and I think we should talk a little bit. You guys had some wonderful ideas about this whole thing and one of the Things I threw out, and a lot of this got stimulated by it was that there's a movement in D.C. and some people like it. They want to be able to withdraw 20 grand from a 401k or the, the tsp and use that for down payment on a first house. And they're not talking about doing it tax free. They're talking about doing it without the 10% surtax on it. And

Steven H Van Wie 32:49

we would all love to say it's a terrible idea because we would rather see you do something like get the loan from the plan or have your parents help you or something like that. But the fine point here is we have to have numerous and multiple ways to get people into the house. I wrote in a blog recently, the one thing that I can't ever get out of my mind, they want you to have a piece of the American dream. And they say that if you're paying rent, you're not getting it. And that's sort of true, sort of not. What good does a mortgage do you really? The money you make in real estate, you make by living in that house over time, because that appreciation in real estate cannot be replaced by any other single factor that I can think of. All right, talk amongst yourselves, as they say.

Joey Loss 33:44

Well, on the topic of the 403B, I feel like normally that idea would be something I'd be averse to. The reason I'm in support of it is because if we look a few years back at when they switched 401k plan participation to. You now have to opt out if you don't want to contribute instead of having to elect to opt in to make contributions. And the difference that that had on the way people interact with their 401ks, it was like something like 16 or 18% contribution rates to like over 80 when they made that switch. And that's just because people live in a place of inertia and they kind of do whatever the default is. And if that means there's a pool of money available that they've earned that they can use to buy a home, I just think from a human behavioral basis we should give them access to that and let them use that and eliminate the penalty that would otherwise apply for a premature distribution.

Adam Van Wie 34:40

Yeah, I can't disagree with anything you said. I. My gut reaction is always, no, don't take it out of the 4.1K. Exactly. But yeah, it does make a lot of sense. And I just think that moving up in society, moving up an economic level almost always includes owning a home. And it's such an important piece of the American dream. And it's really difficult, I think, to achieve the, that American dream without being a homeowner. And so this is like the one case I'm going to maybe give my stamp of approval on. Taking money out of your 401k.

Joey Loss 34:59

Yeah.

Joey Loss 35:17

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 35:18

Live in a house for 10 years and if you didn't make $100,000, I'd be shocked. Pay a mortgage for 10 years and if you paid down $100,000, you got yourself a heck of a mortgage interest only practically you got to get in when you're younger. This whole thing about the, the first time buyers being 40 years old, that's, that's a ludicrous. I know. With that.

Adam Van Wie 35:45

Yeah, I, I just don't think that's accurate. But the fact is it has crept up over time. I think it's still in the mid to or low 30s somewhere in there. But yeah, it doesn't matter. The, the point is that it's crept up over time because of affordability and that that's real.

Steven H Van Wie 36:02

According to Vanguard, older workers are the most likely to max out their 401ks. Now that just makes intuitive sense. Why is that true? Because they can.

Adam Van Wie 36:13

Because they have more money, they make more money.

Steven H Van Wie 36:16

They've already don't have these multiple polls. Yeah, Joyce, caught in the big web of all the things young kids and businesses and cars and all that stuff. Everybody wants your money all at once when you're young. And when you get older, it's much more controllable. So that means you got to do economic affirmative action. How's that get the young people out there to contribute more? But you've only got 19% maxing out their 401ks. And the group the least likely to do that was workers younger than 25. Well, that to me just makes all the sense in the world. How can an under 25 person max out a 401k and do all the other things you're trying to do, including buy a home? You got to have one heck of a job.

Adam Van Wie 37:08

Yeah, you do.

Joey Loss 37:09

And no student loans and.

Steven H Van Wie 37:10

Right.

Adam Van Wie 37:11

And I do want to talk a little bit about expectations. Like I know that you probably get used to a standard of living that is equivalent to how you were raised. So if you were raised in a middle class family, that's what you want to buy, but that's not always what you can afford. When I was 22, 3, 4 years old, I moved to West Palm beach right before. Right. During the housing boom, prior to 2007. But things were already on their way up and really expensive. And I was shocked. I was absolutely floored by how expensive it was down there. Well, I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to afford what I wanted, so, so I bought in a neighborhood I didn't love, in an area of town I didn't love, and I got a roommate. And I mean, the house was just very basic. It was builder grade everything. There was nothing special about it at all. But it was mine and I made the payments and it ended up appreciating and I did really well on it. And that's just what you, you do what you have to do to get into the property. But if I had tried to buy in the neighborhood I wanted and, and not have a roommate, I would have been broke and I couldn't afford it anyway. So I, I just, I think sometimes when people say I can't afford a home, it's, I can't afford the home that I want. Well, you know what, like back when you compare to you, people always talk about the 1950s and how you could afford a house on one salary. Look at what those houses were. You probably had two bedrooms for a family of five and maybe one bathroom. And they certainly didn't have a sub zero and a, and a Viking range.

Steven H Van Wie 38:46

Like it was just a 80 inch flat screen.

Adam Van Wie 38:50

Yeah, it was a basic box with a roof and a carport and like that. So you're not really comparing apples to apples. That same basic box of the carport is probably still affordable to you, especially if you buy it in Omaha or Tulsa or a city that is affordable. So I don't know. I think there's two sides to this argument and expectations, especially in the Instagram era, have become really unrealistic.

Joey Loss 39:17

Yeah, I think, I think that's fair.

Steven H Van Wie 39:18

Yeah, I, I do too. I think it's a very good assessment. The, the first part of solving anything is identifying the problem. Well, we've done that, we've identified the problem. Things are unaffordable now. Solve the problem and then you'll be doing something.

Joey Loss 39:35

Yeah, well, the housing starts. It's exciting. I mean, we've talked at, you know, ad nauseam about the supply issue. That is a real issue that's out of the control of buyers that I think, you know, we can't, there's no blame on them for that situation.

Steven H Van Wie 39:48

And builders are taking some initiative in that. They're, they're downgrading some of their new house, like appliances or countertops. They won't be the highest End in all the things that are being built right now. And it. Everybody's got to do something about it. And it's an individual problem. Each individual has to do something about it to get in there. But we got to give them options. You know me, I'm all about options, choice. Everything has a choice. And then, of course, a little education wouldn't hurt. And as we were talking, Adam. Adam gets out more than I do, to say the least. But people are going out and they're going out to expensive places all the time. And where do you suppose all these people live? Do they already have their homes and they're paying for them or are some of them trying to do it all?

Adam Van Wie 40:31

It's. Everything's packed.

Adam Van Wie 40:39

Well, yeah, I think. I think that's the top end of the K. I think that those people are out spending money. You can see it in Delta's quarterly results. They are for the first time ever, first class and business class revenue outpaced Coach first time ever. Why is that? Because people are willing to pay a bit more for a better service and they have the money.

Steven H Van Wie 41:00

That's the top of the K. Another thing that we. We have to factor in. Not that there's a whole bunch of people can do about it, but under the new tax law, the size of your mortgage is pretty much irrelevant because you're not going to be someone who itemizes if you're a normal person.

Adam Van Wie 41:22

Not very often, no.

Steven H Van Wie 41:23

It used to force people in to get that deduction. And it no longer does that. So you got to find other reasons to get into that house. And I hope that people come to their senses. Like you say, I can buy something somewhere that fits my budget, even if it doesn't fit my eyes and my desires and my perceived future out there. That's a people in an education thing. Again, financial education is a topic that's coming back into its own now, and I'm very happy about that. People, literally, for a couple of generations, people couldn't balance a checkbook. And you got to be able to understand the inflow and outflow of money. If you're on your own in life, your parents aren't going to back up your credit card anymore if they're smart. So it's a big, serious problem. We'll never be able to pound it all and, and get all the right answers. But I really believe that it has a place out there in the lexicon and particularly when you're doing a financial show and people can actually call in and ask questions. So we're going to take another break in a few more seconds here and then come back and then I'm going to go into the regular version.

Steven H Van Wie 42:51

 It's Saturday morning. It's 10 o'clock. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Adam Van Wie 42:53

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 42:54

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 42:55

And for those of you who are just tuning in, we're coming off a one hour prior show because Angela wasn't able to make it today. So she graciously offered us the ability to come in and do it. So we did. And we were kind of emphasizing real estate topics in honor of Angela, of course. And because it is certainly one of the largest and most complicated problems in society today and we deal with all of those things, I say it over and over and over. There is no topic I can think of that affects more people than your money because without it, bye bye. And with it, things pretty good around here. So that's, that's it. All right. I am going to have a trivia question for this hour at the, at the break, first break. And we promised another repeat of the market rap because I know some people tune in just for this one. I don't want to deprive anyone of hearing what's going on in the market right now because it's important.

Adam Van Wie 43:58

Yeah, it's been, it's been a period of consolidation. That's really the, the best way I'd describe it. The market hasn't done anything in four months. It's kind of been flat. I say it hasn't done anything. It's actually done a lot. It just hasn't moved a lot in up or down. And it's been in a pretty tight range at that. And it feels really volatile. But in reality, the opposite has been true. Even this week, we saw decent gains across all three major indexes, but it didn't feel like a great week at all. The we saw a lot of midweek turmoil and then Friday, specifically Friday morning, the indexes were all bouncing around like crazy and fast. There you were seeing 40, 50, 100 point moves, but they never really got out of a pretty narrow range. And it ended up being a good day. It just felt like a bad day. So just kind of a strange market at this point. The Nasdaq ended up 1.5% for the week and the S and p was up 1.1% and the Dow was up 0.3% for the year. The NASDAQ is still negative with the S and P up 0.9%. And the Dow up 3.3%.

Adam Van Wie 45:10

The market may be trading in a tight range, but there's a ton of disparity between sectors. Look no further than the two consumer sectors over the last year. A year ago, consumer Discretionary was tanking while Staples traded sideways. Then Discretionary rebounded while Staples fell. And recently Discretionary is trading sideways while Staples is rallying. The best news out of all that is that they're both up over the last year, but they certainly took different paths to get there. Another pretty good example is both within the technology sector, software and semiconductors. They couldn't look any more different. Software is getting just destroyed and that's all due to AI. And then semiconductors are hitting all time highs and that's also due to AI. So right now the market is really looking for what AI is going to do to different companies and different sectors and it's trying to pick winners and losers. Will it get it right? Eventually it probably will. In the short term though, who knows? I think it's really unpredictable, but it's fun to watch.

Joey Loss 46:16

Yeah, it definitely makes for interesting storylines.

Adam Van Wie 46:19

Every week it does. And it changes every week.

Joey Loss 46:21

Yeah. When the, the, the event nicknamed Sass Apocalypse now, which was the. When all the software started diving a couple weeks ago, it was just kind of hard to wrap my head around. But then we saw a similar thing happened for the investment custodian arena, which is like Charles Schwab, Fidelity companies like that. One of the competitors called Altruist released a tax tool and basically on that news the stocks of all the other major custodians fell 10%. And it was interesting because it changed how I thought about the software piece because we're kind of insiders in a way to the way the custodians work. And I felt we use them every day and we have for a long time. And to see a 10% I was like, okay, that technology is worth something. But to see a 10 plus percent swing felt a little overblown.

Adam Van Wie 47:06

Billions and billions of dollars of market cap wiped out.

Joey Loss 47:09

And then so now, you know, originally I was like, oh, this is so exciting. Like AI is going to give these companies all this capability to create their own perfect softwares. This is maybe this is justified and investors are right. But now I'm thinking like the people on the inside for, for Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, they must be thinking like what in the world. People are way overestimating what cloud AI and these things can do in the short term based on a 25% swing,

Adam Van Wie 47:32

no doubt about It. And then you look at what, what the. What. What sector of the economy has the highest beat rate for earnings this last quarter? Technology, of course. And so has it really affected them yet? Not even a little bit. But will it? Maybe. I don't know.

Steven H Van Wie 47:42

Technology.

Joey Loss 47:51

Yeah. So based on that, I mean, all of these re ratings we're seeing across different industries in response to Claude or Gemini or somebody releasing a tool every week, it's all a rerating of future expectations, not today's profits. That's right. Yeah. The volatility is really interesting and the fact that I just can't get over the fact that the whole market's doing fine. But I've got a chart right in front of me. Energy is up over 20% year to date. Materials up over 15. Consumer staples just below 15. You know, consumer staples are classically the most boring area. And technology, consumer discretionary and financials, kind of the more exciting and larger pieces of the economy of the stock market are down about 4% each and index is flat.

Steven H Van Wie 48:35

Yeah. You think about it, we're so little newly into this year. We haven't had many weeks to operate and things are fine. Yeah, I know not everything's fine. I know not everyone is fine, but things are good.

Joey Loss 48:53

Adam, do you think this, like, a part of me thinks this is healthy? Like I'd kind of choose this over any other.

Adam Van Wie 48:59

I like it. I do. I really dislike when seven stocks are leading the market higher and disguising a lot of problems. This is way better to me.

Steven H Van Wie 49:10

There's a backlog of chips now, too.

Adam Van Wie 49:12

And there's a lot more thought going into this than there is in buying Nvidia. Yeah, buying Nvidia because everyone's buying Nvidia. So I think that's healthy as well. So. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not upset about this recent action at all. I kind of like it. And I know it's not the. The best for your portfolio, but I mean, port portfolios are. If you have a. If you have a diversified portfolio this year, I would bet that you're up.

Joey Loss 49:39

Yeah. I mean, they don't. Looking at performance reports, they don't look that different from Q4. The top level.

Adam Van Wie 49:44

No, they really don't. And I would say if you have a 401k with a target date fund, you're probably up. So.

Steven H Van Wie 49:50

Yep. And there's the return of dividends as a desirable thing too. Value stocks are doing fine.

Adam Van Wie 49:58

SCHD was up like 14% the other day. Year to date.

Steven H Van Wie 50:03

That's the schwab dividend etf.

Adam Van Wie 50:05

Yeah.

Joey Loss 50:05

International small cap value. That's the chance right now. Weird thing to say.

Steven H Van Wie 50:10

Small cap in general. It's astounding that they've been ignored for so long and now they're up 7.3%

Steven H Van Wie 50:19

for the year. That's like a percent a week.

Adam Van Wie 50:23

Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the international markets, they've outpaced the US Markets, but. But not if you look at small cap. So they're right about the same.

Joey Loss 50:33

Well, and just to bring it back, like eight, what is it, eight, 10 months ago now, the biggest concerns that we all had were for the small caps in relation to the tariffs.

Steven H Van Wie 50:42

Yeah, tariffs.

Joey Loss 50:44

To see them doing what they need to do.

Adam Van Wie 50:46

Wait, was there some tariff news I missed?

Steven H Van Wie 50:48

There was a little bit of, a little bit yesterday coming out of the Supreme Court. Once again, Chief Justice Roberts, no friend to the working man. And that guy, I could point out some other fingers too.

Adam Van Wie 50:51

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 51:01

I also like a court that rules on the law instead of politics. Like, I really don't think Supreme Court justices should have politics. Like, yeah, it's so annoying to me

Steven H Van Wie 51:12

that, you know, they do on both sides.

Adam Van Wie 51:14

They do. But I don't mind when you see a ruling that is like, oh, well, Congress hasn't granted that power, so therefore the president, it doesn't have it. That is the law.

Steven H Van Wie 51:23

And then next, now, now we go to the Trade act of 1974 and we do the same thing again and they won't tell us what we got to do to correct the one that they said is a problem. So this is going to be it, same messy self for years. Worry not about that. All right, we'll be right back with a trivia question and more. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 51:46

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

Adam Van Wie 51:48

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 51:49

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 51:50

And lines are open. 904222, 8255.

Steven H Van Wie 51:55

Give us a call and I'll give you a shot at this trivia. Apple Computer was recently fined because they were secretly recording conversations. So they're, they're been ordered. They agreed to pay $95 million back to consumers who were wronged by their illegal recording. How long will it take Apple to earn the profit to pay that fine? No clues. None available. All right, Adam, you're saying something about cpi.

Adam Van Wie 52:30

Yeah. So I went back and pulled the CPI data going back to 1914 this morning. And I did an average CPI over that time. And care to guess what it was?

Adam Van Wie 52:45

Probably 3.3.26%.

Adam Van Wie 52:48

Okay, that is over 100 years of data. But suddenly out of nowhere we have decided that 2% is that target. Even though 100 years of data says that over 3% is actually the average.

Adam Van Wie 53:06

It's completely artificial and arbitrary. And I'm so tired of hearing that inflation is high when it's running below 3%. We had the PCE number come out this week and if you it the actual number year over year is at right at 3% on the nose. And if you strip out rent, it's at 2.4%.

Adam Van Wie 53:28

But the headline is the month over month number running at 4.3% annualized, which is an art. It doesn't mean anything. And it's. I'm just so tired of people trying to make inflation appear higher than it actually is. 3% has been the average over 100 years. Why are we talking about 2%? Stop.

Steven H Van Wie 53:52

I paid a lot of money for my education over a lot of decades and I've got a lot of education in economics and business and everything else. The numbers, three people.

Adam Van Wie 54:02

It's always been three until it tell it was replaced with two without any warning.

Steven H Van Wie 54:09

And full employment is five.

Adam Van Wie 54:12

Yeah. And we're at what, 4.3?

Steven H Van Wie 54:14

Yeah, we're, we're beyond full employment. And what that does, it's, it's fine under one condition. And we have that condition right now. The, the productivity numbers are off the charts. So it doesn't cause inflation when normally it would. If you start hiring people who were the marginal people, you're going to have to start paying everybody more. That's inflationary. But that's not true if you have productivity gains like we have had lately. So truflation website that Adam brought to my attention some time back, every morning they update their inflation number with a more realistic look at the market basket of goods that you're getting. It's been under 1% all week.

Joey Loss 54:58

Okay. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Under 1%.

Steven H Van Wie 55:00

And I was like, yeah, 0.97. And it dipped down to about 0.52 or something one day. But what happens this time of year? Every company, every, everybody across the country operates with the same philosophy. In January, we adjust our price structure. So if you're going to get any inflation, it's going to be in January. They give cost of living raises. They say our new price to our customers is up. Whatever this, that of course in January you're going to have a little blip in it. It doesn't mean it's inflationary. It might just mean that prices changed up a little bit and you're within the confines of reasonable. And then they do the best they can with the productivity and it all washes out. But it's all about, as we say around our house, but Trump, that's the answer to everything that's wrong in the country, according to some people. But Trump is getting very old.

Adam Van Wie 55:02

Yeah.

Joey Loss 56:03

Well, and for listeners, the reason that this inflation target matters so much is because if things are healthy as we're claiming that they are and agree that they are,

Joey Loss 56:14

you would want to allow for some monetary easing policy and lowering rates at a more aggressive pace, allowing things to flourish and lean into growth If things are kind of precarious or we think inflation particularly is high, that's what can stop the lowering of rates. And so disagreement about what is a healthy target rate is a major topic when we're talking about, especially if we're talking about housing and trying to help people at the lower end of the the day.

Adam Van Wie 56:24

a little bit more.

Steven H Van Wie 56:41

How's that ZIRP working out for you? 0 interest rate policy. It leaves you no tools except to slow things down.

Adam Van Wie 56:49

So the other important number we saw released this week was GDP and it increased at a 1.4% annual rate in quarter four. This was widely missed. The estimate by a lot, by half. It was expected at 2.8.

Adam Van Wie 57:07

The reason for that was largely due to the government shutdown. They estimate that it took over 1% off of the GDP for the quarter. And I also read that it will probably be added back in next quarter. So that's interesting. We could see a huge Q1, but that's neither here nor there. If you look into the details, the largest contributions to that positive growth came from personal consumption and business investment and intellectual property. That those are both very good things, especially that personal consumption number. Although it was down slightly over the average of the last two years, it was still quite high.

Adam Van Wie 57:51

And government purchases were the largest drag on real GDP growth. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Steven H Van Wie 57:58

You know, there are a lot of people that were not getting routine paychecks during that quarter because of the government shutdown. And personal consumption hopefully happens once you're getting paid again. So I'm sure there was a lot of deferred purchasing in the public. And as you said, that probably blip us right back up. The Atlanta Fed has a, has a GDP tracking system and it's apparently pretty accurate.

Adam Van Wie 58:05

That is true.

Adam Van Wie 58:27

It normally is. It missed widely. It was at 3%. And it did not. For some reason, it cannot pick up the government shutdown.

Steven H Van Wie 58:35

Yeah. Their model is too static. Which is of course true at almost every level of government that static modeling will eventually get you into trouble.

Adam Van Wie 58:37

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 58:44

But yeah, normally that is a pretty good indicator of what the number that's always within a tenths of a percent.

Steven H Van Wie 58:51

Trump saying that we should be growing at 15%. That's probably a little bit of Trump style exaggeration.

Joey Loss 58:57

No, I don't know that that'd be as good as it sounds.

Adam Van Wie 59:00

No, I think that would cause all sorts of problems.

Joey Loss 59:02

A lot of unrest. Absolutely.

Steven H Van Wie 59:04

You grow that fast, it means demand is through the roof and the prices are going to go up. And economics is a very fine art. Yeah, it's a bit science, but it's a very fine art. We'll see. All right, let's talk for a minute about taxes. That's coming up.

Adam Van Wie 59:22

That's good. I had a thing about taxes also.

Steven H Van Wie 59:25

I do want to make sure that people understand that you might not have all of your tax paperwork yet. There is a round of documents that aren't going to be released until February 27th. If you have a brokerage account, you probably haven't received your composite.

Adam Van Wie 59:44

Although I did get mine.

Steven H Van Wie 59:45

Yeah. And I've seen other people get. Not mine. Sarah got hers. I didn't get mine. My account is much more complicated. They're taking them, they're getting the easy stuff out the door right away. And then as it gets more complicated. But don't file if you have something like that, you're just going to have to file again. I know the problem with people who want to file right away, it means they're getting money back. And if you're getting a lot of money back, that means you were over withheld.

Adam Van Wie 59:51

Yeah.

Joey Loss 1:00:13

I don't know if you caught that, Adam, but he's saying that you have a simple account and he has a big boys account.

Adam Van Wie 1:00:19

That's fine with me. I. I try not to keep it that. That complicated, but. Also, those refunds are looking like they're going to be larger this year. So far they have been larger and. But people are filing taxes at a slower pace this year for some reason. Maybe they're waiting on those complicated 1099 consolidation.

Steven H Van Wie 1:00:24

All right.

Steven H Van Wie 1:00:41

It could be that and it could be partly that people have not been told how to handle no tax on tips and no tax on overtime. Because they're not on your tax form yet. They will be for this year. A year from now when you get your tax forms. That's it. But it's now a series of questions. Whether you're talking to H and R block, your CPA or your CFP or whatever it is, there's a series of questions about what you earned and what part of it is attributable. One thing I know confuses a lot of people, no tax on overtime doesn't mean there's no tax on overtime. It means there's no tax on the portion of that payment that's above your normal pay. So if you get time and a half, your straight time is taxable, your half is not. And unless your employer is keeping good record, you're going to have to go back and reconstruct that if you want to get the deduction. And these are not itemized deductions either. The good news about the whole old BBBA is that so much of it was retroactive and it applies to people who do not itemize. So you're going to. If you do a good job or have someone do a good job, and if you've never used a tax preparer and you have any of these things going on, I think you might want to consider it this year.

Adam Van Wie 1:00:49

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:02:04

Yeah, it's possible. Although if you have a simple enough tax situation, a W2 job and very little other taxable events, tips and overtime, I don't know that it's worth paying.

Steven H Van Wie 1:02:16

And I have not actually sat down and and pulled up TurboTax to walk through it.

Adam Van Wie 1:02:20

Oh, it's often. Do they make it so easy?

Steven H Van Wie 1:02:22

Yeah, I just want to make sure that they've got the right questions covered for the no tax on this and that.

Joey Loss 1:02:27

I'm sure, I'm sure they do it. Honestly, I would bet they have some sort of like OCR document reading. I think the best thing people could do is save their last pay stub for every year if you're an overtime person because that last pay stub will have everything you need to do that calculation. I'm not sure that there's things you

Steven H Van Wie 1:02:40

I agree.

Steven H Van Wie 1:02:43

can't do to yourself except at great expense and missing those things and declaring them as income. You don't make money any faster than to reduce your gross income on paper. So I hope everybody has an understanding of what it means to have that thing staring you in the face between now and April 15th. We'll talk about some other tax related things over the next few programs too because between now and then there's always something to talk about. There's also a bunch of stupid things in Congress that are being proposed for taxes and stuff, Social Security and all that. And I got a few of them. But unfortunately we have to take a quick break and we'll discuss it when we get back. So don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

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

Adam Van Wie 1:03:34

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 1:03:36

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 1:03:37

And we remind everyone, lines are open 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 1:03:44

And the trivia question remains out there. Apple Computer was recently fined $95 million for recording people's conversations illicitly. And I want to know how long it'll take Apple to make enough profit to pay that. And you'll love it, I think. Anyway, one of our local charities, one of my personal favorites is the Wounded Warrior Project, which is actually located not terribly far from here. Yeah. And one of us has a family member who works there. Joy, you want to tell us about it?

Joey Loss 1:04:16

Yeah. We're probably about a mile from it.

Joey Loss 1:04:25

Sure. So my wife has been working with Wounded Warrior Project for probably seven, almost eight years now. And she spent many years in marketing. She's recently moved to Government affairs, which has kind of been her target for quite some time. And in the government affairs role that she's in, she gets to work on legislation campaigns specifically for veteran benefits, which is something that she's very excited about. And there's something right now that she's working on that I thought would be interesting to share with all of you. And that is there's a bipartisan bill called the Major Richard Starr act that's trying to fix a weird government rule that penalizes combat injured veterans. Right now, if a service member is medically retired because of combat injuries, their retirement pay gets reduced dollar for dollar by their disability benefits. And I don't know if you guys. It's crazy and it's very odd. I mean, it's like someone just overlooked the wording when all of this came out originally. And for whatever reason, it's taken years and it's gotten close to the finish line and just hasn't passed over and over again to fix it. And just to put some ideas on the scope, there's 54,000 plus currently medically retired combat injured veterans who are receiving less than their healthy peers who finished their service. It just doesn't make sense. And this would continue as it stands right now. The next person or persons injured would suffer the same fate in terms of loss of benefits. And we actually have clients who Receive both a, you know, a retired pension, the taxable version, and a non taxable disability pension with no offset between the two. And some of them have disability ratings, but it's like particular types of combat injuries. And some of the solutions that have come out recently about how to fix other elements of VA spending are just. It's. For some reason, this is just a system our government struggles with. A lot of the grassroots efforts to fix things don't get to where they need to go because they try to get tucked into bigger bills that have nothing to do with the main idea.

Adam Van Wie 1:04:39

Time.

Steven H Van Wie 1:05:16

It's crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 1:05:45

No, it doesn't.

Steven H Van Wie 1:06:34

So we do things in crazy land.

Joey Loss 1:06:37

Yeah. So these people are losing between 1,000 to $2,500 a month, which we all know that's real money.

Steven H Van Wie 1:06:44

No kidding. And it's the same government who brought you an end to the two laws that created or took away, I guess, the ability for people to double dip on Social Security because they were working for a job where they weren't paying in. Well, now that bill passed last year and now if you work for a different job and don't pay in Social Security, they don't care. You still get Social Security as if you did pay into it. It's the same people. What's up with that? You want to save Social Security?

Steven H Van Wie 1:07:19

I can't think of a worse way to do it than giving money to people who didn't work for it. But everybody keeps trying to ruin the system. They want to improve it. And what that means to a Washington, D.C. person is give some people more money. It's just an asinine world. And I cannot even imagine people who get involved in this thing. What keeps them going?

Joey Loss 1:07:45

Yeah, well, as far as what people can do, I mean, Florida isn't a state that struggles with being on the right side of this. But everybody, you know, if you're in other states, you can contact members of Congress and just ask them to support the Major Richard Starr Act. That's what this is called. And every time it gets close to the finish line, it gets stuck on budget scoring, which is just disappointing. That that's the thing.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:03

Yeah. Arch enemy of the people.

Adam Van Wie 1:08:03

Go figure.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:07

Good morning, Bob.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:11

Hello? Gotcha.

Bob 1:08:14

Gay, this is Bob from Orlando.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:16

Yes, hi. What's happening?

Bob 1:08:19

Hey. So the sky's not falling with the Supreme Court decision.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:23

It doesn't seem to be done.

Adam Van Wie 1:08:25

Yeah, hardly.

Bob 1:08:26

Huh?

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:27

It doesn't appear.

Bob 1:08:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The market didn't really react yesterday with that. So we're down here with our granddaughter. We're doing batting practice.

Adam Van Wie 1:08:37

Right, okay.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:38

Oh, that's what? It is. Okay. The markets closed up very nicely yesterday.

Bob 1:08:40

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:08:43

Yeah. In fact, there was zero reaction, by

Bob 1:08:46

the way, that's a home run.

Steven H Van Wie 1:08:49

The importance of these things is largely in people's head.

Bob 1:08:54

Right, Right. Do you think there are other options then?

Steven H Van Wie 1:09:00

Yeah. The next one they're going to is the Trade act of 1974. And there are options beyond that one, never fear. You know, when you got the caliber of people working for you that Trump does, it's really comforting for those of us who are only observers in the big game. I've never seen a cabinet with this kind of talent. Intelligence, dedication, hard work, experience, you name it. What a group.

Steven H Van Wie 1:09:27

I think we have less to worry about than we might otherwise say 15 months ago.

Steven H Van Wie 1:09:35

That. That group against this group. That's not a comparison. That's a contrast. The way I see it, you want to take a guess at our dream?

Bob 1:09:45

Has anybody guessed anything on the trivia question? Okay. Okay. I'm gonna say five weeks.

Steven H Van Wie 1:09:47

No, not this one.

Steven H Van Wie 1:09:53

You probably aren't going to believe this. That's too long. Okay. So that gives us an upper limit.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10:03

We appreciate it. Thanks so much. Have fun down there. Sounds like spring training for the young ones, doesn't it?

Bob 1:10:06

You guys have a great day. Bye.

Adam Van Wie 1:10:10

Yeah, for sure.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10:12

Dave, good morning.

Dave 1:10:15

I'll guess the trivia question.

Adam Van Wie 1:10:17

Sure.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10:17

Shoot.

Dave 1:10:19

Well, I think it's, let's say eight hours, but I don't have the approximate number. But they've earned $112 billion last year.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10:27

You know what I'm going to do? It's actually nine hours, but I have a plus or minus one on it, and that includes the number eight, so we have a winner.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10:38

Got it. Oh, there you go. Cut out for a minute. If you don't mind. I'll put you on hold and we'll get your address and we'll send you a little something, I assume from Publix, as usual. Oh, well, thanks for calling. I appreciate it. That's kind of interesting. Actually, quick math and got it right on the.

Dave 1:10:39

Thanks.

Dave 1:10:49

Okay, I appreciate it.

Adam Van Wie 1:10:57

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:11:00

Yeah, well, Craig also did that math and texted me and he got. He got eight hours, too, so.

Steven H Van Wie 1:11:05

Okay. It was probably point something and I. I guess the article I read rounded up. Or maybe it was on a more recent profit number. Point is made. It takes part of a day one shift.

Adam Van Wie 1:11:18

Yeah. So crazy.

Steven H Van Wie 1:11:21

Oh, man. It's good to control things, isn't it? All right, you guys want to go somewhere else before the next break, or should we take a couple of little things?

Adam Van Wie 1:11:31

Yeah, just take A shot at something.

Steven H Van Wie 1:11:33

Adam has a millionaire.

Steven H Van Wie 1:11:37

I know a lot of you really love them, but there's not time to do it before this break. So when we come back, we'll go into that. This, this one, this is in the stupid pile. I got a big stupid pile. I read a lot. I guess Joe Biden tried to kill Costco style discounts. He wanted to put through a bill where whether you bought it at Costco or mom and dad's little corner store, you'd pay the same because Costco couldn't be able to buy things cheaper just because they buy 200,000 truckloads of it and it didn't make it. But this is the caliber of people that we send to D.C. too often. TRUMP is personally on it and he's going to kill it. Wow.

Joey Loss 1:12:30

I can't imagine that would get the light of day for more than 10 seconds. That's just, that's Economics 101.

Adam Van Wie 1:12:35

It's also so ironic after he literally killed mom and pops during COVID by doing everything to benefit big box and big companies and shut down all of the little companies. So I just, I don't understand that.

Joey Loss 1:12:50

That one surprises me. It doesn't really add up with some of the other stuff. No, remember like he, he, he blocked the deal with Japan. I mean there's some sense of economics. He blocked the oil deal with Japan. That was going to. Sorry, the steel company. Remember in the steel. And that was significant. And I remember that was like, I think you said that day was the one day you were going to give him his salt because he blocked that deal. So. Yeah, that one surprises me.

Adam Van Wie 1:13:03

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 1:13:14

Well, how about this one? What happens when you elect a commie to a high position?

Adam Van Wie 1:13:21

Well, I think you get a 10 real estate tax hike.

Steven H Van Wie 1:13:26

That would be one thing, wouldn't it? Free everything. Free grocery store. Did you hear any of the results from the free grocery store?

Adam Van Wie 1:13:36

Yeah, there was an article this week. It was, it was only open for a limited time and you had to get a golden ticket, Willy Wonka style. And then you could only get a certain amount of stuff and people were, I mean it was mobbed, lined up forever. I don't think there were any like real mob problems, but there was a ton of people and a lot. It was apparently very easy for the reporter to go find people complaining that they did not get one of the golden tickets. And I kind of figured that's how the, the whole experiment with Mandami is going to go as well.

Steven H Van Wie 1:14:08

It kind of, kind of sounds like it. Well, how about this one? Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, is helping Mondavi and she is going to provide 1.5 billion in additional aid to the city for the first, for this fiscal year and the Next 1 and 510 million for future years. Well, that ought to clear it up, don't you think? Oh, except for that 12.6 billion problem he has, I don't think the, yeah, I don't know, 2 billion is going to help. So all of a sudden he says the only choice he has is to raise property taxes. And what he means by that is that doesn't take an act of the, of the legislature in, in New York. So he can do that. What do you think's going to happen?

Adam Van Wie 1:14:10

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:14:43

Probably not.

Adam Van Wie 1:15:03

Nothing good.

Steven H Van Wie 1:15:04

Nothing good. And Abigail Spanberger, my other classic, she has a list of new taxes. She's only been in a very, very few weeks. Will they never learn? It sounds like the Kingston Trio. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. 

Steven H Van Wie 1:15:26

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

Adam Van Wie 1:15:26

I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 1:15:27

And I'm Joey Loss.

Steven H Van Wie 1:15:29

The, everybody, a lot of people remember the Millionaire series that Adam's done so many of. It's kind of our playing the home game of who Wants to Be a Millionaire. This is about great American success stories that you probably don't know very much about. I know I don't and I don't even know who this one is. So I always play along and try to guess somewhere along the way. So let's have the current edition of the Millionaire.

Adam Van Wie 1:15:57

This is millionaire number 26. This segment is about realizing that American dream. And it definitely there is some luck involved, but it's mostly a great idea and an incredible work ethic. And this is no different. This African American man was born in 1953 in East Chicago, Indiana to a father who worked in a steel mill and a mother who stayed home with her kids. His athletic talent was on display at an early age at Washington High school where in 1971 his basketball team went undefeated 29. 0 and won the state championship. He played college basketball for the University of Louisville and has a. He was a two time Missouri Valley Conference player of the year, helping the team reach the NCAA Final Four in 1975. He was drafted eighth overall by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975 and he was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks. He had a a successful 12 season NBA career from 1975 to 1987 playing mainly for the Bucks. But also for the Los Angeles Clippers. He retired from the Bucks in 1987 after scoring 11,517

Adam Van Wie 1:17:07

career points. He was recognized as one of the NBA's top six men, averaging 13.6, 3.5 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. After retiring from basketball, he. He decided he didn't want to go work for someone else, but wanted to become an entrepreneur. He studied the fast food business, and he decided that the Wendy's franchise model was the one he would pursue. He grew this into owning 160 Wendy's stores, but he wasn't done there. His next move was into Chili's, where He eventually acquired 120 stores. At the peak of his restaurant empire, he owned more than 450 fast food restaurants. He sold the majority of his restaurants in 2016 and started a Coca Cola bottling company. In that same year, he was named the fourth richest athlete in the world by Forbes magazine, behind only Michael Jordan, David Beckham, and arnold Palmer. In 2020, he bought Ebony and Jet magazines for $14 million after they declared bankruptcy earlier in the year. In 2024, the Bucks announced that he had purchased a 10% stake in the team, with an investment group valuing the bucks at $4 billion. Unfortunately, Junior Bridgman passed away on March 11, 2025 at age 71, with an estimated net worth of over $1.4 billion, despite never making over 350,000 in a year during his NBA career. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Doris Griffith, and his three children and six grandchildren.

Steven H Van Wie 1:18:44

Wow. I had heard his name recently in the news, but I did not realize that it was because he had passed or that he was so rich and famous.

Adam Van Wie 1:18:44

Yeah, pretty.

Adam Van Wie 1:18:54

Yeah, 1.4 billion. And he didn't even make that much during his NBA career.

Steven H Van Wie 1:18:59

Unbelievable.

Joey Loss 1:19:00

Yeah, well, yeah, that was before the massive contract, right?

Adam Van Wie 1:19:03

Yeah, definitely in the early days of the NBA's rising popularity.

Steven H Van Wie 1:19:08

America loves our fast food, for sure. Yeah, you probably would have had some words with RFK Jr. You never know.

Adam Van Wie 1:19:17

Chili's isn't too bad. I mean, they've made a bit of a comeback recently.

Joey Loss 1:19:21

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 1:19:22

All right. I asked. I asked a question earlier about what you get if you hire, you know, vote for and hire a commie and a position of power and mentioned one, but there's another one. This Virginia is a funny place. And nobody knows this better than Joey because that's his old stomping grounds. If you could cut out Those counties around D.C. virginia, be bright red, most excellent place to live. That's What I've always heard, but those people are nuts up in the northeast quadrant. And they took a very liberal congresswoman who ran as a moderate for governor they elected. Her name is Abigail Spanberger. And I knew exactly who she was because she always used to make news all the wrong ways. And she promised. Ready for this? Here's the big word. Affordability. Well, here's Abigail's version of affordability for Virginia. She has proposed some new taxes and they look a lot like this. New local sales tax in all Virginia counties and cities. New personal property tax on electric leaf blowers and electric landscaping equipment. Large employer tax. Gun and ammunition tax. New income tax brackets. Delivery tax would hit Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx and UPS orders in Northern Virginia. Investment income tax. Event tax. Storage facility tax. Gym membership tax. Dog walking tax. Dog grooming tax. Counseling tax. Digital personal property tax. New car taxes. Highway use fees. Increase in the hotel tax in Arlington. Statewide speed cameras,

Steven H Van Wie 1:21:12

not a tax, but more fines. Of course. Vehicle repair tax, home repair tax, dry cleaning tax, Fantasy sports tax and rideshare taxes. This is what happens.

Adam Van Wie 1:21:14

That's a tax.

Joey Loss 1:21:23

Do you like fun? Because it's going to get a tax. But the electric, lawn care, that's like, why electric? Why? How does that.

Adam Van Wie 1:21:31

She wants to ban gas and then tax electric. So she gets you either way. It's not to mention she is the most vanilla boring. Worst speaker. And they picked her to do the rebuttal to the state of the Union. And I.

Steven H Van Wie 1:21:35

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 1:21:42

Yes.

Steven H Van Wie 1:21:49

This is gonna be. This is Tuesday, folks.

Adam Van Wie 1:21:51

Yeah. I, I mean, I can't imagine a worse person to deliver that speech because this woman is boring like porridge.

Steven H Van Wie 1:22:02

They just, they never learn you can lead them to walk.

Joey Loss 1:22:07

I think here's. You know, my, my dad always says the pendulum swings in politics that I think, you know, this is some version of an opposite reaction to, you know, the shock that Trump brought and when he started making changes. And it's. Some element of this was inevitable. Right. We've seen it in New York, we're now seeing it in Virginia. There's a lot of bad ideas flying around. And when they get some airtime and people realize, wow, this sucks. You know, then it'll start to move again and we'll see change. This is just politics and afford.

Adam Van Wie 1:22:34

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:22:39

Fortunate affordability through increase in taxes. Right.

Joey Loss 1:22:42

Let me, let me take your money and give it back to you. That's affordability.

Steven H Van Wie 1:22:46

Good morning, Leroy.

Leroy 1:22:48

Good morning, folks. How are you doing?

Steven H Van Wie 1:22:50

Excellent. You?

Leroy 1:22:51

Good, good. I just. A little spread on Joey Sing with the wounded warrior thing. I believe I sent

Leroy 1:23:01

Adam an article a few days ago about the VA and the Trump administration change in the. If you needed a VA fiduciary to manage your affairs, you were deemed incompetent by the Biden administration. They sent your name into the, the nkis instant

Leroy 1:23:26

background check. So you were. You could not purchase a firearm or. And they also could send ATF out to get your firearms in with no due process.

Steven H Van Wie 1:23:40

Oh, that's.

Joey Loss 1:23:42

You know, I haven't seen that, but I. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I need to go read that.

Steven H Van Wie 1:23:45

What's. What's the guy's name? The Georgia guy's name. Who's in charge of the VA now? Doug Collins.

Leroy 1:23:52

Doug Collins.

Steven H Van Wie 1:23:54

I've always thought of him as being one of the great ones. And if he's not producing, then I got to change my opinion. It seems to me that all of this stuff could go away very easily if he got on board with it.

Steven H Van Wie 1:24:11

I don't know.

Leroy 1:24:12

Well, that's, that's something that Doug Collins and Trump administration come up to, right or wrong. If you just go to VA news.gov and it'll pop up in the last couple days, you can read the whole article. He's going to. Trump said, I think it was 200,000 people, they were going to be reinstated. How he's going to do that, I'm not sure. But you know, he's big on big numbers.

Steven H Van Wie 1:24:36

Yeah, that's true. Well, I encourage you to do that and see what's going on there because this has been a problem for as long as you and I have been alive, Leroy, and I want to see it fixed.

Adam Van Wie 1:24:49

Yeah, I did see that article. Thanks for sending that, Leroy. You're welcome.

Steven H Van Wie 1:24:52

You're welcome.

Leroy 1:24:53

Okay. I'll let you guys go. Have a great day.

Steven H Van Wie 1:24:55

Well, thank you for the update.

Steven H Van Wie 1:24:58

It seems like some problems ought to be so simple and that when they get to D.C. they don't turn out that way. What's the first thing somebody usually thinks about if they're considering hiring a financial advisor?

Adam Van Wie 1:25:12

Any idea the first thing?

Steven H Van Wie 1:25:15

Pretty much.

Adam Van Wie 1:25:16

I, I'm really not sure what I've

Steven H Van Wie 1:25:19

heard over my quarter century. What does it cost?

Joey Loss 1:25:24

That's a reasonable question.

Adam Van Wie 1:25:26

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 1:25:27

And you should know. One of the things, you should know exactly what it costs. Well, the real question should be, or the follow up question ought to be what's it worth? Yeah. Exactly. What is the opportunity cost of not hiring a good financial manager? And there's been a lot of studies on it. There's a new one that just came out and the range for people on this study was 2.3 to 2.78,

Joey Loss 1:25:27

Yeah.

Adam Van Wie 1:25:38

What does it cost not to.

Steven H Van Wie 1:25:59

which is the extra return per year that you get from using someone like us.

Adam Van Wie 1:26:06

And that is not through investments.

Joey Loss 1:26:08

Yeah, not. Not exclusively through investments. This includes tax planning.

Adam Van Wie 1:26:10

Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 1:26:13

And I'm going to go into this next week a lot more. But there are psychological things that are better. You get along with your relatives better, you sleep better and you make a lot of money. And this only took from age 50 to age 62 with all the parameters of the new system that Smart Asset has that I'm going to talk about next week. And the person would wind up at retirement with $926,000

Steven H Van Wie 1:26:40

more investment than not using one. What do we cost, guys?

Joey Loss 1:26:46

Yeah, well, for clarification, obviously there's a huge range of outcomes and impacts and stuff. Working with an advisor, certain people stand

Steven H Van Wie 1:26:54

to gain a lot more than I'm going to do. Some other examples based on they've got a tool you can use to do it and I'm going to do that. All right. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. This is the first time we've done our two hour edition, but we'll be back to regular next week, so be there.