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Welcome back to Trust the Process, the podcast where we talk about real estate,
new home industry, new construction, and everything in between.
Today we're going to talk about interest rates.
Topic that we know is, has been in front of mind for people for a couple of years now.
We know everybody's, you hear so much about interest rates.
It's a key hinge.
It has been.
And for people who maybe got great rates when they were low during COVID in those years where you could refinance,
what they look like now, where we think they're going, some of the hindrances that have been posed to us over time.
And I know there are a lot of people who've thought, maybe I won't buy.
I'm going to wait until the rates drop or whatever it is.
And so maybe some of how people are going to get off the fence with that, what it means to new home construction,
and what it means to the end user buyer at the end of the day.
So I'm going to let you jump into it.
And as our resident expert, Mike is going to take a seat here and tell us all we need to know.
I think, you know, I hesitated to even make this a topic because there's so much content out there.
People can find everyone's take on interest rates.
You can throw a rock and hit 10 different opinions.
And there's no shortage of YouTubers and opinions and podcasters who use this as fodder.
And you watch CNBC and they talk about it at least once a week.
There's also a fair amount of people who think they know, who believe they understand it.
Maybe don't have the full picture understanding of where it starts or how it gets to where it is.
I think that's probably most people.
In fact, I've talked to mortgage lenders who clearly really have a very flimsy understanding,
shaky understanding of really mortgage rates and how they're determined.
People think that the vast majority of Americans think the feds control the interest rates.
And that's an narrative.
They control what your 30-year fix is going to be.
And oddly enough, this is very apropos because the fed met today.
So we're in the last week of January, the fed met and decided to keep the feds funds rate.
No changes today.
No changes.
But that doesn't really tell us much.
The feds funds rate is just what banks lend money to each other overnight.
That's why they call it the short-term rate.
So it's, you know, I believe right now it's like basically 5.25.
So that's just the percentage rate that I need to balance my books at the end of the night
because banks have to balance their deposits versus their outstanding loans.
I'm going to borrow money from a bank upstream, upstream, upstream, upstream.
The federal reserve, you know, it goes all the way up to the feds.
But really that kind of sets the tone because a bank, if they know they have to borrow money at the end of the night
to balance their books and they're paying 1% for that money versus 5%,
they're going to be more likely to loan out things that are going to be shown as debts on their books.
That's interesting.
Right.
So if they have a million dollars out but only 100,000 in deposits, there's a ratio.
I believe they can loan 10 times on deposits.
I can't remember.
But they can loan a certain multiplier on their deposits.
So, uh-oh, too many people withdrew money today.
We still have all these outstanding loans.
We need to balance our books according to the debts versus what we have on our balance sheet.
And we need to borrow money upstream overnight.
That's what they call it, the overnight rate or the feds funds rate, the short term rate.
So when they play with that, they use it as a tool to either encourage lending or discourage inflation.
So they have that dual mandate of full employment and 2% inflation, just a random number they pulled out of nowhere.
But they thought that that's a healthy economy, should inflate by about 2%, decreases your debt.
I mean, really, if you have debt on the books, but your dollar is becoming worth less every year,
but you have the same amount of debt, the debt becomes less impactful.
So it benefits the consumer to have some inflation.
So they want some inflation.
And what we're seeing now after COVID, we had all that quantitative easing where the rates were basically zero or were.
And it had upstream effects, right?
So then you saw banks being able to balance their books with 1% money costs.
They're really eager to loan loans at 4%, 5%.
Because it's like printing money literally, right?
They can balance their books.
They can borrow money from an upstream bank, meaning a bank bigger than that or whatever.
And why would you not have debt on your books then based off of your deposits?
You have more debt.
You're making 5% interest on that debt.
To balance your books out at the end of the night, you're borrowing money at 1%.
I've never heard this perspective.
Yeah, it's what the feds are doing when they're setting rates.
That's really what it is.
Now that does have inflationary or deflationary pressures.
You can see when they wanted this bar economic activity after the global financial crisis or during COVID.
It's one of the quickest things they go to.
Oh, let's go ahead and make short-term borrowing costs very cheap.
And it trickles into long-term borrowing costs.
Just slowly.
Most of the long-term borrowing costs are dictated by treasury bond yields.
So that's without getting too far down the rabbit hole on short-term rates and things like that.
I just thought it was important to make that distinction of what it means when you hear,
oh, the feds have lowered rates.
Because it doesn't necessarily move anything.
No, unless you're balancing the books at Wells Fargo, it doesn't really have a lot of basis on your life.
Now, a lot of times credit cards are based on that.
That would might be what we call our prime rate or our feds funds rate.
So the prime rate, anything that's variable, you might notice that as we've seen a couple of rate decreases in 2024,
that would maybe you'd see your credit card interest rate drop commensurate to those rate drops.
But that's about it.
Maybe a little bit of auto too.
You might see it trickle into auto.
But it is a completely different animal than the mortgage market.
Mortgage markets are truly market-based lending.
So those rates are determined by supply and demand for money.
And I think of it as, okay, so you have treasury bonds.
And a 10-year treasury bond trades at, let's say right now, they're trading at 4.5% yield.
So the feds auction off bonds four times a year and you get paid twice a year.
So you can buy bonds for 10 years and get paid every six months.
And currently you're getting paid about 4.5% on your money.
So if you bought a million dollars in 10-year treasuries, you're getting $45,000 a year.
So if you have a bunch of money that you're managing and you want to have a really low risk investment,
it's backed by the full faith and security of the federal government of the United States.
And you're managing a portfolio where your job is to, let's say it's a pension fund,
and your job is to keep enough income in there to pay pensions.
You're going to want some high-risk stuff of 8%, 9%, maybe that's in stocks.
And you're hoping those stocks go up.
Maybe it's a dividend stock where you're getting paid and then you also have stock appreciation,
but then also bonds.
And there's also other avenues, real estate investment trusts and things like that,
that they'll use to get money off of their money.
But it's a great way to preserve your initial investment, almost no risk.
And you're seeing about $45,000 for every million dollars that you put in there.
So really mortgages are the same.
To a funds manager, mortgages are the same product.
It's not a guarantee, but it's a really safe, long-term cash investment
that you can give your investors cash back every single month on their investment.
So whether it's California Pension Fund or city pension funds or just regular mutual funds or ETFs,
they'll put some portion of that money in there because it makes their yields look good.
It kind of creates a floor.
And then if they put 10% in those mortgage bonds or treasury bonds,
they can almost count on that money, whether it's 4%, 6% or whatever,
and then hopefully make up some more points on the front end with the other 70%, 80% of their portfolio,
whether it be stocks or short-term corporate debt, things like that,
that might see them yielding 10% then you kind of average everything together
and they can say, our bond returns 7.5% per year on your money.
So if you give us a million dollars, we'll give you $75,000 minus our expense ratio of $5,000.
So that's kind of how they make money just by moving money around and having money invested
and their investors are happy.
So you're a pension fund, you have $100 million in there, it really adds up.
Now you can pay those pensions and never touch your initial fund.
So the long and the short of it is you have these 10-year treasury bonds that people can buy from the federal government
and then you have mortgage-backed securities which kind of compete.
I mean, that's why it's tied.
If you look at where the 10-year is, you can figure about a 1.5% to 2% premium on top of that
and that adjusts for the risk.
Most people don't hold the mortgages for 30 years so they kind of are considered about what's the average people
staying in the house about 7 years, I think statistically.
So that's really a 7-year bond.
It's not a 30-year bond, it's a 7-year bond.
So you're getting that money back in that 7-year period and in the meantime you're making all that interest on it.
So there is an appetite for mortgage-backed securities and that's a big reason why we had the global financial crisis
because there was too much demand so then it was like, we've got to generate all this debt.
We'll take anything, anyone.
We just got to get this debt into these funds and sell them off
and there were a lot of people that made money along the way bundling them up and reselling them
and there's a lot of books written on that.
There's the big short, there's tons of stuff on that so we don't need to go down that rabbit hole
but that's kind of, if you think of really, it's a supply and demand.
So as long as there's a limited money supply and the feds are trying to do that now since mid-2022 when we...
Criteria is really tightened up.
It gives that security and a few hours of safety.
Oh, even from the global financials, which you say, right.
Absolutely, well yes.
Exactly, yeah, no, for sure because then we saw, oh, mortgages aren't completely risk-free.
Now it's loosening a little.
Right, yeah, it's kind of helping to find a good equilibrium
and that's really how, it's a market-based thing.
Where's the appetite for debt?
So if there's not appetite for debt, then you see your mortgage rates go up
and if 10-year treasury bonds are an indicator of where people think inflation is.
So if inflation, let's put it this way, if inflation is 25%, which I believe we touched that in 2021,
your money is rotting.
So if you have money and a 10-year treasury bond that's making you 4% a year
but it's inflation rates 25% a year, no one's buying bonds
and when no one buys bonds, the yields go up.
So let's pretend back then when those inflation numbers first came out,
even if the feds had done nothing to raise rates, the market would have forced rates up
because there would have been no appetite.
Who was going to invest in mortgage-backed securities that are returning at 3.5%?
I have a 3.5% mortgage rate.
Well, that's great.
But no one wants that debt when inflation is 20%.
Now, obviously that's cool, but that's why these inflation numbers are so important.
So when inflation is at 2%, people can justify putting their money into an investment
that's yielding them 4.5% to 5% because in the case of beating inflation and returning 3%.
I can't just let it sit in the bank.
So that's kind of how it equalizes.
I think of it as if we were at this table and I was one person and I needed $1,000
and somebody came to me and said, I'll give you $1,000, but give me $1,200 next month.
Pay me back my $1,000 plus $200.
And I would say, well, I really need the $1,000.
And then someone else comes around the corner, I hear you're giving him $200 for $1,000 for a month.
I'll give you $1,000.
Give me $100 in one month and then now suddenly I have options.
And then someone comes around the corner, I'll give you $1,025.
I'll give it to those terms so you can see because this guy is going to have $1,000 either way
and he's not going to make any money off of that.
So he's like, well, shoot, I'll take $25.
I'm not going to use that $1,000 in the next month anyway.
Change a month to 30 years or 10 years or seven years and change $1,000 to a $500,000 mortgage
and change the... you see how that's kind of the math.
So when there are more people with more money, if there's more money in the house circulating
and I'm the one that needs it, I'm going to get much better terms.
Now let's pretend the rolls are flipped and there's 10 of us here asking for money
and five people circulating and they're saying, well, I have $1,000 and all 10 of these people want it.
So who's going to pay me the best return and then they kind of play musical chairs
until there's a market that's established.
So this person has a great job and you feel like they're going to repay the debt.
This person's already borrowed money from you and repaid it.
So they're going to give you $100 instead of $200, but you know you're going to get that $100
and you're not going to have to chase them down for it.
This person has the ability to pay. This person at the tail end of the table has no job,
is new to the house, has never repaid debt with you.
What kind of risk scale are you going to give?
So that's kind of how the bond market works because really when you're buying a bond,
you're buying U.S. debt because it's the U.S.
It's the treasury that's going to give you that yield.
So when the U.S. sees a drop in its credit, you know, if you remember in 2008 and 2009,
there was a risk that we were going to lose.
We went from AAA to AA as a country.
So if we lost our credit rating as a country, now our treasury yields got to go through the roof
because there's less appetite because by the way, it's not just Americans that buy treasury bonds.
People in other countries will buy U.S. treasury bonds.
It's a good way to get your money into the U.S. circulation and you'll buy them.
And then as a side note, when they, you know, on the topic of people who buy bonds,
the federal, the government can buy bonds as well.
They'll buy bonds off of banks at face value plus a little premium
if they want to get money back into the supply to say, okay, banks, you're not loaning enough.
You need to loan more money and we're going to do that by buying bonds and that's quantitative easing.
That's that along with lowering the feds funds rate is a way that the federal reserve and federal, you know,
the feds can stimulate the economy.
Get people to buy more and it does it trickles over into goods and everything.
Yeah.
Because it affects credit cards.
It affects, I mean, terms on your TV.
You buy it with financing, your car, your house, everything.
So homes are, home financing is a really fragmented business.
It's not going to Best Buy and one of the open up Best Buy credit card.
They're getting a separate line or a bank is underwriting them and these are their terms and that's it.
It doesn't matter how many people want to come in and buy TVs that week.
But if you're trying to get your head around the mortgage interest market and also the housing market
and you're trying to time those perfectly, best of luck because I've never been able to do that.
Where would you say we are right now?
So are there more people looking for or offering?
There's definitely still a lot of money in the money supply and I think that I think that's the crux of what's keeping rates from being 10, 11% that we saw in the 80s.
Got it to what, 17, 18%.
There's just a lot more money in circulation now.
There's a lot of funds.
There's a lot of wealth.
There's trillions of dollars worth of private equity out there and pension funds that need to invest in places.
And our stock market has been performing really, really well even post COVID.
So there's, you're also competing with a stock market that's returning some great returns.
And why would you invest in a 10 year treasury bond at 4% every year when you could invest in one of the magnificent seven or a tech stock that's returning 20% on its face value every year.
So there's a lot of competition for money, but there's a lot of money out there.
So it's, I think as soon as we see inflation stabilize, which we have, I think we just had a lot of unknown, you know, a lot of uncertainty with changes of administrations.
And I think people were nervous as to, okay, what are they knock on effects that we're going to see?
And I'm going to cool it on buying bonds because if we have a lot of tariffs when I see inflation, and if we see inflation, my bonds are crap.
So I think that's kept bonds really propped up, which is why we've seen the feds lowering rates now for about four or five months.
And mortgage rates have gone up in that time period, not a lot, but they certainly have not gone down.
So there's just no one that can put their thumb on the scale to bring rates down, mortgage rates.
So it's just a matter of where's the demand and where's the appetite for that debt.
I think that's one of the misconceptions is that those two things are operating together and they're not.
They're not.
Yeah.
So having understanding that they're independently moving based on what the feds say and less about what the feds say in the housing market, more about the opportunities that are available to lend on.
Exactly.
And another thing to remember, since they are so tied to inflation, if they sometimes actually, I remember a couple of times in 2022, we would see rates come down because the fed raised rates.
We would see the mortgage market get better because the feds were aggressively raising rates, which gave investors the hope that, oh, we are going to get inflation under control.
So sometimes raising the short term rate will actually lower the mortgage rate, the prevailing wins for the mortgage industry.
So it's a really interesting, I love it.
I think it's fascinating.
I mean, I'm waiting to bring up a historical reference.
I'm just dying.
I know you've got one in there.
I will.
We'll spread out the Great Depression bubble.
We'll let that one rest.
But which, by the way, I'm going to bring it up, which, by the way, was at that time, if you look at like the writings of Milton Friedman and stuff, great economist, they did a post mortem on it in the 50s, I want to say.
And when they looked at bank ledgers and they just looked at the overall money in circulation, this sounds like the most obvious on the nose thing, but the amount of money in circulation plummeted during the depression.
So everyone was just borrowing less.
They were loaning less.
They were transacting less.
And it became this kind of game of chicken that, OK, well, I can get an employee now for my factory for half of what I was paying a year ago.
But do I want to do a bunch of hiring? Because what if there's no one to buy my goods?
Then it becomes a cycle and then no one buys goods because they don't have job security.
And then it just kind of spiraled like that.
So the feds are trying to avoid that.
Really, that's their mandate is don't let that happen again.
So increased money supply when needed.
Because there's a lot of reasons you could say that we had the Great Depression.
It didn't necessarily have to be a money supply issue because it's not like we took any money out of circulation.
It just at the time when people were hoarding it, we should have been dumping money into it.
Because actually that was one of the few times in our history that we've ever seen deflation.
Because the worst thing, what's worse than hyperinflation is hyperdeflation.
All your assets are worth nothing.
If you're selling, when you're a manufacturing economy, which we even more so were back then,
all the goods that you've produced that are in your inventory are now worth half or a quarter what you thought they were.
That's devastating.
If you're running the government, you'd rather have the opposite problem.
You don't want that either, but you'd rather have the opposite problem.
But you don't want to have this deflation.
So when we saw a lot of quantitative easing in COVID, it was to prevent a deflation.
Oh, suddenly people are not going to eat.
How anymore? People are not going to go to the movies anymore?
People, are they going to buy cars anymore?
Are they going to buy houses?
Are they going to do?
We have to spur the economy so that we can ensure they keep doing these things.
So let's increase the money supply.
That's kind of how they do it.
And then too much of a good thing.
We had too much dessert and then we had a cake hanging over.
And all this money and our money supply was, whoa, okay.
And that's a whole different, you know, economists will write books about that too, I think.
Yeah, and it's taken some time for that to absorb.
Kind of work its way through.
There was a lot of fluidity in that.
100%.
And it affected everything, obviously the housing market, but across all goods and services, it was definitely an overlay.
When you look at 70% of homes are purchased with mortgages, the borrowing costs are such a hinge.
It's such a hot topic that it really is the market.
It really is.
And I think what we saw has helped to save the real estate or prevent some sort of freefall and rates shut up is that housing is a great hedge against inflation.
So we saw a lot of investors rushing into housing because homes in general follow inflation.
If you look at our appreciation curves in real estate and our inflation curves, they're really eerily tied to each other.
Yeah.
So when you look at that, it kind of helped create a backstop in the housing market.
So the average consumer kind of got squeezed out because the borrowing cost became astronomically high overnight.
But then the amount of cash buyers kind of compensated for that from the appetite.
And it's not just the big hedge funds.
It's mom and pop investors too.
If they're sitting on a million dollars and they say, well, I want to diversify one and I move 400,000 of that over to a single family home and put some money in the real estate market kind of prevents a deflation.
A lot of factors.
It is.
And interesting too.
I mean, like I said, I think a lot of people, I myself being one of them, I didn't realize how closely tied the mortgage back securities were to that inflationary rate.
Right.
Both the relationship that they have together, but then that opposing, you know, that inverse relationship of how they affect each other.
Exactly.
So yeah, I feel like you just barely touched on the topic.
Yeah, you could, you can go down and you could get into yield curves and stuff.
But if we just tied to mortgage.
Big pieces that helped to fit into a puzzle level.
That's right.
Create the story for how we understand it better.
100%.
The best way if I could just, you know, if someone asked me to describe it as a friend is just think of it as it is a supply and demand.
And that's it.
No one dictates it.
It's how much how ready willing and able of someone to loan you money.
And a mortgage lender kind of works as an intermediary and they'll wholesale those and sell them off.
So if they find that the demand for their product.
Cause they are, they're in a really tough spot because they're writing, you know, the good funding commitment at 7%.
I get all this money at 7%.
Right.
Okay.
We can write a bunch of loans at 7%.
Now they're going to maybe write them at seven and eight or seven just to hedge it a little bit.
But when the market's in the opposite of a free fall when it's kind of falling upwards, really precarious to try to write all that mortgage money out.
Millions of dollars even through a local branch.
So which is why you shop the loan.
Right.
Cause you never know.
You never know.
Why different lenders are able to offer different.
Slightly different.
Exactly.
They follow the mortgage market, but they, there could always be this kind of slight quarter point, eighth of a point.
Right.
Plus a mortgage lender gets paid on the rate that they sell you in addition to their, cause if they, if the, if the prevailing rate seven and they get, they write your loan at seven and an eight, they're going to make that eighth.
They're going to get, they're going to get a premium on that coupon as you'd call it.
Okay.
And then that, that investor will pay a slightly higher premium.
Now, if you go too high, then that's actually a refi risk.
So the value kind of starts to flat line.
Cause they say, well, I don't want this, I don't want this in my portfolio because they're prevailing rate right now seven and you suckered them into a seven and a half.
They're going to get wise in three to five months and know that I'm going to refi and I'm going to lose that in my, in my servicing.
So it's a fine line too.
And that's why if you need help with closing costs, sometimes they'll sell you a higher rate and pass that money on to you.
Cause they know they're going to sell it at a premium, but even that starts to hit its, hit its cap to say, okay, we want to give you 5,000 in lender credits.
We're going to write this loan at a higher rate, but then the end, and buyer of that mortgage product is saying, oh, wait a minute.
Why is this loan an outlier?
This is a high refi risk.
They got their lender credit six months later.
They're going to refi and be out of this.
So I'm not going to give you too much of a premium for this higher debt because I'm not going to, I might only see six months worth of payments on it.
And that's especially reflective in big builders when they pay for a commitment up front.
And so now they're already locked into that rate.
Yes.
Regardless of what they, what happens between then and when all of that commitment has been sold out to the homes that they're putting off the market.
That's a great way to dovetail and into building.
The opposite is true too.
So instead of a higher rate that gives the credit to the buyer, a builder, you know, new home construction has a lot more margin than a seller normally.
Or a builder has a lot more appetite to get rid of that inventory than a seller.
If that's their one home, they're going to say, well, the market's the market and I'm going to get out of it when I get out of it with today's rates and today's marketplace and today's buyer pool.
But a builder has 50 of those homes to unload and they're going to say, well, let me buy a forward commitment.
I'll spend $100,000 to get $10 million worth of mortgage money at a one point discount or something along those lines and buy that forward commitment.
And then I say, if you threw that and sell off their homes.
Exactly.
And that's the way that when you're buying new construction, that builder has a lot more incentive and wiggle room to do so.
And a lot of times a builder is setting their own comps so they can work it into the price of the home.
But since they're setting the neighborhood or at least setting kind of the market in that area, I had to do it in 2023.
I had to spend $54,000 on a commitment to get a buyer into.
There's an inventory that I really wanted to sell.
And during the rate, you know, when we had rates went up to 8.1 in the course of our escrow and they hadn't locked and the only way they could get it done was it just, it was a point where I had to make that decision and say, I'll spend the 54,000 because it's huge loan amount.
Is it's better than me putting the house back on the market and then taking a small price reduction here, a lower offer here and by the before you know it.
And that 54 would have eaten itself up just to move in.
Two more months of holding cost and then maybe it doesn't sell for what it was going to sell for.
So I just made that decision.
But I had the margin in it.
If it was a primary residence and maybe I owed 2.2 million and they wanted it to, you know, it would be, I'd have a lot less wiggle room in it.
So it's just something that you do kind of build into every, every deal that you're working on.
Just say, okay, we got to leave a little bit of room for concession.
I usually do a blanket 2% just across the board.
I think this is 2.5 million dollar home and I leave $50,000 just in either construction overages, concessions.
And I'll probably eat through that at some point.
A little bit of all right.
A little bit of everything.
Yeah, yeah, wherever you need it.
Yeah, 1000 or 10,000 here just.
And we never dial our budgets spot on either.
But so sometimes you're lower here so you can move more money into that pile too.
And then have a little bit more flexibility when the time comes.
So there's a lot to it.
There is a lot to it.
And so guys, when you think about how challenging it is to time the interest rate market to time the housing market to time your life to time your finances.
It's a miracle any home cell.
It's crazy when you really think about it.
And when you, you know, that, that because I guess because it's just such a trigger point for people that number has really indicated what the housing market has done in recent years.
Now that we're kind of getting to a point where we can sort of settle a little bit into what it is today.
What we anticipate it being is probably not going to drop significantly, probably not going to jump significantly.
If our crystal ball were working, we would know that for 2025.
But that's what we anticipate or what we, you know, what all the analysts and what the historical data.
If we look at where it's, where is the momentum?
The momentum is that rates are going to even out, which they kind of already have.
And now that we're kind of to that point, we can look at that sort of where we were and how we, how, how that has affected the housing industry and how we can sort of gel into what's going to be moving forward.
Right. And it's when the economy is good, really hard to have low interest rates on 30 or fixed or 15 year, any mortgage product, very hard.
Because you're competing with the stock market.
You're competing with the Fed trying to make sure that economy doesn't overheat.
You're competing with a lot of people that are gainfully employed looking for mortgage money.
It's just, it's like having your cake and eating too.
To have a record low unemployment, which we have, to have a growing economy by GDP, to have a great stock market and then to also expect 5%, 4% interest rates is just pie in the sky.
So that's what a lot of people are hoping for.
A lot of people have been, you know, jaded about with interest rates.
Agreed. And what we forget is that when rates were 2.5%, 3%, you could take a bath in the Bellagio Fountains because the strip was closed down.
There was a lot of fear still. Right. We forget the fear.
Yeah.
It's, you only remember the good part.
Oh, you could get a, you get a house for 350 and a mortgage rate for 3%.
Right.
Well, you had to have the stones to pull the trigger when all your friends are getting laid off and they're saying that the city might not open for another three months or airports or, you know, sparse and no one's coming.
It's scary. You know, it's easy to hide in hindsight.
And now that we've passed that through that, those people that did jump or did take that risk at the time, obviously paid off. They did well.
But at the time was, it was a decision by winners.
Right. So those are the ones we hear about, right? Not the people that did sign on that loan and then they ended up losing their job.
Right.
You know, looked at it a hundred times and never quite pulled the trigger and now they're kicking themselves.
Oh, yeah.
And then when you're out there, there's a lot of them still that haven't even been able to get into the home buying game because they didn't pull the trigger then and then they went through, you know, 23, 24 with maybe it's going to drop again.
Maybe, you know, now, maybe they'll get back into the market in 25.
Yeah.
As we, you know, that, we've talked before about some of that.
Yeah, we've had a lot of content on that.
And you know, if we can see some pressure relief somewhere.
But a lot of times people have to be careful what they wish for because if you're wishing for a 3%, right?
And then suddenly you might find yourself really nervous at your job.
Oh, they're talking about layoffs.
Oh, they're talking about, oh, I would have bought.
So they just don't realize how a lot of things do move and lockstep together.
So if you feel really confident about your any potential and your job and your little 401k that you've been putting into since you were 21 and now you're 31 has been going up and up and up and up and.
Oh, if I only had that, yeah, it's hard to get it all at once.
If only, right?
If only, yeah.
Good. Well, good conversation. Appreciate the backstory and the help.
I hope we didn't lose anyone.
I don't know. And if you did, you did, but I think it's it's interesting and relevant information.
So glad you broke it down.
I certainly learned a lot.
Hope you guys did too.
Glad you were here to join us and we'll hope to see you on the next episode.
Thanks so much for joining us on Trust for Process.
Bye bye.
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