Ep 71: How To Tell When a Recession Is Coming And How You Can Prepare For It
The X's & O's
2022 has been far from a regular year, as have the past three years.
The war in Ukraine, the after effects of Covid-19 on the economy, and talks of a recession all make 2022 a very unusual year.
But how have these events affected you and your finances?
In this episode, Brent, Matthew, and Joshua discuss some of the most talked about events of 2022 and explain how they have impacted the everyday lives of Americans, just like you.
Matthew, Joshua, and Brent discuss:
Elon Musk vs. Twitter: Why he backed down from his ownership and why he is getting sued
How the Ukraine and Russian war has influenced this major spike in inflation
What characteristics in the economy tell you that a recession is occurring
How global events have subliminally impacted your spending patterns
And more
Resources:
Connect With RPA Wealth Management:
The Hosts:
Brent Pasqua, Matthew Theal and Joshua Winterswyk
Transcript
Welcome to the retirement plan playbook with Brent Pasqua, Matthew Theal and Joshua Winterswyk from RPA wealth management. In this podcast, we cover current events, retirement planning strategies. And provide you with the tools to help you build a successful retirement playbook in any political or financial landscape.
Join Brent, Matthew and Joshua as they navigate the issues that can make the later stages of your retirement plan, challenging and help you create the best retirement plan playbook. Now let's get to the show.
Welcome to the retirement plan playbook. We are back. I'm Brent Pasqua, host and founder of RPA wealth management. I'm here with Matthew Theal certified financial planner and our guy, Joshua Winterswyk certified financial planner. Uh, we are getting a lot of the same questions right now. And that's about whether or not we are in a recession.
Are we gonna actually step into the recession if we're not? And what are some of the strategies we can utilize? If we do end up, or we are in this recession. So we want to address that today. But as we kind of get this thing started, I wanted to ask you guys Amazon's prime day came and went. Did you guys take advantage of any deals?
No, I didn't buy anything. Um, I was looking at TVs. I, I wanted new TV, my TV's too small and it doesn't work that. So I, I decided to hold off the wait for labor day or black Friday, I'm sure they'll be bigger sales then. Um, I looked at all the players best buy Amazon Walmart, I'd love to get a nice TV for a little bit less than they were offering them.
I peaked at Amazon prime day, but I actually didn't pull the trigger on anything. So I, I, it came and went, like you said, I know it's two days now. It used to be a day and I didn't actually buy anything. Was, do you get like a, a much bigger sell on items? I think a lot of their items are on sale. Cause they have like, their basics and lines, but there's a lot.
I know that there's a lot of stuff on sale and I see a lot of like articles out there from other publications being like, here are the 10 best prime day deals and they curate like a list that you can kind of click through. I click through a couple of them, but nothing caught my eye enough to buy. So I saved some money.
Is it trying to become like a black Friday Sullivan? Oh yeah. I know people get pretty excited for it. Like black Friday. It didn't, uh, trick me this time though. I saved a hundred percent cause I didn't buy anything. I, I, I didn't buy anything. I didn't, I forgot to even check, but I mean, it's just not a big day that I circle in the calendar.
I guess I wish that they would just make it last a little bit longer. Maybe make, make it prime week now. Yeah, I think so too. Prime week would be cool. All right. Well, let's get into the headlines. Uh, Elon Musk notify Twitter that he wants out of his 44 billion deal to buy the struggling social. He claimed Twitter failed to comply with obligations in the merger agreement.
Twitter has, uh, sued Elon Musk in Delaware for pulling out of the deal. I, I'm still confused about what has all happened here and how did we even end up here? Yeah. This is a crazy story. So, you know, we, we talked about it like three or four shows ago. Musk agreed to buy Twitter. They signed the agreements and, and then he's kind of been.
I guess like taking his toes out of the water slowly and, and setting up for this with, with public comments. And then he, he let them know that he's pulling the deal. And then, Twitter obviously sued because the board has to put the shareholders as their best interest. Right? So like advisors, we have to put our client's best interest.
First, the board has to put the shareholders at Twitter's best interest first and obviously 44. Billion's a pretty good deal for, you know, a struggling social media company. It's worth a lot less now. And Musk pulled out. He said he is not gonna do it. They sued. They're gonna Delaware. You know, my popcorn's ready.
I think it's gonna be a, a fun ride here. Anything with Musk is entertaining. I think so too. It's gonna be a long draw to how legal boxing match is this. Do you think more about what he's saying is bots. And, or do you think this is more like a, a buyer's remorse thing? And he just got put too much of his hands in the fire, and this is just too much to deal with.
Probably a little bit of buyer's remorse would be my guess. I know he was gonna use some of his Tesla shares and, Tesla's dropped in priced as is everything, you know, since he agreed to buy it and. I can understand him wanting out. It looks like he is gonna pay some money to, to Twitter, regardless.
How, how this shakes out. Cause the agreement has a $1 billion kind of bill on it. If he backed out through any of this process and he signed that, that sounds like a lot to you and me, uh, this P pocket change for, yeah, for Mr. Elon, but this is no different, you know, say you're a real estate agent. You sell a house, the buyer backs out.
That's all that's happening here. Why does this go through. That's where the majority of corporations are incorporated at. So it's a Delaware court. It's be interesting to see how this court case goes, but it's probably going to be expensive and there's gonna be a lot of lawyers making probably a lot of money.
This is probably not the last time we talk about this. No inflation is another big issue. The June inflation data was reported at a 9.1% increase compared to last year. The highest increase since November of 1980. Matt on the last show we had talked about how inflation has peaked and it looked like that was your stance.
What do you think now? Yeah. So on the last show, we said that, a lot of the commodities that were leading the rising inflation had peaked and that that's still the case. The, one of the major problems though, is any economic data is always gonna be backward, looking, not forward looking. And right now, the biggest driver of this previous inflation print was gasoline up 11.2%.
And over the past year, energy has contributed a 41% gain to the CPI. And I was just driving to work that today. I looked at the gas station and finally, here in California, enter prices are below $6 a gallon. So it's, it was 5 99 and then five 90 at Arco for the cheap. And that should help lower inflation in the July print, which will be re reported in August.
Pretty crazy that we haven't seen inflation this high since 1981. So last time inflation was this high. I wasn't even alive telling my age, I guess, on this podcast. Yeah, neither was I . But pretty interesting to see here. I think Matt, you needed some clarification cuz you did call that it peaked even though the overall inflation number.
Is higher, but tell us about core inflation. Yeah. So core inflation is when you strip out food and energy prices. And the reason we do that is because they're volatile and core did peak. The highest reading of core we've had was at 6.4%. And that was in March and it was reported in June or June's data reported a 5.9% gain.
So core still hasn't got up as high as it has, if it did. I think that would be really, really concern. But so far it, it does look like inflation's most likely this is the peak print and it'll start to come in. Hopefully. So do you think, so once it starts going down, does it continue to go down or could you see sort of like a roller coaster ride where it comes back up at later parts in the year?
That's a good question. I, I mean, I'm not sure anytime we're dealing with this macro data. It's always tough to call. I mean, what's been driving inflation and, and what's really led to this I guess wildfire we're dealing with right now is the war in Ukraine. Right? Cause that caused food prices to go up that caused oil prices to go up.
So we just don't know what's around the corner, just like at the beginning of the year, we didn't know that war was around the corner. So inflation probably wouldn't be an issue today. We wouldn't be talking about it if it wasn't for that. And what we have to see what the Fed's gonna do. I mean, that's another kind of factor in here.
They're trying to battle inflation with the raising of interest rates. So you know, what is going to be their stance. If we do see inflation start to drop. Are they gonna continue to raise interest rates and we will kind of have to wait to see what are those effects. Yeah. I feel like both these stories, Twitter and inflation, aren't going away anytime soon.
No. No. All right. Let's get in the retirement planning corner in the retirement corner today, we wanted to discuss and talk around the recession and what it actually can mean towards your retirement. Whether you're in retirement, you're preparing for retirement. You're thinking about retirement. We wanted to discuss a few strategies that you can use during the recess.
But first we wanna know though, how do we actually know if we are in a recession and are, are we currently in one? That's a great question. So typically a recession is measured from an economic standpoint as two negative quarters of GDP growth. So that means that gross domestic product declined for two quarters in a.
But what most people look at and what the federal reserve watches is actually rising unemployment. And right now the current unemployment rate is 3.6%. It's at a 50 year low. Currently there's two jobs available in this country for every one person who's looking for a job. So until that goes higher we probably won't be really near a recession at.
Is that the one factor that's kind of holding us back right now from being sort of in a recess. Yeah. Yes. The strong job market is really helping and, there's, we're not in a, what we'd call a technical definition of a recession right now. I'll go back to GDP and just gross domestic products.
So for our listeners that aren't familiar kind of with that term, that is the measurement to seek a. Or to capture a country's economic output. So it's the total value created in the us. Um, and so we know we had that first quarter that was negative, um, of that measurement seems like early data, not official data is predicting that it's gonna be negative again.
So based off of just those terms, technically somewhat of a recess. Would you, would you agree, Matt? Yeah. It it'll hit the technical definition. But I mean, everybody's just talking about this, you know, recession, recess or recession, and like, I've, I've never seen this in my life. Even like going back, I feel like more people are talking about a recession now than they were in 2008.
Why do you think that is though? Why do you think people keep bringing it up or like, so like micro focused on a recession is. Because they feel like it's gonna affect the way that they're spending money, their cost to their goods. You think it's the market? Is it their job? Wh where, where is this obsession coming from?
Yeah, so I have some interesting stats. So consumer sentiment just came out last week and it, what it said was consumers are worried about personal finances and inflation. We obviously know why people are worried about inflation. But over 50% of people are saying that starting to erode their standard of.
You know, when you're going, you're putting your credit card in, you're paying more for food and gasoline takes away from what you could per purchase on other things. And I think people are just down about that. So they think we're in a recession, even though we probably really aren't and you've seen, wage wages increase, which is good, which is kind of not also like a, in leading indicator of a recession.
That's positive also after kind of the pandemic, you saw personal finances in the us and a position that was. Great. I mean, people's savings accounts were built up. Debt was being paid off. So although inflation's kind of eroding that spending power people are in overall in a better financial situation than they were before the actual pandemic happened.
It's funny, cuz everybody says, Hey, like I'm gonna cut spending, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. But also last week we got retail sales data and it was 1% higher. Then the reason there's a lot of demand out there. Like people just aren't cutting spin, like these just aren't signs that are consistent with the recession.
We see that those are like, you know, some of the positives of what's happening right now, but is there negatives regarding cinema of this recession? I mean, obviously inflation, right? Like we keep talking about it. Cause it's impacting a lot of people. The price you pay at the pump, go to your grocery store.
You, you buy food it's higher than it was a year ago. That that's very, very clear and that's a little bit depressing to some people. And, and that's really hurting the consumer sentiment. But out outside of that, there, there's not a ton of negatives other than people feel down in, in continuing on the inflation talk.
I mean, just when you see the. You know, last month it was 8.6. Now we're seeing inflation increase to 9.1. Like just emotionally looking at that report, not really understanding the data or like what's actually driving it. That's not what we want to see in this time after we've been dealing with inflation this whole year, it's kind of wearing us down.
I feel like in America. Yeah. And it totally is. And you can see that in the approval rating of the president of the United. There's never been a president who had less of an approval rating than Joe Biden does right now. Trump was more like than Biden, which is crazy. And I think that makes people feel depressed and it makes them think that, Hey, we're probably gonna head into recession because you know, this guy Biden clearly doesn't know what he's doing.
So it's all just sentiment driven. And then you look at the stock market. I mean, you log into your investment account, so here's a negative and you log into your 401k, you see your statement come through after this quarter ended and you've lost money, you know, most people have. So that's also not helping that sediment.
Yeah, absolutely market being down. And then there are some other interesting things that we're seeing in the economy. If you look at the specific retailers, some of them have rising inventory levels. , but it's not because people really aren't shopping there. It's because they ordered all of the wrong things that aren't in demand anymore.
Yeah. You brought that to my attention. I keep getting these, uh, emails from target that they have furniture going on. So yeah, they all do because they ordered a bunch of furniture thinking that people would replace it every year. But you know, you buy a piece of furniture. You keep it for five or 10 years.
You couldn't find furniture. I mean a year ago, outdoor furniture, indoor furniture, you were waiting six weeks, to, to get anything you ordered. Um, and what's crazy is, is some of this inventory is not even hitting like retail stores. It's already being sold to like the secondary market. That's how you know, that that is kind of a, gonna be an issue or is already an issue is because they can't get rid of the inventory fast enough.
Yeah. It'd be interesting to see like how they're going to offload some of that stuff. I mean, obviously sending out these mass email, We got one more negative too, right? Matt? Yeah, I do. I wanna hit this real quick. So we got corporate earnings that have been coming out and the CEO of JP Morgan chase, Jamie diamond.
He, he's usually always in the news for his comments and what he said during the JP Morgan conference call. I found really, really interesting. So he said that on average they're finding that consumers are spending 10% more than last year. A lot of that's probably inflation driven, but they're spending 30% more than they did prior to COVID and travel in dining expenses up 34% year over year.
And this just isn't behavior. That's consistent with the recess. Is that because they just have so much more money saved from COVID and then now they're trying to save to trying to spend it, or is it just, and then also does cost of doing these things have gone up or no. Well sort of, yes. But really, no, they do have savings.
Cost of things is a little bit higher. But what he's saying. Is people are spending, 30% more than they did prior to COVID like people are out spending money, they have more money in their pocket. They're making more cuz of the Jo the wage growth, Jo Josh mentioned, then everybody has a job right now.
So there's just more money to spend throughout the economy. I think there's more variables too. There's pined up demand. Mm-hmm right. A lot of people through COVID didn't take trips or they postpone trips. I mean, I know, I know we even hear this in our office a lot from clients is that they had a trip planned two years ago.
But they didn't buy plane tickets, but their cruise was booked and now they're using it this summer. So that means they're still spending new money, on rental cars, on flights that they didn't have booked, but they, made a paid for a portion of that vacation back in the COVID time. I think a lot of those variables are just 80.
I'll just talk about myself personally. I went to Hawaii twice in the second quarter. I was very blessed. I mean, I went in April and I went in June. Never happened before in my life, but just worked out that. And then previously, what, two weeks ago, Josh, when we went to the soccer match, we used Uber for the first time to get to a match since 2019.
Yeah. I don't think I've ever had used Uber bef for a match since yeah. 19. Yeah. So that goes into that travel spending category that he's seen that increase in and you know, the Uber was $40. I, I thought that was probably fair. I thought it was gonna be a lot more than it was. Yeah, me too. I think it was a little better than we thought, but still more expensive than before COVID.
Yes. So if we're not actually in a recession, then are we going into one soon? Yeah. So the that's very possible. Kind of the current belief in the market is that the fed is gonna take us into our recession by over hiking interest rates. Cuz there, like we said, there are some signs, the economy is about to slow.
Senti's really low. And if the fed does over hike, they raise rates too much. Yeah. That's definitely gonna cause a recession. Absolutely. Do they wanna cause it. I don't think they wanna cause it, I think they just want to, break the back of inflation as they say, that's their focus. They they've talked about it.
Their focus is inflation. The current administration focus is inflation right now, too. So they're using that tool of raising interest rates to battle this priority. But it's a very delicate situation. They keep talking about a soft landing with raising interest rates, but we see that there's a lot more variables to it than just slowing down demand.
I mean, if people are really concerned about being in a recession, like how long would it take to come out of the recession? That's a tough question to answer. I mean, it would really just be how fast it snaps back. The fed is usually your friend, so it's how fast they, they pull us out with accommodated monetary policy.
As, as they say, we've talked about it before on average or sessions last about 11 months. If you're just looking for the historical average, that's what it. But right now, the markets stocks, commodities they're saying are recessions in the future based on the way they're trading. So I think one of the things that I would it's on the it's on everybody's mind, whether or not we're in a recession or not, but I think who it also impacts a lot are people that are hoping to retire in the next couple years.
Or maybe you just retired. If someone's considering retiring in the next few years, is that still possible? Oh, absolutely. This is a good time to retire actually. But it always starts, you know, we say it almost every show when we hate, I hate to be a broken record, Josh, you always say build a plan.
Mm-hmm , that's where it starts. If you wanna retire, you need to go out and build a financial plan or find someone who could help you build one. Yeah. And I think that if you build a plan and you understand your future and you've run those projections, a 20% stock market drop shouldn't impact your ability to.
No, it's not going so you don't, you shouldn't even really notice it. I think one thing that you could do too, like during this time, if you're trying to plan for a strategy from a strategy standpoint, is if you're gonna retire in the next couple of years is maybe start really putting away where and how you're gonna get that first year two of income.
So if the market hasn't really bounced back, You're not selling a bunch of shares either in your 401k plan or in your IRA or your brokerage account to create that income that you need to kind of close that gap, give you some more peace of mind heading into it. You're not worried about, you know, making a wrong decision for your first year of retirement.
Probably be a big stress reliever for you too. You could use the cash out vacation strategy, Brent that's, that's your favorite, right. And I think you, you can, and if you do that and plan it correctly, so if you have built up vacation and you can maybe take that built up vacation into the beginning of that following year, once you plan to retire sell off that vacation, you're gonna get a lump sum check.
And if you do get bonuses that could help as. Do that at the start of the year and, bring your taxable income for that year down and go ahead and retire. And if you have saved some money in your back pocket from, the last for the first year of retirement, then use that money. Plus the bonus, plus the vacation to really use that for the first year or two of retirement.
That's a really good strategy. I know we've worked with a few clients on that and you helped me with a couple of my clients and, you know, it's, it's taken their runway by, somewhere between four to eight months without them ever having. To touch the 401k or IRO, which was really cool. I mean, and I think a lot of the concern too, for somebody who is getting ready to retire is, the market's down significantly 20, 22, 20 5%.
It's just kind of been in that range and you're probably gonna have to sell some shares of your IRA or 401k if you retire. If you're not planning ahead, nobody really wants to sell off that many shares that early on in retirement to get that generate that type of. No, you don't and you just have to be very mindful of it.
I think, to piggyback on your guys' strategies, as well as analyzing your debt, making sure you're heading into retirement. And you know, those things you wanted to get paid off are being paid off, or what is that debt strategy. If you're still holding a mortgage going into retirement and really looking at that, cuz managing your expenses is just as an important as managing your.
One of those expenses, I think is taxes. Right? So if you can carefully plan out where your income's going to be in that first couple years of retirement, try to minimize as much taxation as possible. I mean, you're not having to withdraw as much if you're not paying as much in taxes. Yeah. I was working with a, a new client.
We're building out his retirement plan right now. We're looking at all his various assets. He's got most of his wealth in tax deferred retirement accounts, specifically a 401k. And we, we created one plan at the beginning of the year and we totally just ripped it up the other day in a meeting. And we're, we're doing a full new one.
We're gonna completely drain his Roth IRA first. It, it just makes so much sense with how the market's turned and he's gonna end up paying little to no taxes for the first few years of retirement. We're gonna let that 4 0 1 build back up. And then once he hits his RMD age, that's when he'll start taking income out of his four.
Oh. So yeah, the, the changing dynamics made us change strategy, but because he built the original plan, it was very easy, to call an audible kind of like paint and Manning up there, switch it Omaha. Yep. Omaha and move forward. I, I think that's one of the things that is so important when you're working with a client and that's being able to adjust and change and adapt the.
Because things are going to, to change. And when you're doing planning, you're gonna assume that they're, we're gonna go through these volatility points in the market. And, you know, we assume that someone during their retirement's gonna be in a recess, there's gonna be a recession for a couple years, but how you adjust during that time, cuz you don't wanna look back to years from now and say, well, we didn't do anything.
We didn't adjust the. We didn't adjust our strategy. We just kind of went up and we went down and then we kind of came back out and nothing, you never took advantage of everything. You never really got creative in being able to help the client. That's not really what you want to do through these periods.
And that was my thought. And, and you're, it's not gonna be the only recession you're going to be going through and your retirement. So we have to be prepared for these type of events and times, because it's most likely gonna happen again. So these times we put together a plan, like you said, Matt, Audible, if we need to, when you are working with a retiree, what are some of your favorite strategies to hedge the risk of retirement during a recession?
Yeah, there's only one strategy. I think that's like the gold standard that puts everyone at ease and that's doing a bucket strategy. So it's kind of old school, but take your money. You put in three different buckets, you have your cash bucket, you have your fixed income bucket, and then you have your equity bucket, equity bucket, seven plus years long.
The medium term is that bond, right? That's anything from three to five years. And then you have your short term bucket, and that's where you put enough for two to three years income. And you decide about that on personality. But if you do that, you could, you'll agree to be able to write out any stock market correction history and any recession in history.
I think in writing this down just visually, it helps. Not only us, but our clients understand that not all of the money that's invested needs to be invested, not only the same way, but we have specific timeframes and specific time horizons for each bucket of money. Like you're saying to use at different periods throughout your retirement.
And I think it could just be a great tool to provide peace of mind for. Every client I've ever done bucket strategy with absolutely loves it. It's like the light bulb goes off and they're like, oh, okay. I'm gonna be fine. I, I won't pay attention to the market. I don't care if it drops another, you know, 10, 15% from here.
I don't care if we go into a recession, we built the strategy. I have my money. I know where my money's coming from. It's gonna be perfect. Yeah. And I think what's, important about that strategy though, is it as much as the concept is easy, it also takes a lot of detail and planning to create that because if you Don.
Have its each bucket specifically align for the investments that they need, then the strategy's probably not going to work correctly. And so there is that detail and, and like we were talking about before you have to be able to adapt from that. Yeah. I mean you're right in audio format sounds really easy.
People are probably like, oh, I could do this myself. You probably can it's it's a little bit more difficult, but we explain it easy and you, you can't even do it unless you understand exactly how much income and expenses and creating that cashflow report. If you don't understand how much you're gonna need that strategy, isn't as useful.
One of my favorite, I think strategies during this time is just spend less like reduce your spending if you can. I mean, if you are, depending on your portfolio for. And you can withdraw just a little bit less every month, then do it, especially if you have money. Some of that income's building up in savings right now is the time to not worry about how much is building up in savings.
Worry about trying to preserve as many shares as possible on the market's down. Try to reduce what you're taking out every month. Yeah. I've done that with a few clients as well. In the last month, reduce the, reduce the money coming out of the account. They could take a little bit less and then let that money continue to compound.
Once the market goes higher. And I know it can be a, a difficult thing to do, but it is going to be very valuable in the long run for your plan. And you've said with wage growth that. There is demand for, for work. And if you are recently retired or you're thinking about, I mean, you could always go make party fair money.
Not having to work all that much though, to kind of fill that gap during this time. Yeah. Great time for part part-time work, especially, you know, retail or restaurant any of those jobs. Perfect. And lastly, you could always delay retirement a little. Yeah. It's always an option, but. Not many people want to take that option.
No, they don't. But you know, especially with work from home and hybrid schedules, if you have to that is, that is one option we have on our list. Yeah. I would say build the plan first. See if you can, or can't retire and go from there. But I think there's ways to work around this recession.
I think so, too. All right. Let's get into the recommends, uh, Matthew, what do you have to recommend for us? Yeah, so I have a great money saving strategy. So I'm gonna start this. Isn't my idea. Uh, one of our listeners, uh, one of my best friends, he gave me this idea and, um, I was comp, we were complaining about how much our DirecTV bill was.
And I, I guess he went on and, you know, got in the whole fight with DirecTV and got a really good loyalty number. He called and got his bill reduced. I went out and did the same thing. I took my bill from over $200 to $83, a. Um, with loyalty discounts. It was great. I highly recommend if you're still paying, if you're still sucker like me and paying for direct TV to go out there.
Get those loyalty discounts and, and reduce your bill. I can't oh. Cause what? I can't help with this smile when you're telling the story. What, what direct TV charges is obscene compared to what the content Netflix or Disney or Hulu has for under 20 a month? I thought you signed a lifetime contract. Good.
I, I just to pay more . I, I, I guess I didn't, I thought I did too, but I got a loyalty discount. I'm very happy. I can't wait for my new bill to come in the mail. So you like saving money. Everybody likes saving money. I, I hadn't seen you that happy after you told me that DirecTV story in a long time. So I'm, I'm happy for you, Matt and good tip by the way.
I mean, I've done this every couple of years since I've had DirecTV. Have you? Yes, I did. I finally switched to streaming, so I have direct TV streaming now, and it's just like a fat flat, no contract to think, but great job, Matt. Can I talk about it for one more minute? Sure. You know, what I don't get about direct TV is when you have a direct TV, you have a username and a login and you could also do all the streaming apps.
And I know password sharing is a big problem for like Disney plus and Netflix and who Hulu, HBO, everyone shares. Why don't people just share direct TV passwords for all the various apps you could just put on your apple TV and watch that way. I think people do. Oh, they do? Yeah. You want my password? so I guess he just locked himself into a contract.
No, he just signed a lifetime. I got sucker paying 200 bucks a month for DirecTV. Uh, that's pretty good. Brent. You wanna go next? Yeah. I'll I'll go next. So. Being a recent, you know, I've, we've went on vacation every year for the last several years. And I actually got this tip from Matthew. When we were going on a trip, he told me to go get my, uh, TSA pre-check done.
And a few years back, I actually did that. So now when we travel, we go through airport security, we bypass all of those long lines. But not only do you bypass the long lines, but you also don't have to take your shoes off. You don't have to take your belt off. You don't have to pull out your laptops or your electronics.
Like you literally just go into a much quicker line. So if you're gonna be traveling and you wanna bypass a lot of the headache of the airport, just go get pre TSA check. Cuz I feel like that's one of the biggest headache besides just checking. If you gotta check your bags, like that's kind of a pain, but besides that, like if you're not checking your bags going through.
TSA check is such a pain. Oh, it is. But if you can bypass so much of that headache and just go to a much quicker line, it's so worth. And I think it was less than a hundred dollars to do it. And within a couple of weeks, I got our pre TSA number. And every time you go to book your flight, you just put the pre TSA number in there and it comes on your boarding pass.
And now you don't ever have to go stand in those long lines. If you're gonna travel more than once a year, it's absolutely necessary. If you're gonna take an annual trip per year, you probably should do it. It just saves so much time and so many headaches. How long does it last for? How often do you have to renew it?
I'm not sure. It's a number of years. I think it's greater than five maybe. Oh, wow. Yeah. I probably need to renew mine pretty soon. Cause I think I got it a while ago. I don't have it. We've had this conversation, Brent, and I'm taking a trip in October. So I'm debating whether me and my wife should.
Should get it. It's well worth it. I mean, you're traveling with a child, right? Yeah. You should probably after this podcast, after we stop recording, maybe go sign up. Okay. Maybe I'll do that. I'll update the listeners. It's pretty, it's pretty easy to do. Nice. I have a, I have another, just a convenience tip here.
I moved last summer and I had to like forward my mail from my old address to my new address. So I made a postal service. Um, and I thought it was pretty cool cause I made the account. And then now I get images of all of my mail and the packages that are being delivered by the postal service and an email every day, just thought it was pretty cool.
Like, so, you know, what's coming to your mailbox and you have a digital email to, to show that along with packages thought it was pretty cool. Not the greatest recommends, but if you're interested in knowing what's coming in your mailbox, sign up for the us PS free accountant, do you check. Yeah. Like, so it just comes to my email.
So like, you know, I can see again packages, but also if like I have an important letter I'm waiting for or invitations or something like that, I know to go grab it. Cause I also don't check my mail like every day. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty interesting too, if you're going on vacation or you're gonna be going for a while that you're able to have records of what's coming in.
Yeah. So, uh, Hailey has that on her phone. And we got a letter one day from the IRS and she text me, she's like, oh my God, Matt, what did you do? I was like, I don't know why the IRS is a Syal letter. So we opened it up and it was about like the child tax care credit yeah. Is completely meaningless. But yeah, very cool service.
I agree. Yeah. And it's free. You can go on there and say, I think you can even like print stamps and print labels from like your account and stuff, but pretty cool. The IRS probably sent you that same letter about 13. No, no saying the same thing oh yeah. Cuz they're useless. Yeah, absolutely. To you, to your wife, to your child wasting paper, we must really be in a recession cuz none of us recommended things for anyone to purchase.
No, I, I haven't been purchasing a lot of things. No, I'm waiting. I'm um, I'm holding back, like I'm just waiting for the big sales to come and then I'm gonna start spending money. Like I have a laundry list of things that I wanna buy. I'm just gonna wait it out. Your need list is growing. Huh? I think you're in the same in the market for patio furniture.
Like I am. Huh? I am. I'm gonna hold off on patio furniture cuz the season's almost over. All right. We might need to tag team that fill. I want a TV. all right. Well, as advisors, we love helping people and that's why we do it. If you'd like to schedule an appointment with any of us, please go to RPA wealth.com and schedule a complimentary consultation.
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