October 17, 2025 • 11 mins
Host of ‘How to Money’ Joel Larsgaard joins the show to discuss attending a wedding now costing a fortune, only 1/3 Americans now think college is ‘very important,’ and people willing to be paid less to work remotely.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Every Sunday from twelve to two pm.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
What I find kind of interesting and I didn't even
know this, and that's that there are certain bankruptcy attorneys
that are actually open and usually they listen people listening
to Joel on the way to the bankruptcy attorney and
figure out how their life is going to end very quickly.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Joel.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Good morning, morning Bill.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, Joel is Sunday, twelve pm to two pm at
How to Money, Joel, all Right, A couple of things,
and this one is weird.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm sure that this was there's something wrong with this.
Going to a wedding.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Going to a wedding is now as expensive as a
month's rent.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Do I have that right? Not throwing a wedding, but going.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
To Yeah, just just attending and participating in. And basically
what they're saying is that, you know, for people who
are in the wedding party, all of the stuff involved
with being a part of the crew, it's expensive. And
I think it's true. Like it's think about eyeing the
suit or the dress if you are if you're a groomsman,
(01:05):
like think about the bachelorette party, the bachelor party. Those
have been ramped up in recent years, and so often
they involve a destination and running a place and going
out and stuff like that, and so I think especially
for young people, I'm out of this phase. Bill, haven't
been in this phase for a while of like all
my friends getting married. But when you are invited to participate,
it's an honor, and then you realize, holy mackerel, this
(01:28):
is going to cost me a lot of money to
actually participate in the way my friend wants me to
be able to participate. This is actually going to be
a financial obligation. At the same time, well, there's a
couple of ways around it.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And by the way, I'm still in I'm going to weddings,
usually fourth or fifth weddings that my friends are having.
And when they say we'd love you to be a groomsman,
and all I have to do is rent this tuxedo
at one hundred and fifty dollars and kick into the
bachelor party, the quick answer is no, thanks.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Have fewer friends.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
I think is one piece of advice, right that you
could follow in order to save money and then or yeah,
you could say no, or I think there's also just
ways to lean in and say, hey, like, what are
the obligations going to be I'd love to participate, but
I'm also worried about my finances. And if we're going
on some sort of fat, fancy, you know, bachelor trip
(02:21):
like then a bachelor party trip, then I'm a little
nervous I won't be able to participate in that part
of it. I think you could be honest with your
friends and typically that. I don't think people view it
in the way they used to thirty years ago. I
don't think there's a shame in that game. I think
you can just be honest and say, listen, I want
to participate in the ways I can't, but I can't
afford that part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, or do what I do. I have plenty of money.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I could easily afford it, but you are not worth it.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I Am not going to spend this kind of money.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
You could be that brutally honest.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, but it can be expensive, you know I have.
I'm no joking. I have bailed out and said it's
not worth it. I will be glad to sit in
the audience and watch what's going on.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I don't have to be up there.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
When I got married, I had one of my best friends.
I asked him to be a groomsman, and he said no,
and he was a photographer, and so he said, actually,
I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot the wedding.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Can you pay me to do that?
Speaker 4 (03:15):
And so he took the opposite approach, and he was like,
I'm gonna find a way to make money off your.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Wedding instead of paying money to be in it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
So he charged you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
He charged me.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Good for him, I know, right, Yeah that works now.
Neil was my best man, and I'm going to invoice
you too.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah. Of course Neil was my best man.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And the only thing I asked is that everybody wear
the groomsman if you will, just wear a dark suit, right,
just and the only people that had to wear a
charcoal suit that matched my suit and neil suit, as
I am my best man. And Neil came through, didn't you, Neil?
(03:57):
You went out and bought a suit. Oh no, hold on,
I'll tell you what I did. I went out and
buy your soup.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
What happened together? And then I went, oh, no, no,
I got it. I got it, don't worry. And Bill goes, no,
I got it, and I said, You're damn right, you do.
And then they brought in four bolts of material to
weave together a suit that fit.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Now to realistically, Okay, I'm going to tell you a
true story.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
There's a little.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Inside baseball, and that is we pulled out the biggest
suit they had and and I'm not exaggerating, it costs
more money to alter the suit to fit Neil to
take it out than the suit itself.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Take out the suit.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
We almost had two You almost had two suits put together.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
To make it work.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
I had four arms, four pant legs. It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Neil came in with a Neil came in with the
best idea of all since weekend, since I bought a
suit and Neil got a suit, he suggested that we
put the two suits together, and so you had two arms,
one arm for me, one arm for Neil, two heads,
three legs, so we would hop and walk down as
(05:18):
conjoined twins.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
I like it. I like it. It's got like a dumb
and dumber vibe going on.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I thought it was, and I really wanted I came
very close to doing that. But I have a certain
person in my life said, you are dreaming. If you're
going to do that. Yeah, it wasn't gonna happen, all right, Joel.
It used to be that if you didn't go to college,
that was something that you were almost embarrassed because it
(05:46):
depends on the culture. But uh, to me, going to
college was like gravity. I woke up in the morning,
my heat, my feet hit the floor instead of the ceiling.
I mean, it was sort of automatic. And so was
college not anymore. The world has changed, hasn't it.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Yeah, it sure has.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
And I don't necessarily think it's because college is unimportant
or it doesn't make a big difference in your earnings
trajectory over your lifetime.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It still does.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
When you look at the numbers, the average person with
a high school diploma and a college degree that the
average earning is different is something like a million dollars
over the course of your career. And so yeah, that's
still it still matters. But it's really been interesting to
see the growing skepticism that the general American public has
(06:36):
about the value of college and whether it's worth it
or not. And Gallup does this poll every year, They've
been doing it for decades, and something like a third
of Americans now think college is very important that was
three quarters of Americans back in twenty ten, so just
fifteen years ago. The massive at least belief that people
(06:57):
have in how important going to college is.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
It's the mine precipitously.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
I think that's a few different things that are contributing
to that, but I think probably the number one thing
is how student loans have burdened people massively, which comes
down to really how expensive college has become.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Hey, I have a question, and I noted this as
we talk about it is over a lifetime a million dollars,
let's say, and that's probably a pretty fair figure. Well,
that's people who if you look backwards, if you look prospectively,
we're not going to know if that figure is a
million dollars until people retire fifty years from now or
(07:39):
forty years from now. And when you look at high
school versus college, first of all, you're four years ahead
of the game if you go out of high school.
If you start getting a job, a blue collar job
that's highly skilled versus what you can get with college today,
I would say a blue collar job is worth more,
(08:00):
certainly in the short term.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And with blue collar.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Jobs, you normally don't get student loans or if you do,
they're very small. I'm willing to bet that if we
talk and we look prospectively at the next forty years,
I think that number is going to change, where a
college degree is not going to be worth as much
as a good, highly paid, blue collar job.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
I think you're right.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
I mean, I think the gap between those is closed,
and I think you have to look at what degree
are you getting, what is it going to get you
at the end of the day, Because if you're getting
a degree in engineering, then that's one thing right that
you might be able to be in that upper echelon
of income earners. And if you're getting a degree in
(08:47):
English literature, let's say, not to denigrate that as a choice,
but truly, especially depending on how much you're going to
pay for that degree, you might not find that it
pays off in the same way. And I just think
back in the day twenty thirty four years ago, getting
a degree was was the most important thing, and even
if you got it in something that wasn't necessarily like
(09:08):
highly applicable or leading to an immediate six figure job,
it could still mean and it still often did mean
increase lifetime earnings. But I think with artificial intelligence harming
especially some of those people at the very beginning of
their career ladder taking over some of those jobs, or
at least making some of those jobs less relevant or
(09:28):
maybe leading to lower pay in some of those early
postgraduate years. I think you really do have to do
a different value assessment. And the people that are ultimately
in the worst possible place when we're talking about college
is the people that go for two or three years
and then don't get the degree. I was talking to
a friend the other day and her son's been going
to school for a couple of years. He's racked up
a little bit of student loan debt, fortunately not a lot,
(09:49):
but so oftentimes it's the people who are like, I'm
not sure what I want to do. Let me go
to college, let me figure it out, and then they
take on, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in
student loan debt, they don't graduate, they don't have the degree.
It drives up their earnings and they still have student
loan debt to pay off.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, and the cost of course of tuition, to your point,
is absolutely insane. When I went to law school and
they raise the per unit cost from fifty five dollars
a unit to sixty five dollars a unit.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
There was almost the riot at high school.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I believe it. I believe.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
One of the other things I think we should probably
mention real quickly on that front is that when you
look at the sticker price of college and then the
actual out the door price, the gap has actually grown there.
So what looks like like when you look at the
website of the school you're interested in going to and
you see the average annual tuition, you're like, oh my gosh,
that's insane. But when you think about when you look
(10:44):
at the merit aid and the need based aid that
students are able to get these days, if you fill
out the fast SAD and you jump through the proper
hoops something like the average private school, the discount is
something like fifty six percent for students. So if you
see the forty thousand dollars a year, it's not actually
forty thousand dollars a year, and you do have to
jump through those hoops in order to get that discounted price.
(11:05):
But it is important to note that maybe it's not
quite as expensive as you might think it is either.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, as I've been saying my daughter is starting a
master's degree in computer engineering because you can't get a job,
and so she goes now getting a master's degree, which at.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The end of that she won't have a job. So
you know what I do.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
I have her practice every day at my espresso machine
making coffee.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
It just is that's a.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Skill, that's a skill she can actually use. All right, Joel,
we'll catch you this Sunday twelve to two pm and
he's at how to Money.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Joel, you have a good wedding, you too.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Thanks Bill,
Every Sunday from twelve to two pm.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
What I find kind of interesting and I didn't even
know this, and that's that there are certain bankruptcy attorneys
that are actually open and usually they listen people listening
to Joel on the way to the bankruptcy attorney and
figure out how their life is going to end very quickly.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Joel.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Good morning, morning Bill.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, Joel is Sunday, twelve pm to two pm at
How to Money, Joel, all Right, A couple of things,
and this one is weird.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm sure that this was there's something wrong with this.
Going to a wedding.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Going to a wedding is now as expensive as a
month's rent.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Do I have that right? Not throwing a wedding, but going.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
To Yeah, just just attending and participating in. And basically
what they're saying is that, you know, for people who
are in the wedding party, all of the stuff involved
with being a part of the crew, it's expensive. And
I think it's true. Like it's think about eyeing the
suit or the dress if you are if you're a groomsman,
(01:05):
like think about the bachelorette party, the bachelor party. Those
have been ramped up in recent years, and so often
they involve a destination and running a place and going
out and stuff like that, and so I think especially
for young people, I'm out of this phase. Bill, haven't
been in this phase for a while of like all
my friends getting married. But when you are invited to participate,
it's an honor, and then you realize, holy mackerel, this
(01:28):
is going to cost me a lot of money to
actually participate in the way my friend wants me to
be able to participate. This is actually going to be
a financial obligation. At the same time, well, there's a
couple of ways around it.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
And by the way, I'm still in I'm going to weddings,
usually fourth or fifth weddings that my friends are having.
And when they say we'd love you to be a groomsman,
and all I have to do is rent this tuxedo
at one hundred and fifty dollars and kick into the
bachelor party, the quick answer is no, thanks.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Have fewer friends.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
I think is one piece of advice, right that you
could follow in order to save money and then or yeah,
you could say no, or I think there's also just
ways to lean in and say, hey, like, what are
the obligations going to be I'd love to participate, but
I'm also worried about my finances. And if we're going
on some sort of fat, fancy, you know, bachelor trip
(02:21):
like then a bachelor party trip, then I'm a little
nervous I won't be able to participate in that part
of it. I think you could be honest with your
friends and typically that. I don't think people view it
in the way they used to thirty years ago. I
don't think there's a shame in that game. I think
you can just be honest and say, listen, I want
to participate in the ways I can't, but I can't
afford that part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, or do what I do. I have plenty of money.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I could easily afford it, but you are not worth it.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
I Am not going to spend this kind of money.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
You could be that brutally honest.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, but it can be expensive, you know I have.
I'm no joking. I have bailed out and said it's
not worth it. I will be glad to sit in
the audience and watch what's going on.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I don't have to be up there.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
When I got married, I had one of my best friends.
I asked him to be a groomsman, and he said no,
and he was a photographer, and so he said, actually,
I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot the wedding.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Can you pay me to do that?
Speaker 4 (03:15):
And so he took the opposite approach, and he was like,
I'm gonna find a way to make money off your.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Wedding instead of paying money to be in it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
So he charged you.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
He charged me.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Good for him, I know, right, Yeah that works now.
Neil was my best man, and I'm going to invoice
you too.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah. Of course Neil was my best man.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And the only thing I asked is that everybody wear
the groomsman if you will, just wear a dark suit, right,
just and the only people that had to wear a
charcoal suit that matched my suit and neil suit, as
I am my best man. And Neil came through, didn't you, Neil?
(03:57):
You went out and bought a suit. Oh no, hold on,
I'll tell you what I did. I went out and
buy your soup.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
What happened together? And then I went, oh, no, no,
I got it. I got it, don't worry. And Bill goes, no,
I got it, and I said, You're damn right, you do.
And then they brought in four bolts of material to
weave together a suit that fit.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Now to realistically, Okay, I'm going to tell you a
true story.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
There's a little.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Inside baseball, and that is we pulled out the biggest
suit they had and and I'm not exaggerating, it costs
more money to alter the suit to fit Neil to
take it out than the suit itself.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
Take out the suit.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
It's true.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
We almost had two You almost had two suits put together.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
To make it work.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
I had four arms, four pant legs. It was beautiful.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Neil came in with a Neil came in with the
best idea of all since weekend, since I bought a
suit and Neil got a suit, he suggested that we
put the two suits together, and so you had two arms,
one arm for me, one arm for Neil, two heads,
three legs, so we would hop and walk down as
(05:18):
conjoined twins.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
I like it. I like it. It's got like a dumb
and dumber vibe going on.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I thought it was, and I really wanted I came
very close to doing that. But I have a certain
person in my life said, you are dreaming. If you're
going to do that. Yeah, it wasn't gonna happen, all right, Joel.
It used to be that if you didn't go to college,
that was something that you were almost embarrassed because it
(05:46):
depends on the culture. But uh, to me, going to
college was like gravity. I woke up in the morning,
my heat, my feet hit the floor instead of the ceiling.
I mean, it was sort of automatic. And so was
college not anymore. The world has changed, hasn't it.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Yeah, it sure has.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
And I don't necessarily think it's because college is unimportant
or it doesn't make a big difference in your earnings
trajectory over your lifetime.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
It still does.
Speaker 4 (06:15):
When you look at the numbers, the average person with
a high school diploma and a college degree that the
average earning is different is something like a million dollars
over the course of your career. And so yeah, that's
still it still matters. But it's really been interesting to
see the growing skepticism that the general American public has
(06:36):
about the value of college and whether it's worth it
or not. And Gallup does this poll every year, They've
been doing it for decades, and something like a third
of Americans now think college is very important that was
three quarters of Americans back in twenty ten, so just
fifteen years ago. The massive at least belief that people
(06:57):
have in how important going to college is.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
It's the mine precipitously.
Speaker 4 (07:01):
I think that's a few different things that are contributing
to that, but I think probably the number one thing
is how student loans have burdened people massively, which comes
down to really how expensive college has become.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Hey, I have a question, and I noted this as
we talk about it is over a lifetime a million dollars,
let's say, and that's probably a pretty fair figure. Well,
that's people who if you look backwards, if you look prospectively,
we're not going to know if that figure is a
million dollars until people retire fifty years from now or
(07:39):
forty years from now. And when you look at high
school versus college, first of all, you're four years ahead
of the game if you go out of high school.
If you start getting a job, a blue collar job
that's highly skilled versus what you can get with college today,
I would say a blue collar job is worth more,
(08:00):
certainly in the short term.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And with blue collar.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Jobs, you normally don't get student loans or if you do,
they're very small. I'm willing to bet that if we
talk and we look prospectively at the next forty years,
I think that number is going to change, where a
college degree is not going to be worth as much
as a good, highly paid, blue collar job.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
I think you're right.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
I mean, I think the gap between those is closed,
and I think you have to look at what degree
are you getting, what is it going to get you
at the end of the day, Because if you're getting
a degree in engineering, then that's one thing right that
you might be able to be in that upper echelon
of income earners. And if you're getting a degree in
(08:47):
English literature, let's say, not to denigrate that as a choice,
but truly, especially depending on how much you're going to
pay for that degree, you might not find that it
pays off in the same way. And I just think
back in the day twenty thirty four years ago, getting
a degree was was the most important thing, and even
if you got it in something that wasn't necessarily like
(09:08):
highly applicable or leading to an immediate six figure job,
it could still mean and it still often did mean
increase lifetime earnings. But I think with artificial intelligence harming
especially some of those people at the very beginning of
their career ladder taking over some of those jobs, or
at least making some of those jobs less relevant or
(09:28):
maybe leading to lower pay in some of those early
postgraduate years. I think you really do have to do
a different value assessment. And the people that are ultimately
in the worst possible place when we're talking about college
is the people that go for two or three years
and then don't get the degree. I was talking to
a friend the other day and her son's been going
to school for a couple of years. He's racked up
a little bit of student loan debt, fortunately not a lot,
(09:49):
but so oftentimes it's the people who are like, I'm
not sure what I want to do. Let me go
to college, let me figure it out, and then they
take on, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in
student loan debt, they don't graduate, they don't have the degree.
It drives up their earnings and they still have student
loan debt to pay off.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Yeah, and the cost of course of tuition, to your point,
is absolutely insane. When I went to law school and
they raise the per unit cost from fifty five dollars
a unit to sixty five dollars a unit.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
There was almost the riot at high school.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
I believe it. I believe.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
One of the other things I think we should probably
mention real quickly on that front is that when you
look at the sticker price of college and then the
actual out the door price, the gap has actually grown there.
So what looks like like when you look at the
website of the school you're interested in going to and
you see the average annual tuition, you're like, oh my gosh,
that's insane. But when you think about when you look
(10:44):
at the merit aid and the need based aid that
students are able to get these days, if you fill
out the fast SAD and you jump through the proper
hoops something like the average private school, the discount is
something like fifty six percent for students. So if you
see the forty thousand dollars a year, it's not actually
forty thousand dollars a year, and you do have to
jump through those hoops in order to get that discounted price.
(11:05):
But it is important to note that maybe it's not
quite as expensive as you might think it is either.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, as I've been saying my daughter is starting a
master's degree in computer engineering because you can't get a job,
and so she goes now getting a master's degree, which at.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
The end of that she won't have a job. So
you know what I do.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
I have her practice every day at my espresso machine
making coffee.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
It just is that's a.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Skill, that's a skill she can actually use. All right, Joel,
we'll catch you this Sunday twelve to two pm and
he's at how to Money.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Joel, you have a good wedding, you too.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Thanks Bill,
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.