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October 30, 2025 12 mins
Host of ‘How to Money’ Joel Larsgaard joins the show to discuss whether the stock market is in a bubble, consumers feeling discount fatigue, and renters having an upper hand in the housing market these days.
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Time for Joel Larsguard on a Thursday, host of how
to Money Sundays from twelve to two pm, social addresses
at how to Money Joel, Good morning, Joel, Hell Joel,
old there you are? Hey, Yeah, well Le's go no
for you, you know it.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's why he's here. He's he's cheap. What he's cheap?
But good right, what you pay for you know?

Speaker 3 (00:25):
All right?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Joel.

Speaker 1 (00:27):
You know I've been talking to people, I've been talking
about this and discussing him in on the radio. That's
something extraordinary is happening and I don't understand it. And
the stock market is at an all time high. It
seems like every day it's hitting new levels, especially over
the last week week and a half. At the same time,
consumer confidence is low and it's dropping. And unemployment, I mean,

(00:52):
look at the employment sector. First of all, no one
is hiring or very few people are hiring, and they
are laying off people by the tens of thousands, soon
to be the hundreds of thousands. Has this ever happened
and put all the connect the dots on this one
for me?

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, that's a good quite.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I mean I think there was probably there was really
was a similar reaction kind of in the in the
heart of COVID right when the stock market it took
a massive dive and the things in the overall economy
were looking not so great. And then the stock market
continued to it started to shoot back up dramatically, and

(01:31):
people were like, wait a second, like we're not out
of the woods.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
On Main Street.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
There's a lot of like uncertainty, there's a lot of
difficulty in the labor market, and just like, well, can
I actually my business function the way that it used to?
And yet we saw the stock market cruise to new
heights pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
It was like such a short recovery time. And I think.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
We were seeing kind of like obviously just not the
exact same thing, but something similar happening right now where
people on Main Street are feeling more uncertainty and the
job market is it's certainly not what it was a
few years ago, and the stock market roaring to new heights,
up something like forty percent since April, and it's kind

(02:14):
of tough to square everything in your mind. And that's
why I think we're hearing more calls of this being
a potential bubble. Is there a bubble in stocks? I
think it's a worthwhile conversation to have. I just think
it's also a really hard discussion because especially as individual investors,
but really nobody knows and it's hard to predict the future.
So could the stock market see a significant decline from

(02:36):
here over the next year, Sure, it certainly could.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Could it continue, you.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Know, soaring over the coming year, Yeah it could. It
could be up fifteen percent, it could be down twenty percent.
It's really really hard to predict, which is why the
borings are so much the time. Even if we are
in a time of overinflated stock prices, like staying the
course still makes sense for most people.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
I at the same time, though, I'm having a hard
time understanding, for example, the employment world. And I use
my daughter Pamela as the poster child of employment. She
is a computer nerd and has some extraordinary skills, and
she's because she can't get a job because all the
entry level, lower level jobs, of which where you start

(03:20):
it doesn't matter what your skill set is, they are
all disappearing and they're gone. And she's starting her master's
degree and as I told her, you're now unemployed with
a bachelor's you're gonna be unemployed with the masters in
computer technology, and so it's gotten to the point now
where you're an expert also on cannabis. I mean she

(03:41):
knows an addition of being a pothead, she knows this
stuff cold. And I go, you know, you have to
go door to door to cannabis stores and get a
job at one of those, or you're gonna have to
go to a fast food place.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
You'll still be employed.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
But instead of making a six figure income with your
skill set at a major corporation, you're going to make
thirty thousand dollars and you'll still be employed. I mean,
that's the way it's going. And I mean she's devastated,
and you know what do I say, you are?

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:11):
I mean I feel especially for younger people who are
entering the job market now, and I don't know that
it's quite as bad as graduating into the teeth of
the Great Recession back in eight oh nine, where like
the employment sector was incredibly locked up. I do think
we're part of it too, is like, what did we
experience recently. What we experienced recently was a job market

(04:33):
where employees and workers had so much of an ability
to jump ship get paid a lot more, there were
a lot more job openings versus job hunters, and we've
seen that dissipate, and so I don't think again it's
as bad as we've seen in slightly more distant history.
But it's cold consolation, right for somebody graduating and saying like, hey,
I've got this degree.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
I'm well prepared.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
I would make a great employee, and AI is stealing
some of those entry level jobs. And just the general
economic concerns are causing many employers to, you know, be
more careful about when they're hiring and who they're hiring.
It does make me think of just some other something
I saw recently, which I think is good advice, is
that people should be and I think you and I

(05:16):
talked about this, actually, Bill, people should be maybe consider
more part time work or contract work, because that might
get your foot in the door at a place where
you're interested in working, and that work that employer is
not making quite the same commitment to you. But so
there's something about, especially in today's environment, getting your foot
in the door, having a job in a place where

(05:37):
you're interested in working and where you think there's room
to grow. And I do think at times it is
this mix of like a difficult employment economy and also
maybe really really high expectations from certain young young workers.
I was talking to an older lady in my neighborhood
the other day and she was like, man, I just
see this unwillingness, like this this desire for young people

(05:59):
they graduate college and they're like, yeah, I want to
work from home five days a week.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, yeah, you know there's some of that.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, we got the entitlement titlement issue going on too,
and that's something else to talk about that we're going
to over the next month, two months, six months, all right, Joel,
this headline I kind of find interesting. Customers are feeling
discount fatigue, And as I asked just before we went
to break, how can anybody feel fatigue getting discounts?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Explain that one to me. Yeah, it's a good question.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
I think I see this from multiple angles, and I
do think that there is a certain amount of just
there's so many sales now, right, there's Prime Day, and
now Prime Day is twice a year, and it's like
Black Friday is no longer a single day. It's now
kind of a seasonal event, and it basically kicks off
here as November starts and it you know, runs through

(06:52):
the beginning of December, and so it used to be
like a few days that you had to pay attention to.
And now retailers are like around every major holiday in
their own concocted holidays, they're coming up with different ways
to try to entice you to buy stuff at a discount,
and I it's I think it's harder than ever.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
You would have thought.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
That the advent of the Internet, we would have it'd
be so much easier to price shop and say is
this actually is this deal actually a deal? They're you know,
the one I'm getting in my email inbox or the
one that my favorite website is trying to get me
to click on. And it's actually harder in so many
ways to know whether or not a good price that

(07:31):
you're being pitched is actually a good price, or if
it's if it's actually more expensive than it was let's say,
three weeks six weeks ago, and they're making it seem
like it's a deal, and so much of that comes
down to MSRP, whether or not it's it's legitimate or not.
And so it's oh, it's sixty percent off, but what
you know, what are they actually charge for it most
of the time. Maybe it's actually more only more like

(07:52):
ten percent off. So I do think it's getting harder
and harder for individual shoppers to know whether deal is
a deal, and it feels like they're getting inundated with
quote unquote deals.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
All the time.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yeah, and the other side of that coin, and I
am guilty of this. I am looking at a product
and there are different brands basically does the same thing,
and I assume that the more expensive one is the
better one, and that's automatic, and I will go for that.
And I've been told over and over again I'm a

(08:23):
moron for doing that.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Well, I do think one of the things that this
recent survey that kind of talks about deal fatigue points
out is that people are making decisions based on value and.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Quality a little bit more.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
And I think that points to something else where those
the Chinese sites like Timu and she and We've been
in a data with stuff and you buy it and
it looks so good on the app or on the
site where you're shopping, and then it comes into the
mail and you're like, oh my gosh, the sizing's way off.
The material is terrible, and it was really cheap, but
this belongs straight in the trash.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
It wasn't expensive, but it wasn't worth anything.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
And I do think that's a really important thing for
people to consider, especially as they're making purchases going into
the holiday season, is not just the price, but how
much actual use am I going to get out of
this product? Like, for instance, I bought one of those
kind of pop up tent saunas because I was like,
I want to get and do I like the idea

(09:18):
of like getting in the sauna before I get into bed,
kind of nice and relaxing, and it's fine, but it's
kind of cheap. And so really what I need to do,
if I'm into it is to get a full fledged
sawn and put my money where my mouth is and
spend a couple of thousand dollars really to get something
that I'm going to use regularly and enjoy. And so
I think maybe thinking about the longevity of items that

(09:38):
you're buying and not just how to get the absolute
lowest price is Also it's really worth considering personal story.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
Just as everybody knows around here, I have just remodeled
my house and it's really nice.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
You'll never be invited to get to go to it.
By the way, Joel good to know.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
And I bought outdoor for an and so I'm looking
at outdoor furniture and I go to Costco and there's
a full outdoor set for twenty eighteen hundred dollars by
contractor who had nothing to do with it. Said would
you like this to still be here next year? And
I said yeah. He goes, you're going to have to

(10:19):
spend some real money for outdoor furniture that's still going
to look good five years, eight years from now. And
I sucked it up, per what you were talking about,
and frankly, I didn't know you could spend that much
money for outdoor furniture.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
And that's good.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Outdoor furniture costs insane amounts of money, more so than
indoor furniture because of course what it has to deal
with with the weather, with the sun. And he talked
me into it, and I spent some real real money.
I was about to go to Costco and I didn't.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
And that's that's the buy once, cry once sort of
way of thinking about things. And I think we should
probably all be more prone to thinking that way, even
about something as simple as our wardrobe. It's like I
used to buy the like fifteen twenty dollars pairs of
jeans and I was like, man, these things like they're misshapen.
They don't last very long. And then I like stepped
up my game and I bought jeans were like, you know,

(11:13):
sixty seventy eighty bucks. I'm like, I wear I wear
jeans every day.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
And you can stop right there, Joel, you can stop
too much there. Yeah, Costco fifteen dollars shirts are fabulous.
The Kirkland jeans are wonderful. Really, yeah, they're bred, they're frozen.
To try it out, they're frozen. Burritos are incredible. It's

(11:38):
let me tell you, try it out. Fifteen bucks for
a shirt and you'll be surprised. Okay, all right, yeah,
give it a shot. I'm all for saving money. I yeah,
well it is I mean, this is I mean, it's
actually good quality stuff.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
It is not garbage. Especially the breath signature boxer briefs
are excellent too. Yeah. Yeah, they just did that.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Although again now I'm in talk about my underwear, all right, Okay,
underwear story.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
I just I used to buy Duluth underwear. Actually was
given to me by a friend.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
Of mine, and those are twenty bucks a pair, and
I bought a couple of them as they wore out
after months and months of the elasticity going and I
ended up going to Costco and buying the Haines six
pack for less money than a single pair of underwear
costs with the louth.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
I'll tell you there's a difference. Now, is it worth
that much more?

Speaker 1 (12:34):
No? And then that's part of the formula, is how
long is it going to be worth? How good is
it versus expensive inexpensive? But I'll let you figure that out.
Just remember Costco clothes, Costco burritos. We'll catch you next week,
Joel and Sunday morning, twelve to two pm right here
on KFI.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
All right,
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