I

do just want to say that, I mean, judging by everything that guy just said, he lives in Finland from Estonia.

Estonia, roughly Eastern European.

Finland, you're up there in Scandinavia.

You're doing all right.

I think Finland has the highest international happiness.

The people are the most happy there.

If you want my advice, I'd 2X your subscriptions, I'd 2X your gambling, and I'd see if I could get that gambling to be your retirement.

Yeah, which

isn't surprising.

And honestly, people make it sound more consequential than it is.

So as we talked about earlier, bankruptcy is actually not that even big of a deal, really.

It's really not.

It's overblown.

I mean, it's not great.

If they had zero costs and all of the money went back to their student loans.

Should we buy the avocado toast? Should we buy the latte? Like, do we not worry about those?

That's not gonna make or break someone's life in the end, but I do see on my show and in the data, I mean, it's the death of a thousand cuts that Americans face.

So it's not that I don't wanna be the boomer avocado toast thing, but the internet came after my throat for kind of agreeing with Kevin O'Leary that, you know, maybe Gen Z shouldn't be getting $28 lunch multiple times a week.

You can meal prep.

Even just going and stopping at the drive-through is gonna be more like, you know, 11, 15 bucks, depending where you're going.

So there are these choices and personal choices that people are making, and I'm okay with anyone doing whatever they want.

Go get the $28 three times a week.

[laughs]

Hmm.

It's really not.

It's, it's overblown.

I mean, it's not great.

I don't just like, "Go get bankrupt." Like, that's not wonderful.

But it's like people make it sound like the scariest thing in the world when it's really not.

But, um, I mean, uh, I looked into that two years ago.

It's deranging to the way that people see their place in society.

Yeah.

Um, so but the, for the vast majority of us, the outcomes of our lives is still dependent on the choices we make.

And even on that grocery spending thing, 'cause I know we saw, we saw bad statistics these past few years with inflation and, you know, coffee went up like crazy for a little bit.

Eggs went up like crazy for a little bit.

They weren't really inflation-driven, they were more market things with, like, uh, bird flu happening and a big drought in Brazil for the coffee beans.

But either way, with all that, tracked by the Federal Reserve, as a percentage of income that it cost to fulfill a standard grocery budget in this country, it is cheaper now than it was 100 years ago when people were living the best American dream, right? When we all look back at the white picket fences, everyone could get a house-

... advise people to rent.

It's very standard in the personal finance community, but more than anything, right now rent is, like, half of a mortgage if you get in a mortgage.

Right.

Like we're in the highest disposable income society in the history of human existence.

Not everything's perfect.

Cost of housing's gone up.

Cost of school's gone up.

Cost of healthcare's gone up.

We can acknowledge those realities, but people have agency.

... and getting this job that might not even exist.

Do these Trump accounts, like the Treasury Secretary was saying, do you think that they have the ability to change the way that a huge chunk of the country sees money?

Absolutely.

You can see the importance of investing now.

Just that $1,000 being put in, even if they don't contribute up to that $5,000 a year max, in the S&P 500, that $1,000 over that 18 years just left alone will be $6,000.

If they contribute all the way up to the $5,000 max, which $2,500 can come from employers, that'll get up to $233,000 by 18, which is world-changing.

That gets you into a house.

That gets you paid for college.

Or retirement? What should they be thinking about?

Nope, I don't know him.

He's one of the OG finance YouTubers, and I think I started watching him when he was up and coming.

And I was like, "Wow, I can't believe how absolutely stupid I am with finances." I didn't even know there was this other world.

And then to accomplish the things I dream of accomplishing, it's gonna take actually marking the goals I wanna get to and the different steps that are required to get there.

And that's where I started to actually focus on building the income, not just the hobby stuff, you know.

I was doing music composition and, you know, I was making, like, $30,000 a year off of that in college, and dropped out of college.

But, um, from there I just knew I had to go get stronger income, actually build myself a budget, and that's when I started, you know, looking to move in different areas, and I got a connection down in Austin.

What do you, um, what do you think is the number one thing that's preventing, uh, Gen Z-ers from working? Or do you think we already talked about that? Let me see where we're at right now.