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Fixing the Housing Market, Trump’s Tariffs, What’s Next for Our Economy (and More!)

Taylor Schulte: This show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network. Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I’m your host, Taylor Schulte, and today I’m joined by author and economic expert, Kyla Scanlon. 

Kyla’s new book In This Economy, How Money and Markets Really Work is unlike any other book I’ve highlighted here on the show. Think of just about any complex financial or economic topic, and Kyla has a chapter or section dedicated to explaining it in plain English for everyone to understand. 

For the extra complex topics like monetary policy or how to determine the value of a stock or even bonds and credit spreads, she includes her own hand-drawn graphics. To further simplify the concepts, you can read the book cover to cover or open it up to any page to learn more about one of the 100 plus topics covered to support Kyla’s work. 

Thanks to her for responding to my out-of-the-blue email invitation to join me on this show and get this great information into the hands of more people.

I personally purchased 10 hard copies of this beautifully written and designed book to give away. If you’d like your chance at a free copy, just be sure that you’re subscribed to the Stay Wealthy Retirement Newsletter by going to youstaywealthy.com/email because next week my team will randomly select 10 newsletter readers to send these books to. 

And if you don’t end up being selected, the good news is that you’ll be receiving my weekly memo that I personally write every Thursday about retirement planning or investing oftentimes accompanied with free checklists and flow charts to help readers take action. So it’s a win-win for everyone. 

Once again, just go to youstaywealthy.com/email or click the link below in the episode description in your podcast app. 

Speaking of the episode description, in today’s wide ranging conversation with Kyla, we discuss everything from the state of the housing market and interest rates in the US to Trump’s proposed tariffs and the Fed’s role in our economy.

We also talk about potential solutions to the housing affordability issues in this country and how companies like Airbnb and Zillow have contributed to the current problems to view the articles and resources referenced in today’s episode, as well as links to all of Kyla’s work, including her new book. Just head over to youstaywealthy.com/232.

It is often said that real estate here in the US is the economy, and in your book you shared that Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve a few years ago, said that a recalibration of the housing market was necessary. 

To kick off our conversation today, I’d love for you to just provide a high level overview of the housing market here in the us the role housing plays in our economy and what Powell might’ve meant by that recalibration comment.

Kyla Scanlon: So the housing market in the United States is the main way to build wealth for a lot of people. It’s kind of the American dream by whom have kids settle down. That American dream has increasingly become outer reach for a lot of people. What Jerome Powell is kind of getting at is that it would be good for the housing market to have a recalibration, and what he meant by a recalibration was a reset on prices. 

So home prices have skyrocketed post pandemic during the pandemic basically since the recession and a lot of people have been left behind. It’s very difficult to afford a home, especially now with rates being quite high because the Fed was raising rates in order to battle inflation. 

The idea of the housing market being the key to the American dream is just increasingly out of reach and in order to address that problem, we have to build more housing, but because rates are high, it’s difficult to build housing.

And so there’s all of these things that are in the way of actually fixing the housing market and making it so people have access to that wealth building opportunity. And a recalibration of the housing market is difficult to accomplish. 

The only way that you can really fix it is through expansion of supply, so building more homes, that would be the only way that we can reset the price level, but like I said, there’s a ton of headwinds in the way and it makes it so a lot of young people feel kind of locked out of that generational wealth tool. 

A lot of baby boomers own most of the three and four bedroom homes versus millennials with kids. 28% of baby boomers own most of the three and four bedroom homes, only 14% of millennials with kids. 

There’s kind of this trap as well in the housing market where it has been this tool for wealth, and so baby boomers are like, I’m just going to hold onto this house. It’s generating a lot of money. It’s a huge asset for me. It’s where most of my wealth is stored, and you kind of end up with this situation where there’s a lot of upward mobility. 

There’s a bunch of more specific details that we can get into, but that’s kind of the general overview. It’s difficult to get in. Recalibration will come through expanding supply, but there’s all sorts of headwinds to doing that.

Taylor Schulte: Yeah, I’d love to dig into this affordability comment here for a minute. You often hear from people, I bought my house way back when for a hundred thousand dollars and houses today are a million dollars. Inflation plays a big impact and the growth of these prices, my question is, is housing truly unaffordable? 

And if so, how do we determine that it is unaffordable? Some people suggest, well, maybe these younger generations, maybe they just need to work harder or develop better financial habits. Is it truly unaffordable?

Kyla Scanlon: I think so. So homes went up more in price than the median worker made between 2020 and 2021. So the median worker has a salary of $55,000 a year. The median home went not in price by more than $55,000 between 2020 and 2021. By that metric alone, even if you devote your whole salary to buying a house for one year, you’re still going to be left behind as the median American. 

Maybe people can work harder, but it’s a supply problem. There’s just not a lot of homes for sale and places where people want to live because that tends to be like a second follow up point. Where I’m from, even in Louisville, Kentucky, you could probably find a house, but if you wanted to live in Los Angeles or New York City, it’s going to be more difficult because of the supply and demand mechanics. 

That’s one part of it. There’s not enough housing and places where people want to live. Home prices really have gone up a lot in price. And then the third point would be mortgage rates. 

So mortgage rates, no matter the Fed’s best efforts seem to be very resistant to going back down. They’re above 7% and if you were able to get into the housing market before they went up, before the fed started raising rates, you’re having a 2.5%, 3% mortgage, which is much more affordable than a 7% mortgage. And so that’s one part of it too is mortgage rates. 

The fourth part would be home insurance. Home insurance has gone up by quite a bit. I wrote a whole piece on that a few months ago. The average home insurance cost is up, I think over $2,000 a year. So there’s all of these headwinds, to use that word again, that make it so affording a home is difficult. 

Part of it’s the supply and demand problem, not enough homes and the places where people want to live. And then the other part of it is a financial problem. So high mortgage rates, high housing cost and high insurance, property taxes, etc.

Taylor Schulte: How do you think we solve the supply issue? I’m here in San Diego, California, which is a very desirable area to live, and there’s really not a lot of room left to build new homes. I know in your book you had shared that one in 20 new homes are now built for the purpose of rental living rather than a home ownership. 

So is that part of the problem that many of these homes are just available for rent and not purchase? How do we solve this supply issue? In a lot of desirable areas, there’s not much more room to build more desirable homes.

Kyla Scanlon: Part of it is definitely the usage of a house. People use homes as assets and part of getting a lot of revenue off of your house is renting it out. I live in a rented out house, I pay rent to a homeowner, and that’s a financially great situation for the homeowner because you’re able to pay down your mortgage. 

But for a renter like me, I’m not building up equity. It becomes difficult over time to be in that situation. So that’s definitely one part of it where people are like, it makes sense to rent out this house. It’s been in my family forever. I’ll just have this house and then live somewhere else and sort of reap the gains and it makes total sense to do that. 

I think in terms of how we fix it, I won’t comment too much on landlord laws. That’s not something I’m knowledgeable enough to provide law advice on, but zoning reform is a big part of it.

So in Los Angeles where I spend a lot of time, 95% of Los Angeles is zoned single-family. So you can’t build multifamily, you can’t build what is called the missing middle of housing. 

So that would be townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, you really can only build single-family homes, which is fine, but for a place like Los Angeles, which desperately just needs housing, it becomes very difficult because you need apartment buildings and you need to have duplexes and triplexes and townhomes and have different opportunities for people to live versus just having that single-family house which ends up creating sprawl. 

If you’ve ever been to Los Angeles, you’re in the car most of the time because everything’s so far away because of the sprawl that has been created from some aspects of zoning. And so a lot of it is zoning reform, mixing different types of commercial and residential.

So allowing a residential building to be built on top of commercial space, that’s a big part of it. There’s a lot of good legislation that’s been passed by the US Treasury around reducing red tape and making it so financing for homes, it’s easier for the builders. 

Every single part of the housing process is a little complicated because of bureaucratic regulation, because of zoning, because of a little bit too much government oversight and because of things like nimbyism not in my backyard, where people are quite concerned about what is being built around them understandably. 

And so I think that’s the way that you fix it though, is you say, okay, how can we rezone this place to build upwards if we can’t build outwards, how do we make sure that there’s enough housing for those who wanted in areas that they want to live?

Taylor Schulte: You mentioned interest rate policy a little bit ago, and I’m personally curious to hear your response to this. So my wife and I are beginning to look for our next home, and right now we’re currently locked into a fantastic 2.9% 30-year fixed mortgage rate, but we’ve got three kids and we’re starting to outgrow our home. 

So we’ve been on the hunt for something a little bigger recently, and as we all know, interest rates are sky-high at the moment and so are home prices. And so one thought is, well, let’s just sit tight and be patient and hope that interest rates come back down soon and then we’ll pounce on a new home and rates are lower so it doesn’t sting so much to ditch our current low mortgage rate. 

But then the other side of the coin is, well, if interest rates come down, you would assume that demand would spike, the market would get more competitive and home prices might be higher than they are today. 

Do you think that lower mortgage rates will help make housing more affordable or would lower rates just spike demand leading to more people like my wife and me rushing out to go buy that house increasing competition and increasing prices, which could just potentially leave the unaffordability problem just relatively unchanged? What are your thoughts on this?

Kyla Scanlon: A lot of people are concerned about that because lowering interest rates is basically a demand-side tool. Ideally lower interest rates, builders would be like It’s time to build houses, and people are like, okay, it’s time to sell. 

And then you’d have builders who are like, it’s time to build, and then you’d have a lot of supply hit the market and a reasonable amount of demand. I think a lot of people are in a similar spot to you and your wife. 

Okay, I have had this house that maybe has appreciated quite a bit. I have a great mortgage rate on it. It’s time to upsize, I’m going to wait for rates to go down. And then once rates do go down, there is that demand hitting the market for that upsizing of homes. So a very certain type of home might be in demand, which is slightly bigger than the starter homes that people might be in. 

So I think the goal would be that lower rates would allow for more building, allow for a freeing up of supply just on the general market, but it’s definitely a demand side tool. And I think there are worries that if that does loosen up a bit, that home prices could skyrocket, but the goal would be to build alongside of that.

Taylor Schulte: Going back to why we don’t have enough homes. We mentioned zoning, the types of homes being built. There’s a handful of other reasons that you mentioned in your book. I’m specifically interested in you sharing a little bit more about one of them that you coined villification. 

So what is vilification and why does that contribute to us not having enough homes in the us? And then also you mentioned Airbnb, so I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about those two reasons for maybe why we don’t have enough homes here in the US.

Kyla Scanlon: Zillow has distorted pricing and it’s made it a little bit difficult to figure out exactly what a home is worth. A lot of people will go on Zillow, be like, oh, I can’t sell my house for lower than that. Zillow. And I believe Redfin were also participating in the housing market for a little bit, buying and selling homes. That didn’t work out too well for them, but that’s one aspect where there’s been some price distortion. 

One could argue that that was a good thing to have happen. Transparency is always a good thing, but that’s kind of distorted some elements of signal and what people might be willing to accept or sell their home at. And then the other part, Airbnb, a lot of people have written a lot about this. 

The number of op-eds on Airbnb has decreased over the years, but that was a story that you heard for a long time is Airbnb was contributing to gentrification. It was distorting the housing market. It was making things confusing because people would have these homes and then just rent them out, not rent them out to people from the neighborhood, but have these visitors come in. 

And maybe that was ruining the community dynamic. So Airbnb is kind of an interesting case study because you have homeowners that can get quite a bit of money from renting it out for just a few days versus having a more steady renter that further reduces housing supply for people who are just trying to find a place to live in the city and can make the overall housing crisis even more complicated. 

And so that’s kind of the dynamics of those two is a lot of distortion, distortion for Zillow of price mechanics and then distortion for Airbnb of just the general housing situation in a city.

Taylor Schulte: Any other comments on how we solve this unaffordability problem? You’ve touched on a couple of things already, but I want to make sure we cover everything here because it does seem to be the big issue here with the housing market is how out of reach it is for so many people. Anything else to add to the solution for this unaffordability problem?

Kyla Scanlon: I’ve written a lot about it over the past few years, and I think the biggest thing is just zoning reform, so making it easier for people to build, and you can extrapolate that across the board, just like making it easier for companies to try out new things for maybe landlords to have an easier time doing transactions. 

I think that’s the biggest thing to take away from the housing market is that there’s a lot of red tape and rightly so post great recession, everybody was very scared from what I gather. 

And I think that’s the biggest thing is zoning reform. That’s what basically anybody will tell you who spends a lot of time on housing policy is zoning reform will be our path forward. And so I’ll just reiterate what they’ve already said.

Taylor Schulte: It’s just so interesting because in all the conversations that I have with people, it’s the problem is interest rates and if interest rates come back down, then housing will be more affordable again. 

But in talking to you, it doesn’t really sound like that’s the solution that lower interest rates. Doesn’t all of a sudden mean that housing is more affordable?

Kyla Scanlon: I don’t think so. I think it’ll help people buy a house that is a bandaid. Lower interest rates will be great because if you want a 2% mortgage and your house is appreciated, $200,000 in value, you’re in a really good spot to go to a new house.

Now with your new $200,000 of wealth and hopefully again a 2% mortgage, I think that that is a bandaid on the situation. If lower interest rates can help us build more, yes, that’s great, but just being like, oh, we’re going to make everything cheaper and maybe it’ll free up some housing. We’ve had a housing problem for a while.We haven’t really built since the great recession. I think that’s what people should take into account, not just it should be cheaper.

Taylor Schulte: To round out this conversation on housing here, we’ve been talking about the United States and some of the difficulties that we have here in the housing market in the US. What about other countries? What issues are some of the other countries having with the housing market? Is it the same as what we’re dealing with? Is it better, is it worse?

Kyla Scanlon: I think most developed nations have a pretty tough time. The UK is kind of notorious for having a pretty tough time with housing. I think Australia has a pretty tough time. 

The thing is when you’re a developed nation, you just kind of stop building some stuff like, okay, the population is not growing rapidly. We have a general sense of how things are going to go. We’re going to focus on other stuff.

And so I think for the US the great recession didn’t help stuff, but this is definitely a worldwide problem and it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared across most developed nations in a very big way.

Taylor Schulte: Well, thanks for playing along there and going through some questions on the housing market with some of the time we have left here. I’d like to switch gears slightly and briefly touch on what may be next for the economy and potentially housing with Trump in office for the next four years. 

So to start, one of the important players making important decisions for our economy is the Federal Reserve. And Jerome Bow, the chair of the Fed recently said publicly that Trump cannot legally fire him. 

And before we unpack that comment a little bit more, can you just share with us at a high level the role of the Fed in our economy and also what the typical or maybe intended relationship is between the Federal Reserve and the White House?

Kyla Scanlon: So the Fed is the monetary policy unit of the economy. And so they have been given this power by Congress through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to basically manage money in the economy. Their dual mandate is price, stability and maximum employment. 

And so they want to make sure that everybody wants a job, has a job, and that things are not extraordinarily expensive. And they’ve been granted this power by Congress through the Federal Reserve Act. They are a quasi-governmental entity. 

So Jerome Powell actually reports to Congress. He gives them progress updates, but they are separate than the government because we don’t want the Fed to have to respond hopefully to political influence. 

The reason that they were designed to be independent is because if we had a monetary policy unit that was responding to the fluctuations in the political cycle, we would have the same problem that we had before the Fed was established, which was bank runs, which was uncertainty, which was an economy that could not grow, which was JP Morgan, the original having to bail out banks.

And the Fed was established to fix all that, and that’s what they’ve tried to do. And so with their toolkit and their dual mandate of Priceability and maximum employment, they tried to do the best that they can to have the United States achieve a balanced economy. 

So they don’t want an economy that’s too hot, they don’t want an economy that’s too cold. They want to make sure that it’s moving as smoothly as possible, especially considering the recent bout of inflation that we just went through. And so they’ll raise and lower interest rates accordingly. They were raising rates for a long time in order to battle inflation, make it more expensive for people to be alive so they spend less money. 

So the economy slows down and then ultimately, hopefully inflation slows down. That is what was accomplished. Inflation did slow down, so they held rates steady, and now they’re starting to cut rates because they’re looking at the other side of their mandate, which is the labor market and saying, okay, we’re seeing a little bit of weakness.

We’re seeing a little bit of slowing down in the labor market. Inflation seems like it’s on the right path, so let’s cut rates a little, give the economy some breathing room, and then we’ll see where things go from here. 

At the recent FOMC meeting, which is the policymaking unit of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Open Market Committee, there was a question from a journalist to Jerome Powell about how Donald Trump would interact with the Federal Reserve. And there’s been a lot of rumors that Donald Trump would ask Jerome Powell to step down, and Jerome Powell is in office until 2026. 

He cannot be removed by the president because of the power that Congress has given the Fed. And so he was like, no, I’m not going to step down. It is not legal to make me Jerome Powell step down. 

So that’s true from what we know, the Fed is not beholden to the whims of the President. They do have to respond to Congress, but they’re meant to be independent so they don’t have to fall into the political cycle so they can stay focused on that dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. 

And so that’s the general idea of the Fed. And then what has happened recently with some of the political turmoil.

Taylor Schulte: And you shared in your recent newsletter that you thought Powell’s comment about Trump not being able to fire him was actually really important for our country for the future of this country. You alluded to it a little bit there, but can you share a little bit more and unpack your points that you made in your newsletter there? That this is actually a really important thing for the future of this country? In our economy,

Kyla Scanlon: The Fed being independent and not having to respond to a president being an institution that has been granted this power since 1913 is really important. The Fed has made mistakes just like any policymaker has. They didn’t move fast enough to raise rates in order to battle inflation. 

They might’ve moved too fast cutting rates right now. Institutions should be respected, especially ones that have been established via law. And there seems to be a tendency to maybe want to have a shakeup at some of these institutions with Trump’s presidency, which is fine, but I think to respect the power that the Fed has been given to respect the importance of that independence is really important.

And I think Jerome Powell standing up for that is something that we kind of needed to see because checks and balances are what politics should be. At the end of the day, there should be kind of a gut check on either side and the Fed should not have to bend to the will of a four-year presidency, but rather bend to the will of what the economy needs, which is price, stability and maximum employment.

Taylor Schulte: Switching gears here a little bit. I know you’ve spent some time on Twitter recently setting the record straight with tariffs. So with you here, I’d love for you to share with my audience here, what are tariffs, what are the benefits and drawbacks of tariffs? And also why do most economists believe that tariffs and import quotas will actually reduce economic welfare?

Kyla Scanlon: So tariffs are a great tool. I’ll just say that upfront. If they’re targeted, if they’re blanket, tariffs are not great. And so tariffs are attacks on imports. Basically, anything that’s coming into the country will have a certain tax amount assigned to it. 

What Trump has proposed is a 10 to 20% blanket tariff on anything that comes into the United States and a 60% tariff on anything that comes in from China. And so a lot of people will say, okay, this is great. These companies are going to end up paying this cost. 

It’s going to be more expensive for them to send goods into the United States. Like if you wanted to get Italian buttercream from Italy, your Italian buttercream is going to be 10 to 20%, theoretically more expensive with a tariff, but that’ll make those companies be more competitive with pricing hopefully. 

But what research has found is this companies like the Italian buttercream company, is just going to pass that cost off to the consumer.

AutoZone has already said that they’re going to do this. Walmart has already said that they’re going to do this Elf Beauty. Every single company that makes products in other countries and imports them into the US is like, no, the consumer is just going to pay for this. Why would we accompany absorb this cost? 

And so that’s the issue with the idea of blanket tariffs is that they end up hurting the consumer, their tax on consumers targeted tariffs where you’re like, okay, we’re going to do a 10% tax on all semiconductors that are coming in from China, which is part of what President Biden did is okay, because you’re like, okay, we’re just going to make that part of industry a little bit more competitive. 

We’re going to make those people have to be more price-responsive. We’re going to try to encourage domestic manufacturing here in the United States. But when you do blanket tariffs, which who knows if this will actually happen, but he do blanket tariffs, it gets a little bit more complicated because companies are like, okay, well, we’re really good at making microchips, but now we have to figure out how to make steel inside of the United States. 

We have to figure out how to get steel inside of the United States. We have to pay more for steel, and that’s going to really complicate our production process. So that’s the general idea with tariffs is their tax on consumers. 

Not all tariffs are bad tariffs, but if you’re thinking about it blanket wise, there’s studies from the tax foundation that says this will cost the average family between a thousand to $2,000 more per year. What President Trump has also proposed is using these tariffs to pay for tax cuts. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is expected to be extended.

That’ll cost about $4 trillion to extend it, and tariffs will only raise maximum about 500 billion in revenue because we only have $3 trillion worth of imports. 

So I’m throwing a ton of numbers, which are really hard to follow, but even if we milk tariffs for all they’re worth, we just won’t have enough money to cover some of the tax cuts that have been proposed, which will exacerbate the federal deficit, put us further into debt. You could go on and on with the domino effect of what this could cause. 

But in summary, tariffs are tax on consumer. Not all tariffs are bad tariffs, but blanket tariffs, no economists likes them because of what they do to prices.

Taylor Schulte: So consumers may enjoy some of these tax cuts extended from the tax cut and jobs act for potentially another four years here, but they might get hit with some extra taxes from these tariffs. Potentially they’ll just counteract the taxes they’re saving from TCGA.

Kyla Scanlon: It would end up costing people more, just proposed all sorts of tax cuts, ending taxes on social security, ending taxes on overtime, pay ending taxes on tips. And it comes to the point where like, well, where’s the money going to come from? 

They have ideas. It seems like the Department of Government Efficiency might find some stuff out. There’s a lot of money to be cut out of the government, but I think to say, oh, tariffs are going to pay for the tax cuts. 

It’s just going to make the average consumer’s life quite difficult. And that’s just not something you want to see, especially after the recent inflationary bout that we had that people are still recovering from. We just don’t want fiscal policy to make it more difficult for people. And I think that’s the really tough part about these proposals.

Taylor Schulte: To round out this conversation, I’d love for you to share about the disconnects that you mentioned in measurement trust and implementation and why these disconnects might point towards a clear framework for change and a path forward from here.

Kyla Scanlon: So the disconnects in implementation trust and framework are basically this idea of what I wrote about in my recent newsletter where it was kind of retrospective. I’m like, how did we get here? How did Trump win? What do we need to sort of fix just bipartisan? What can we fix in the American economy? 

And a big part of it is data measurement. So having better metrics that more accurately capture how people are feeling, not relying on GDP growth to tell us the whole story of how people are, but rather having a more expansive tapestry of data that we pull from all sorts of metrics I listed out in the newsletter that would do a better job, like housing affordability versus wages, and then the implementation idea. 

There’s all these policies that are being proposed, but it becomes very difficult to get stuff done. Los Angeles, for example, has spent the last three years spending $7 million on building food carts, great initiative, but not a single food cart has been distributed yet.

We actually need to implement these processes. We need to get from idea to action faster. It can’t be so slow, we just can’t take that long on this stuff. We have to really reduce the red tape and the bureaucracy, and then the trust aspect. 

How do we regain trust in one another in the media environment and then in politicians at large. A survey that’s haunted me over the past couple months is a, from the Spring 2024 Harvard Youth Opinion poll, and they asked young people, who do you trust? What institutions do you trust? 

And the only institution that young people still trusted in was the United Nations Trust in the media, the government, the presidency, wall Street, had all declined by double digits. And so I think that’s a huge issue. When we talk about measurement, when we talk about implementation, we have to address the third corner of the triangle, which is trust. 

People just don’t trust in policy. They don’t trust in the data, they don’t trust in the ability for the government to get stuff done. And all of that has to be fixed if we ever want to move forward and kind of establish an economy where consumers best interests are at heart. 

And so that’s kind of the idea of the triangle, is we have to address all three legs of the stool in order to have a stable foundation.

Taylor Schulte: Well before we part ways here. You wrote an amazing book called In This Economy How Money and Markets Really Work. And as listeners know, I’m giving away copies of this book, but I’d just love for you to share what is this book about? What prompted you to write this book?

Kyla Scanlon: This book is about the economy. It’s basically an intro guide to everything that you might need to know about economics. So inflation, the labor market, the federal reserve, monetary and fiscal policy, crypto is in there, the stock market, the bond market. And then I talk about problems and opportunities at the end. 

And the reason that I wrote this book is because I do social media videos, but I also have spent a lot of time at institutions. I was at Capital Group, I was at a startup. And the biggest takeaway for me from all of these conversations that I’ve had over the past few years is people are like, I don’t know where to start with economics. 

The terminology makes no sense. It’s all confusing. And so I really wanted to provide a fun guide. There’s 60 illustrations in the book done by me for people to start with and not feel so overwhelmed because the economy’s everything.

The economy is buying a cup of coffee, it’s striving down the street. Everything we do is an economic transaction. And for whatever reason, we pretend that people don’t need to know that. And then we get surprised when they’re trying to figure out how to take out a loan and they’re like, what’s a credit score? 

And another thing that was quite influential for me was I sold cars and I had all these people come on the lot and they didn’t know what an interest rate was. It’s definitely a labor of love this book, and it’s something that I really wanted to have exist in the world. 

But the goal beyond my personal stories is to have a place where people can go and understand all of this stuff in a more fun and accessible way.

Taylor Schulte: You do such a great job of breaking down these really complex pieces of our economy into a really simple, digestible way. It is one of those coffee table books that you can just pick up and read a couple pages or read one of the sections in there. And like you said, you cover just about every aspect of this economy. 

So if you want to learn more, there’s some great drawings in there that, like you said, you had done yourself. It’s a really, really easy, fun, friendly way to learn more about money markets, the economy, and how everything works. So be sure to share a link in the show notes for today’s episode. Kyla, thank you so much for joining me today on the show.

Kyla Scanlon: Thank you. 

Episode Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. This podcast is not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or other professional services.