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BONUS: The Economy Added 115,000 Jobs. Consumer Confidence Just Hit a 74-Year Low. Let’s Unpack This.
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The US added 115,000 new jobs in April, totally exceeding expectations. But there was one industry in particular, information technology, basically the tech sector, that performed terribly. The job growth was concentrated in a couple of areas, healthcare, transportation, warehousing, retail. While tech is having a bloodbath, we're going to discuss that. We're also going to talk about the stock market, the housing market, and more. Welcome to the first Monday after the second Friday episode of the Afford Anything podcast. Now normally, if you're a longtime listener, you know that on the first Friday of every month we do an episode that's a macroeconomic update. We talk about what's happening in the economy and the reason we do it on the first Friday is because that's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, puts out its jobs report. Well, this past first Friday, Friday, May 1st, the BLS did not put out its report as it typically does. Instead, the BLS delayed until the second Friday. And so following their lead, our economic update is now on the first Monday after the second Friday. This is a short bonus episode which we are releasing in addition to our normal Tuesday and Thursday episodes. So this is going to be a three episode week. It's short, it's ad free. But I do have one announcement and that is that we have opened the doors today to our course on rental property investing. It's called you'd First Rental Property. It is a 10 week guided course on how to invest in rental properties. Whether you want to house, hack into a primary residence and offset some of your out of pocket costs by virtue of monetizing your own primary residence, we've got material for that. Or if you live in a high cost of living area and you want to buy a rental property out of state in a low cost area. Like me, I'm a, I live in Manhattan, I am a renter in Manhattan and I am an owner in Indiana, Georgia and Nevada. So if that's what you want to do, we've got loads of information for that. We guide you through this course over the span of 10 weeks. We talk about how to analyze properties, find properties, finance them, renovate them if needed, how to place tenants, everything A to Z. We've got lots of support, study halls, mastermind calls, office hours, very robust spreadsheets, checklists. We also have an AI tool. All of that is available@affordanything.com enroll. That's affordanything.com enroll. Now with that announcement said, let's get started on today's episode. We'll start with jobs Data. And by the way, the reason that we always start with jobs data is because that is one of the most clear indications of how the economy is doing way more so than the stock market. The stock market is not the economy. And particularly in the short term, the stock market is often driven by hopes and fears. In the long term, it's fundamentals, but in the short term it's emotions. So if you want to really understand the economy, don't look at the stock market, look at the jobs market and also look at the bond market. Those two are going to tell you far more than the stock market will. Jobs. We added 115,000 new jobs in April. We also added revised March numbers upwards. So both March better than expected. Numbers revised upwards, April very strong number. The unemployment rate has stayed unchanged at 4.3%. And we're also seeing wage growth. So on the surface, many things look very good. And then when you dig a little deeper and you look at the industries, we also see some very good news. We see that these are private sector jobs for federal government. Jobs are actually decreasing while private sector jobs are increasing. That is much better for the economy. But inside the private sector, whether or not there are jobs available is very industry specific. Healthcare is strong and stable and that's been consistent over the past year. We've seen healthcare be the leader as one of the strongest, most stable sources of job growth. So Healthcare added 37,000 new jobs in April. That is pretty much in line with what it's done over the last 12 months. A lot of that is nursing facilities, residential care facilities, home healthcare services. We have a population that is aging and that means there's a lot of caregiving, related work that's out there that needs to be done. Transportation, added jobs, warehousing, added jobs. We're talking logistics, couriers, messengers, commerce, infrastructure. Now those sectors are down from their February 2025 peak, but they are improving. Retail also added jobs. A lot of that was consolidated in discount retail and consumer necessities like warehouse clubs, building material retailers. We saw some of the more consumer discretionary sectors lose jobs. So department stores and electronics retailers lost jobs. What that tells us is that consumers are spending, but they're becoming more bargain oriented, more value conscious. They're spending more on necessities and they're spending more on discount retail. This goes hand in hand with what we're seeing in consumer sentiment surveys. So the University of Michigan puts out a consumer sentiment report every month and we are seeing consumer sentiment at an all time low. The University of Michigan has been Tracking consumer sentiment for 74 years. Consumer sentiment is now at the lowest level in its 74 year history. It's even worse than it was during peak inflation in 2022. And what's notable is that this decline, this low sentiment, is consistent across all income brackets, all age brackets, all education levels and all political affiliations. So it is we, we found the one thing that we can unite on and that is low consumer sentiment. Now, largely this is driven by high inflation, high gas prices and fears about the economy, fears about what jobs will be like in the future. And what's interesting is that there is, and we've talked about this in previous episodes as well, there's a disconnect between. Because there have been times when the economy has objectively been worse. 2008, for those of us who are old enough to remember 2008, the economy was objectively worse. And yet consumer sentiment now is in a worse position today than it was even back then. Similarly, you know, we're talking about a 74 year low. So you think about the high inflation in the 1970s and early 80s, you think about the recessions of the 1980s. Consumer sentiment now is even lower than it was back then. Now when we look again at the fact that we're adding jobs in retail, what we are seeing is that in spite of this low sentiment, spending has not dropped in a way that mirrors that low sentiment. So spending people feel bad, but they're still spending money. And the stuff they're buying isn't necessarily as fancy. They're spending a bit less on discretionary items, but people are still spending. There has not been a major spending pullback. You know, one hypothesis around this is that high gas prices have a disproportionate impact on a person's level of confidence, disproportionate to the impact that they make on a household budget. And that's because when you're paying for gas, first of all, when you're standing at the pump as your tank is filling up, you have nothing else to do with your time other than just watch that number go up. Like you're, you're standing at the fuel pump, just watching the numbers on the pump rise. So you are viscerally aware of the cost of that fuel. Because what the heck else are you going to do at that time? Maybe check, tick tock, that's one piece of it. Another piece is that you, you're filling your tank maybe what, once a week. So if the cost of other things rise, if inflation makes the cost of sofas and refrigerators and dishwashers go up. You don't notice it because you don't buy a sofa and a refrigerator and a dishwasher on a weekly basis. So the frequency of purchase as well as the. The viscerality of purchase, this is. Gas is not something that you order online. You have to do it in person. And you have to stand there and watch the number on the pump rise while it's happening. And you're reminded of that weekly. And when you layer that onto high housing prices, many people, in an effort to buy a cheaper home, live further away from where they work, which means you've got a longer commute. So now you're saving money on home prices by virtue of living further away. But. But you're paying more in fuel in that regard. It's no wonder consumer confidence is bad. But also, objectively, if you're paying an extra $2 per gallon, $2 per gallon above and beyond what you used to pay. Right. So that is the cost differential. Well, according to J.D. power, the average American driver consumes approximately 40 to 50 gallons of gasoline per month. That means you're spending between $80 to $100 per month extra. If you. Is that a lot? For some households, yes. But for many, that's not so much money that it would cause a pullback on buying clothing or going to restaurants or ordering doordash. That's where we see that consumer confidence can dip even while spending remains high. There is an emotional impact to spending an extra $80 to $100 per month that is disproportionate to the effect that it has on your budget. Let's put it this way. If your property taxes were to rise, let's say property taxes plus homeowner's insurance, if those two factors together rose and the cost of that was an additional $80 per month, would it emotionally impact you in the same way? Not as much. Not as much because you would not be standing in in the snow with a windchill surrounding you, fueling your tank, watching the number go up. Right. If your property taxes were to rise, you would see it on a piece of paper that gets mailed to you once a year. Or you would see it in the notice from your lender that your mortgage is about to rise by an extra 80 bucks a month. But that's going to come out as an invisible electronic withdrawal that you don't really feel anyway. Off of consumer sentiment, back to the jobs report. There are two categories of workers that have seen their jobs shrink dramatically. One is federal Government employees. The other is the tech sector. The tech sector in particular, and the BLS refers to this as information employment. This is down by 342,000 jobs, which is about 11% from its November 2022 peak. And, and that is very significant, particularly given the fact that those tend to be relatively high paying jobs. In April, the tech sector lost another 13,000 jobs. We're seeing a continuation of a lot of job culling in this arena. There's also another stat, it's people working part time for economic reasons. And that number, I think this is maybe the most important interesting part of the jobs report. That number jumped by 445,000 in just one month. Just between March and April it jumped 445,000. Now these are people who want to work full time, but they can't find full time work, so they're only working part time. Now that might be because their hours got cut back. It might be because they were previously unemployed and they can now only find part time jobs. Now what's not counted within that number are people who voluntarily choose part time jobs. So for example, you might have a full time stay at home parent or caregiver, elderly caregiver, who prefers part time hours, or maybe you have a semi retired person who prefers part time hours. That's not counted in this number. So people who are voluntarily working part time out of choice, that's not counted. It's the people who are working part time because they want full time and they can't get it. That jumped by half a million in one month. And although there is not data to track why, like who, who is comprised within that number, why did it jump so dramatically in a month? I have a suspicion that many of these laid off tech workers are included in that part time stat. I can't prove it, but I do have a hypothesis. And regardless of whether or not that hypothesis is true, what we, what we know based on that dramatic jump in that number is that there are a lot of people right now who are settling for part time work. Turning our attention to the housing market, existing home sales in April were flat. That's a really bad news for the housing industry because often there is a spring rebound. A lot of people who don't want to look for a home in winter, they don't want to move in winter. Those people often start buying homes in the spring. And so the housing industry often expects a spring rebound and we did not get one this year. According to data from the national association of Realtors, existing home sales ticked up 0.2% between March and April. That's a seasonally adjusted annualized pace of 4.02 million units. That is way less than what they were expecting. According to CNBC, analysts were expecting a gain of more than 3%. The average days on market, which is a measure of the average amount of time that a home spends on the market has gotten longer. And the supply of available homes climbed 5.8% from March to April. That gives us 4.4 months of inventory on the market, which is actually less than what we need. A six month supply of inventory is considered to be a balanced market. So we do need about a 30% increase in inventory in order to have what is considered a balanced market. That being said, inventory is very location dependent. And in specific areas like central Florida or parts of Texas, we're seeing a ton of inventory on the market. These are particularly areas where there is low friction around construction, low friction around ADUs and building. Those places are seeing a lot of inventory. Other geographies are seeing lackluster inventory. The median sale price rose by just shy of 1%, 0.9% year over year. According to data from NAR. The median sale price is now $417,700. I mentioned average days on market has increased. It increased by an average of three days. So homes now sit on the market for an average of 32 days. That is up by three days as compared to April of last year. About 1/3 of the homes on the market are purchased by first time homebuyers. That is a slight dip over the first time home buyer composition of last year. And sales are climbing fastest in the Midwest and in the South. They're holding steady in the Northeast. They're declining in the West. So with all of that data in front of us, what conclusions can we draw? Number one, the housing market is frozen in place. It is neither crashing nor skyrocketing. It is just frozen. It is particularly significant that we did not have a spring rebound because spring is typically one of the strongest seasons for home sales. That shows that we are in a frozen market. We see that affordability has improved slightly, but not enough to really unlock or unfreeze that market. A buyer that was priced out when mortgage rates were at their peak is probably still priced out right now. So we would need much deeper cuts in the mortgage rate in order to unlock more sales. And if we had deeper cuts in the mortgage rate, that would do two things. Number one, it would bring more buyers into the market. But number two, it would also bring more inventory into the Market, because that's the third thing that we're seeing in the data. We have limited supply. And much of that is because you've got people with the golden handcuffs scenario. You have existing homeowners who have homes with a 3% mortgage interest rate. They don't want to give up that mortgage interest rate, so they. They're holding onto these homes. So inventory is constrained. And so that creates this kind of weird split where transaction volume is weak, meaning like buyers are not buying, but also sellers are not selling in a normal market, or if we had six months of inventory in a normal market, buyers that aren't buying might cause prices to come down. Right? Lower demand. If there is adequate supply, then a decrease in demand would cause prices to come down. But we now have buyers who aren't buying and sellers who aren't selling. So everyone's just at an impasse. And what that means is that high mortgage rates are the main choke point. The housing market will change meaningfully when mortgage rates decline, but we are likely still a few years from that, from a meaningful decline. Is it a better time to be a buyer or a seller? It's between the two, a much better time to be a buyer. Homes are sitting on the market for 32 days on average. Yes, there's limited inventory, but for the inventory that is out there, buyers have the power. This isn't like what it was like in 2020 or 2021, when homes were getting multiple offers on the day that they were listed or really pocket list. You know, they'd go as pocket listings, meaning they wouldn't even formally ever get listed. They would, through word of mouth, go under contract before they ever officially even came on the market. That's called a pocket listing. That was happening all over the place in 2020 and 2021. That is no longer the case with homes. Average days on Market at 32 days. You know, buyers have a smaller selection to choose from, but they have more power when they go into that transaction. They can ask for closing costs. They can ask for repairs and other kinds of concessions. They can ask the sellers to leave all of the furniture behind if they want to keep it. You know, buyers are in the stronger negotiating position. And so that is the snapshot of the housing market as of right now. And that is our May 1st Monday after the second Friday Bonus episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it gave you some insight into where we are economically at this moment in time and again. We have a course on how to invest in rental properties with specific attention that we are paying to the housing market of 2026. How do we navigate as rental property investors? How do we navigate this particular market? How do we navigate the realities of high mortgage interest rates, low inventory? How do we navigate that and how do we do that? You know, there are some people who just want to buy a home for yourself. You want to buy a primary residence for yourself, but paying all of those costs out of pocket is a huge out of pocket sum. And so you want a house hack so that you can offset some of those costs. Right. The course is geared both towards those people as well as also towards people who want to buy a property purely as an investment. It's not a house hack. It's just a separate standalone property that you're buying it purely for the sake of generating residual income, cash flow, building equity, all of the benefits that you get from owning rental property. And there's a strong likelihood that that property might be out of state. Like I said, I live in Manhattan and I own properties in Georgia, Indiana and Nevada. So I am simultaneously a renter and a landlord. I rent my own personal residence and I also own seven rental units on the first of every month. I both pay rent and collect rent. And so this course is built for people who want to do that as well. And it's also got loads of information for anybody who is, what's a quote unquote, an accidental landlord. So you're in the golden handcuff scenario. You're holding onto this property because it's got a 3% mortgage interest rate, but you have to move, maybe because of a job, because of family circumstances, maybe just because you want to. You've retired and you'd like to live somewhere different. You don't want to give up that 3% mortgage interest rate. You want to hold on to that property, but you never intended for it to be a rental, but now it just makes the most sense to hang on to it, but you don't know what to do. How do you. Do you renovate it? If so, how. How much money should you put into it? How do you make sure that you're not over improving it, that you're adequately optimizing it for the neighborhood, but not over improving it? Right, because there might be a $20,000 differential between a couple of just a few renovation decisions that you're making. So how do you renovate it? How do you screen for tenants? How do you protect your asset? Right. This course has information for all three of those profiles. The house hacker, the out of state investor, and the accidental landlord, whichever of those resonates with you. Or if you're this is a little bit more rare but standalone investor in state we hear less and less of that these days, but it does happen. Maybe you live in Cincinnati in a standalone single family home and you also want to invest in rental properties and heck, you happen to live in a place where there are plenty of great rentals that you could buy. So the standalone local investor we've we've got information for all of those profiles and we've got guidance and support and structure and a community experience where you have study halls, you have active investor calls, you've got forums with TAs, you've got a cohort of people who provide accountability, who provide support. You've got spreadsheets and checklists and worksheets and handouts and really robust information that can lead you A to Z through this process. So that is available right now. We've opened the doors Today, Today, Monday, May 11, and the doors will be open through next Thursday. So we're closing our doors on Thursday, May 21. This is your window of time to Enroll. Again Monday, May 11, through Thursday, May 21. This is the window of time to enroll. If you want to learn lots more about it, please go to affordanything.com enroll. That's affordanything.com enrollment. Thank you so much for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant and I'll meet you in the next episode.