Robert Croke (3:00)

Feel like everyone needs to take a deep breath and USA for a minute because of everything that's going on. But given the backlog of muddy economic data, the markets are just more volatile than normal. So expect continued swings in your 401k and your traditional investment accounts. And additionally, the Fed now has a less clear view and into economic data. So a December rate cut might not happen. Finally, we might be doing this all over again in January as that's when the spending budget is expiring and they'll have to meet again and start this all over.

Austin Hankowitz (3:33)

Well, let's hope that doesn't happen and we can just keep getting paid and the economic data keeps coming out and the markets keep going up and to the right. All right, Robert, let's now talk about our next story, which is Disney losing $30 million per week for every week the YouTube TV blackout lasts. So as of October 30th, Disney's channels include major ones like ESPN and ABC went dark on YouTube TV because the distribution contract between Disney and YouTube TV expired and they failed to reach a renewal agreement. Now Disney wants higher distribution fees for their channels. YouTube TV's arguing, hey man, we're already paying you too much already. You know, we don't want to pay you anymore because if we do, we'll be forced to raise subscription prices for our YouTube TV. And I don't know if you remember this, Robert, they just raised prices last year, so that would not be good.

Robert Croke (4:23)

Yes, YouTube TV is actually offering their customers a $20 credit because of the lack of access to the Disney channels. Wall street analysts estimate Disney is losing $4.3 million per day, translating to that $30 million per week if this blackout continues and Disney has publicly stated that it cannot predict how long this service blackout will last and build a hedge into its earning guidance for this uncertainty. We which is why we're seeing their stock drop dramatically by 8% just today. And here's why that matters for your money.

Austin Hankowitz (4:56)

Yeah, let's talk about why it matters. Right? Because on one side you've got YouTube TV saying we don't want to pay you more money for this Distribution and then Disney saying, no, we want more money. And then YouTube's like, well, if we give you more money, we're not going to make enough money to make a profit, so we're going to have to raise prices to our customers. And I'm already paying like 90 something dollars a month for my YouTube TV and I don't get any ESPN anymore, so I can't watch my college football. So it's just, it's a lot. If YouTube TV actually ends up paying more to Disney, they're unfortunately going to have to pass those costs on to their subscribers. Where if Disney doesn't do that and they just cave and they say, listen, we don't want any more money, they're going to have to raise prices elsewhere to offset that, that gap, right? So maybe that's higher Disney plus or higher Hulu prices for their subscribers. Now more importantly, if YouTube wins this negotiation, every other streaming provider is going to try and pay less for those channels, which then forces networks to raise their pricing. So either you look at it, Robert, our monthly bills are probably just going to have to increase somehow some way as it relates to consuming this streaming content.

Robert Croke (6:00)

It's crazy to me that Disney's profits so far in the fiscal year 2025 are $10 billion and they're already in this situation where they're blocking out YouTube TV. All this is happening and the consumers are going to have to eat this increase again. It's crazy. It's not fair. $10 billion in profit and they can't find a way to make this work for YouTub. It's crazy to me.

Austin Hankowitz (6:26)

It is crazy. And you know what else is crazy? Our third point, which is the introduction of the 50 year mortgage. So the idea of a 50 year mortgage is back in the headlines as policymakers and housing advocates debate ways to make monthly payments more affordable in a world of high home prices and even higher interest rates. Now, the basic concept is pretty simple. You just stretch the term of the loan out from 30 years to 50 years. Assuming that monthly payment is going to drop because it's stretched out longer. On paper, it could solve the affordability crisis. But then once you look a little bit deeper, it tells a different story.

Robert Croke (7:02)

That's right, Austin. Definitely a different story for sure. So I did a little bit of math here. In a 50 year mortgage dramatically increases the amount of interest a homeowner would pay over the life of the loan. That's a foregoing conclusion. But your equity builds much slower because early on the payments are almost entirely interest. So for example, I broke it down on a $400,000 mortgage and after years on a 30 year mortgage, your principal would reduce by $47,000, but only $14,000 for the same loan at 50 years, which is just crazy to me. And additionally, the interest rates are going to be higher on these mortgages than a 30 year mortgage because it's going to be higher risk for the lenders. So I assume these mortgage rates are going to be 50, 75 basis points more expensive than the 30 year mortgage. So let's break it down of what this means for people and their money because it's not all what they think it is. And I think it's a bad idea to even consider these 50 year mortgages.

Austin Hankowitz (8:06)

Well, on one side, right, you've got these monthly payments that would theoretically go down, but the total interest paid over the life of the loan goes up substantially. So you can carry mortgage debt also into retirement, right? Getting one of these at 30, I'm 29. If I got a 50 year mortgage, I wouldn't pay it off till I'm 79. Theoretically. That would be crazy. And if longer term loans become standard, here's the key. Home prices could rise because more people can now afford these bigger loans. Rates could be higher for such long terms, reducing the benefit. Right? There's a lot of different things to consider here. You know, Robert and I were talking about this before the show started and it's interesting to kind of think, right, let's say that for that same $400,000 home that someone purchased, and you've got your normal 30 year mortgage on it, assuming you now, you know, pay it off in 30 years, the house probably appreciates all that fun stuff. As you think about paying pretty much nothing toward the principal during that first 10 year period of time. I mean, Robert just gave us an example there. Only $14,000 would go toward the principal over a 10 year period of time, you're essentially relying entirely on capital appreciation, right? The equity to be built because the home value is appreciating over time, which, I mean, you look at what happened in Texas, what happened in Miami, what happened in some of these other areas, you know, houses should go up into the right over a long period of time, but it's not a foregone conclusion, it's not guaranteed. What is guaranteed with a 15 and a 30 year mortgage is that you pay it down over time, specifically in that 5, 10, 15 year period that allows you to say, cool, I've got some good equity. It's not the case with these 50 year mortgages.

Robert Croke (9:37)

Yeah, I think that's a great point. We're so used to hearing about capital appreciation in real estate, but if you look at markets right now like Cape Coral, Florida, prices are actually way down from where they were two years ago. So imagine the situation where someone buys a home because we always talk about you shouldn't buy to what they'll loan you. You should buy to what works within your budget. And so many people don't do that. They're like 50 year mortgage, I can get more home for a lesser payment. But at the end of the day you have to be very, very careful because it might be better off to rent if you become house broke because of this 50 year mortgage. So just make sure you understand the numbers because we want to really guide you guys in the right direction for the future, not just getting a lower payment right now. Because if you look at it on this $400,000, you're only going to save about 280 to $320 per month on that payment. I don't think that is enough to go to a 50 year mortgage. I'd rather see you go get a side hustle. One shift a week to pay the difference.

Austin Hankowitz (10:36)

I think it's a great breakdown, Robert. Now, before we jump to the rapid fire section of the show, which as you guys might remember is Robert myself, bring three of our favorite headlines that have caught our eye throughout the week that we want to share specifically with y'. All. We're introducing a new segment of the show called Movers and Shakers, brought to you by ETF. ETFCentral.com is in partnership with the New York Stock Exchange. They're a wonderful resource and hub for all things data and inflows and performance and holdings of all the different ETFs that exist out there. There's over 4, 600 ETFs trading on the stock market right now and ETF central.com is a great place to learn more about them. Now, according to the website, as you can see shared on screen, we've got our best performers and our worst performers of the week. ROBERT so let me do this. I'll cover the top three best, you cover the top three worst and then we'll have one big takeaw away from what we've learned. So the best performers this week in the ETF space include life sciences up nine and a half percent, precious metals when you exclude gold up just north of 7%, and finally tomorrow's treatments of 6.8%, which could be better defined as like oncology, weight loss, biotech, kind of the future of healthcare.

Robert Croke (11:50)

Blockchain is down 6 and a half percent. Space and deep sea research is down 3% and volatility is down about 2 and a half percent as well. So it's been a pretty crazy market with these categories.

Austin Hankowitz (12:03)

It definitely has. And I would say my biggest takeaway across all of these, right, Best performing, worst performing. I think it's interesting to see precious metals, when you exclude gold, performing so well. Up, up just about, you know, 7.2% this week. Right. Think palladium, think silver, think copper, things like that. You've been talking about copper for a while. Silver's obviously breaking out. So I think, I think as we see more volatility in the markets, we should expect to see precious metals, when you exclude gold, continue to trend up. Right?

Robert Croke (12:32)

Yeah, I agree, Austin. I think that's a great call out there because I do see a lot of continued growth in the precious metals market. I don't know that gold is going to continue to rise as much as silver is because silver obviously has all of its use cases in EV and phones and solar and everything else. But I think it's a great call out to mention for people that are investing in the precious metals sector.

Austin Hankowitz (12:55)

All right, Robert. With that out of the way, let's now jump to our Rapid Fire section. The three news stories sitting at the top of my Rapid Fire section today include Hims and Hers launching their new Labs product. Anthropic investing $50 billion in AI infrastructure in Uber. Partnering with Vail Resorts to launch their Uber Ski product. So let's kick things off with the Hims and Hers Labs product launch. Hims and hers announced on Thursday the launch of Labs, their new product that directly competes with Function Health. The product is available in two plans, base in advance and offers yearly BL blood draws to run over 120 biomarker tests across 10 key categories. Now, why I think this is exciting is one, I am a customer of Function Health. I've done the blood draw, I've done the urine analysis, I've got the app. I know all my stuff. It's really cool. So knowing that that can now be done to more people on Hims and Hers, I think is really, really impactful. But two, Function Health is doing a quarter billion dollars a year in annualized revenue. So if Hims and Hers can sort of of capture some of that right to the tune of 50, 100, $150 million a year in annualized revenue, I think that's going to be material for the company long term. Up next is anthropic investing $50 billion in AI infrastructure. The AI company is building data centers alongside Fluid Stack in Texas and New York to meet the demand from their more than 300,000 business customers. This makes a lot of sense as the company reportedly is going to reach profitability much faster than open AI. I'm sure you guys saw that headline this week. Anthropic expect break even by 2028. Now, what's exciting about this, Robert, is I'm sure you remember October of 2024, inside the rich Habits Network, we offered the opportunity for people to invest in FluidStack, the company that Anthropic is building these data centers with at about a $700 million valuation. Now, the current valuation is not yet public, but I can confirm it is a lot higher than 700 million, which is really exciting for not just us, but everyone who invested alongside of us via the Rich Habits Network. So go check out the Rich ha network now. Finally, Uber partnering with Vail Resorts to launch the Uber ski product in their app. Now, Uber has partnered with Vail Resorts to provide skiers a seamless way to buy lift tickets and reserve a ride to the slopes. This winter with Uber ski, riders can now reserve an Uber that can accommodate as many as four passengers and their ski gear, as well as purchase the Epic Pass directly through the Uber app. Robert, I'm not much of a skier. I do more of the the water sports, as you know. You've been on my boat, more wakeboarding, stuff like that. But I guess good the skiers.

Robert Croke (15:37)

My big takeaway from your rapid fire today is the Hims and hers with the preventative care. Because if I read it correctly, it's only $199 a year, which I think is incredible at economies of scale with a company like Hims and hers going up against Function Health. Because for someone like me that cares about my blood work and I get it done a lot, that's incredibly affordable. I'm sure they're just going to send us a packet right to our house. We do a quick prick with the thing and send it in and give us all those biomarkers. So I love that call out from you. And I wanted to get into my rapid fire right now as well. I'm going to start out with strategies. Michael Saylor says he has no doubt in his mind that Bitcoin will be bigger than gold within a decade. So in 10 years, 2035, Michael Saylor predicts that Bitcoin will outpace gold and have a larger market cap. So to give you guys some numbers right now, Bitcoin currently has a market cap of 2.04 trillion versus the gold's market cap of 29 trillion. So for bitcoin to surpass gold, the price would need to climb to around $1.4 million per coin. And although I'm very bullish on bitcoin, I don't know if we're going to see that high of a price in the next 10 years. And I'm not sure about these numbers. But I'm an investor in bitcoin and gold. I assume we're going to see substantial growth in both. So more to come and we'll definitely touch back on this in a few years and see how close to right. Michael Saylor is number two for me today. I think is an interesting one. I think it's really good for the housing market and that is, and I don't know if you guys saw this or not, but Fannie mae drops their 620 minimum credit score requirement to be able to get the Fannie Mae loans. And I think this is really, really good to no longer require a 620 or greater credit score. And they base the eligibility more on broader basis as it relates to your past payment history with rent and payment history with utility bills. This is going to help a ton of people that have lower credit scores or non traditional income but that may not currently qualify. But as long as they have these long standing on time payments, they will now be able to get these really awesome products from Fannie Mae. And number three, and this one is my favorite radar today, and that is Michael Burry pulls the plug on his hedge fund Scion Asset management status was terminated and ended operations November 10th. And this is huge news in light of him recently being in the headlines due to his massive short bets in the AI sector. He had notional value of 912 million of put options on Palantir, 186 million on Nvidia. And these bets comprised around 80% of his fund's portfolio. So I'm assuming that, you know, he is really getting a lot of internalized pressure because of a lot of wrong bets over the last few years. And so maybe that is the reason for pulling the plug, but we'll see more in the future. And for those of you that don't remember, Michael Burry's claim to fame was that he accurately predicted the housing market crash of 2008 and they even made a movie about it. But it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns for Michael Burry as of recent, so we'll hear more from him. But he did do a cryptic post on X the other day talking about what is next on November 25, so more to come on that one.

Austin Hankowitz (19:03)

I will say Robert Michael Burry shutting down is no surprise. He shut down after he shorted, you know, back in 2008, 2009 maybe. He's I also saw some Alex and Palantir shorts that were going to expire in 2027 via some put options. I don't know what's going on with that guy.

Robert Croke (19:19)

He's just maybe a little out of touch and he's made too many wrong moves and investors are like, micha, might be time to hang it up and do something else. So we'll see what he comes back with.

Austin Hankowitz (19:29)

All right, so let's now jump to the Q and A section of this episode. As you guys know, the Q A section of the Rich Habits Radar Friday episodes are entirely focused on small business ownership, entrepreneurship, and just like making more money, Dave Ramsey says, go pay off all your debt. We say go make more money. Go increase your income. Go get more money in your bank account. So we got our first question here coming from Paul. Paul says, hey guys, I love the podcast. I'm looking for some guidance on wanting to purchase a local business. I'm 42. I make 125,000 a year. I work as a service advisor at a dealership and have for many years. Now I've got $50,000 saved that I could use towards a purchase as my dream is to own a small independent repair shop. I've seen several listed for sale over the past few years in the $500,000 range on Biz Buy sell. So my question is, where are the best places to look for these types of opportunities? Do I use biz by sell somewhere else? And the best ways to actually purchase this? Do I do an SBA loan? Seller financing? What do you guys think? Robert, you've bought and sold businesses. What's your take on the situation from Paul?

Robert Croke (20:35)

I think Paul, it's a great idea. I think you should look at owner financing. But before you do anything, I want to make sure you understand one fact. Mechanics don't grow on trees. They're not very reliable. So make sure you at least have one or two mechanics. You said small shop shop that can be there to help you along the way. Because if you're going to be a mechanic as well and you're going to Be in the trenches. You need to make sure you have one or two people you can rely on after that. I love this idea for you. Go to biz, buy, sell. Drive the areas that you think have the most growth near you. That would be great to have a shop and look at buying one of those. But before you agree to any numbers, make sure you get the details from them. Get the real books, get the books that come from the POS system or the cash register so you make sure they line up with what they're reporting because a lot of people still get those cash service bills and don't include those in the sales. And really understand what you're paying for. And always negotiate to what you can get to rather than just laying down and giving them what they want. I love this idea because you have the experience, you'd be very good at running this type of business and then you can control your future because a lot of people are getting older. I know a mechanic shop right now in Toledo, Ohio. I'm trying to back the son because the father's retiring. Similar situation. We're going to get owner financing from his father and move on. That's what I would do.

Austin Hankowitz (22:01)

I like that. I guess. A couple pieces of advice I'd share with you, Paul. You mentioned it's your dream to own a small independent repair shop. It's one thing to have a dream like that. It's another thing to have a dream like that and really understand what part of the dream drives you. Right. I think a lot of people like yeah, it's really cool. I'd love to have a coffee shop one day or it'd be really fun to have a boutique peak. Do you like the idea of owning a small independent repair shop because you like working on cars? Because you are super big on customer service because you love running the back end operations of types of like, you know, a business like that, like what about the business really gets you excited. And once you figure out what that is, now you can begin to think about how do I bring partners in that are going to allow me to really double down on what I'm good at. Which could be, you know, working on cars or the back office or the customer service and then they can support things I'm not good at. So a great example of this is there's a candle making company in Tampa, Florida that I went to about this time last year. And it's a. It's a husband wife duo. The husband is really, really good at the customer service. Explaining the different types of Processes of making candles and the different smells and the like. He's very personable. The wife is the opposite. She likes the bookkeeping. She does the online social stuff. She does the, you know, the behind the scenes stuff that makes, that's the glue for the business. So, Paul, I think Robert did a good job tactically speaking how to buy this business. But I want you to look more introspectively in thinking about what do I really enjoy about this idea of a small independent repair shop. And once you understand what you enjoy most about it, what you're most excited about, it's time to find people that can sort of, sort of, you know, bode well to your weaknesses there and really kind of buoy you up if it's, maybe you're not that personable and you don't want to do the, the hey man, your car is ready. You just want to turn a wrench all day, right? So like there's a lot of different things that you need to be cognizant of before you go and you buy something like this. So our next question comes from Charles Q. Charles says, I love the creative and people side of my business, but the numbers drain me. Every time I sit down to do bookkeeping or analyze cash flow, it feels overwhelming. So I, I just end up putting it off. How do you stay financially organized without killing your creativity? Should I outsource the financial side completely or is there a basic system that every entrepreneur should understand no matter what? You know, Charles, let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. It's like 20 years old. They've got AI it's bookkeeping, it's cash flow, it's invoicing and it's affordable. Not an ad for Intuit, but I've been using Intuit now for the last half decade. Super, super easy, super, super reliable. I mean, every accountant that we've worked with and every bookkeeper also can speak QuickBooks. So I highly recommend doing that. But yeah, hire a bookkeeper. There's nothing wrong with that. It's part of the cost business is having someone there that can handle the things that you don't like to do. Because think about it, you keep putting off the cash flow, bookkeeping stuff. But let's say someone else was a part time bookkeeper and did that for you. Now you can focus 100% of your time on being creative. Just think about it like this. If you're over here spending, you know, an extra couple thousand dollars a month to hire a part time bookkeeper, but because you're able to focus 100% of your time on the creativity and the people side of your business. Just think about all the extra money you're gonna make by not having to feel this burden of bookkeeping or the financials or the numbers that's, you know, kind of taking you away from your vision of what you're really, really good at, which is being creative and, and you know, having that customer service side of the business. Like the more you'll make more money having a bookkeeper than not having one.

Robert Croke (25:34)

Yeah, I think you really killed it in the prior question, Austin, and that is higher to your weaknesses. So many people try to wear every hats early on in their business, sometimes well into a mature business and you can't do that. And this question, Charles, is exactly me. I don't like dealing with the day to day bookkeeping and the invoicing and all that. So I've always hired it away. And I make so much more money because I have someone holding down the fort every day on taxes, income, people that owe us money, all of the above. So I love the breakdown Austin gave. And just make sure you're always hiring to your weaknesses because. Because too many small business owners hire someone that's like minded like them and you have to have different skill sets to make it all work.

Austin Hankowitz (26:18)

Now our final question comes from Patricia. Patricia says, I'm realizing one of the hardest parts of being a business owner is that every single decision, big or small, lands on me. Even simple things start to feel heavy over time. How does successful business owners manage decision fatigue? Are there tools, routines or delegation strategies that actually work? Work to lighten the mental load without losing control of the business. Robert, I'll let you kick this one off.

Robert Croke (26:44)

This is a tough one because we all get in that situation. And earlier on in my career, I always felt I needed to own everything and that was a mistake. For many decades, I would own a hundred percent of every company because I wanted to be the boss and I didn't want to play well with others. And I learned from experience. I love having partners. Austin and I have been partners now for three years and I love it because he does what he does well, I do what I do well and everyone wins. So I think in the interim what you could do is look for mentors, whether they're paid or free. Find people that are in your world that can help you with the decisions, help you figure out what's next and have someone to bounce ideas off of like we do with our partners, because you want to make sure you're always, always progressing well, but not leaving all of the burden on yourself, because that's really hard to do, especially during emotional times when growing a business.

Austin Hankowitz (27:40)

So, Robert, do you have a sort of delegation strategy or framework that you've adopted over the years to help you understand and be better at just not having to make so many decisions?

Robert Croke (27:49)

I don't really have a delegation strategy. I would just say it's more of a mindset. I don't micromanage. I look at it this way. I would rather hire someone that can do a job 70% as well as I can. And then if I have to hire a second person to help them, I'm going to get the throughput that I need to make sure everything gets done. Because too many business owners can't scale because they have to have their hands in every detail of the business and do everything. You know, it's the old saying, if you want something done right, do it yourself. The problem with that is if you're a control freak and you can't delegate, you can't scale either because there's only so many hours in a day. And that is why, for me, it's higher. Well, higher to your weaknesses. And make sure to not micromanage and let people learn along the way.

Austin Hankowitz (28:36)

I really like that. I think as it relates to Patricia's question, I think Patricia just needs to do a better job of hiring people that she works with. Right. Like, you should interview several times and make sure you're incredibly aligned on where you think the business is going. They're on the same team with you. You guys are trending in the right direction. Like I guess I'm saying is I feel like Patricia would not feel like she has to make every big or small decision if she had an employee or a business partner or somebody on her team that was 100% aligned with where she believes the business is going. Right. I can imagine Patricia hiring some sort of director of operations. Right. And this director of operations and her are lined up 100% on their goals. The KPIs, the different types of, of, you know, everything they want to achieve, how it's going to get there, what they're going to do, and then once you're aligned on those things. Cool. Like, I trust you as my director of operations to make the right decisions to ensure we end up at this right place. And if we don't end up at the right place, well, hey, you're not my director of operations anymore. I did a bad job hiring. I have to go do a better job now hiring someone that is going to be aligned with where we're heading as a business. And so Patricia, I don't have like tools, resources or like delegation strategies beyond just saying like, hey day, hire someone that's aligned 100% and you will know when you meet them and, and you will know like what that begins to shape up as. But something else that, I mean, truly helped me a lot when it came to making decisions was I would write down on a piece of paper the three big decisions that day that I needed to make. Like three big things I need to figure out for the day and then brain dump everything else. So I have it written down but I don't have to like act upon it right now, now, because I agree. Decision fatigue is so real. Making so many decisions every single day is really, really hard, especially if you're an entrepreneur. It just, it's very taxing. So maybe narrowing it down to just three, four, five big decisions and everything else could get delegated to somebody else. I think that could be a cool place to start.

Robert Croke (30:41)

I really like that. And that's probably one of the reasons why I have, for every company I own, I no longer own anything 100% myself. Because you can hire the best employees in the world, but if they don't have skin in the game, you're not going to get the same output that you give to the company. And that is why now every company I have, I think, except for Silly Bands, I have partners and it could be small partners. You might give 5% of your company over a two or three year period of equity to someone to be that operational partner to take some of the load off of you. So there's a lot of ways to do that this and always use ChatGPT as your friend because you can really train it well to help you with some of these decisions. What do other people do and how do people like myself and Austin overcome these adversities along the way?

Austin Hankowitz (31:29)

Everybody, thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of the Rich Habits Radar, a new Friday episode of the Rich Habits podcast where we come at you with the biggest headlines in happenings impacting you and your money. If you learned something this episode, if you enjoy these episodes, if anything positive, please consider leaving us a five star review on Spotify, sharing the episode with a friend and subscribing to the Rich Habits newsletter link in the show notes below for that. And as always, you know these episodes are about three or four months old, so we're still trying to get the kinks out. So all feedback on the structure, the content, everything, please share it in the comment section below here on Spotify. As you probably know, we get back to every single comment that you guys drop in the comment section on Spotify because we're grateful to get your feedback and and yeah, thanks for tuning in. This has been a fun one.

Robert Croke (32:18)

Robert yeah, and don't forget about that seven day free trial. You can go to the link in the show notes. It is awesome. It gets you full access to the Rich Habits Network for seven days free of charge. You can kick the tires, check out a private live where we do all these cool things and investments without a penny out of your pocket. And if you like it, we'd love for you to stick around. So make sure to check that out as well.

Austin Hankowitz (32:40)

Thanks everyone and we'll see you on Monday. Sam.