Sunday Drive - 06/12/2022 Edition

👋🏻 Hello friends,

Greetings from Saratoga Springs!

Take it easy and enjoy this week's leisurely Sunday Drive around the internet.

Vibin'‌

The vibe of the week is from my high school days - Ridin' the Storm Out by REO Speedwagon. Originally released in 1973 at a time of great societal and economic turmoil (sound familiar?), this version of the song (the one most played on the radio) was performed live in Denver, CO in 1981, near the end of that tumultuous period. Given that the world today seems to move faster than ever, perhaps the current storm is nearing an end.🤞🏼

Quote of the Week‌

"Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Chart(s) of the Week‌

On the one hand...

Some forecasters have predicted a repeat of the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession of 2008-09. With the recent rise in interest rates, the chart below would suggest that home prices in the US are poised to decline as mortgage capacity is diminished.

On the other hand...

However, there is a lot of money looking for an effective inflation hedge, and as this chart shows, more and more cash buyers have come into the market leading one to perhaps think, "not so fast".

Interesting Drive-By's

🤥  Revoking job offers is an increasingly common cost cutting strategy - This one hits very close to home for our family. In the fall of her senior year of college (2019), our daughter was offered a job with a major financial services firm. She was slated to start shortly after her graduation the following spring (2020). Fortunately, despite her scheduled start date being in the depths of the COVID pandemic, they honored their offer and she began - remotely at the time - what has become a very promising career in the field of wealth management. In a previous Sunday Drive, I wrote about the increasing importance of trust in the world we are living in. I believe this trend of revoking job offers will only serve to accelerate the decline in trust of corporations in general, leading more and more people to seek self-employment as their only "safe" career path.

📈   More "retirees" are starting new businesses - Tracking entrepreneurial activity across two decades, various geographies, and demographic groups, focused on the crucial first year of business is the subject of this article. The 55- to 64-year-old age group accounted for 26% of new entrepreneurs in 2017, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. That’s a significant increase over the 15% figure from 1996. Research by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows the same age group has the highest rate of business startup activity globally over the past decade.

💰  The Great Resignation is creating the next generation of entrepreneurs -  This article explores why millions of people are ditching traditional employment to bet on themselves.

💡  Airbnb and the abstraction of location - In what it calls "the biggest change in a decade," the home-sharing company, Airbnb launched a new way to book space. Instead of starting your journey by selecting a location, Airbnb now lets you pick a "category." The category represents the type of experience you're looking for — based on a general vibe, a specific activity, or a specific purpose.

What I'm Working On

On Saturday, we were blessed with a gorgeous sunny day here in Saratoga Springs. My wife and I enjoyed the beautiful and patriotic parade held to celebrate Flag 🇺🇸 Day (Flag Day is actually this Tuesday, June 14th but they held the parade on the weekend so more folks could attend). It was wonderful to see a community come together to celebrate the symbol of our country in the midst of such political strife and division.

I've been busy preparing for the launch of the new website for New Lantern Advisors which will be much more robust and content-rich than the existing prototype site that I built myself. The new website will be the centerpiece of the formal marketing initiative that will be begin in the second half of the year.

Once that launch is completed, I plan to roll out an educational webinar to introduce the Built to be Boring™ portfolio, the same model portfolio that is the backbone of my advisory client portfolios. My hope is that some time in the fall, I'll be ready to license the model to individual investors and fellow advisors as they seek to generate reliable, cost effective and tax-efficient retirement income.

If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em at me.

‌I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...

-Mike‌

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