This is WHY YOU FEEL POOR!

A couple things we've always had in this country have been people that want to keep up with the Joneses and increasingly see their neighbors with brand new cars and brand new houses and want to try to continue to obtain the same, even though they might not have the income to do so. Maybe even their neighbors don't even have the income to do so. It could be all financed to the hilt and those guys could be extremely broke. And another thing that we've always had is a wealth gap between the rich and the poor, which I'm sure most of us have noticed by now is getting worse. Well, since millennials are the largest generation in history, which is my generation, we are now facing a wealth gap of our own between rich millennials and millennials who are not doing so well. And believe it or not, a lot of the wealth that millennials have been obtaining is inherited wealth from their rich baby boomer parents. There's a big wealth transfer going on right now. Now you can also argue that that's really nothing new either and that this is something that's always happened, which is true, but it's kind of unique right now considering the sheer amount of wealth that is being transferred right now, guys. Right now, just as a whole, millennials only have less than 30% of all the wealth that's out there. So even though we're the largest generation, we have less than 30% of the wealth, which is not too good. But some millennials that are doing really well for themselves have maybe inherited a lot of money or started a really successful business. Think like Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook or something like that. The top 10% of millennials are actually richer than baby boomers were at our age. So in some ways, the millennials that are doing really well are a showcase for just how much wealth can be obtained under the right circumstances in this economy. Now one problem that millennials have faced since the beginning of our working careers that I mentioned before here on the channel is basically when all of us got released into the wild and old enough to get a decent job, that's when the 2008 financial crash hit. And that was a devastating blow to the economy, which made it very hard to even get a Mickey Mouse job. You couldn't really get hired anywhere for anything serious and make a decent amount of money back then unless you were just lucky. This has caused millennials to go through all sorts of hardships along the way, like having a lower level of home ownership than their baby boomer parents, larger debts in general, spending too much, having student loan debt, things like that, as well as unstable jobs and lower wages, guys. That is contributing massively to this wealth gap between well-to-do millennials and ones who are not doing so well. But because there are so many rich baby boomers out there that are going to be passing down wealth to their millennial children, it's estimated that there's between 70 and 90 trillion dollars of wealth that's going to be passed down to millennials over the next 20 years, guys, which is the greatest wealth transfer in world history. We've never seen anything like this before. Think about the national debt, right? Is that 35 trillion right now? Well, this number soars past that by like 3x. With all the wealth that's inherited by millennials, it could be enough to pay off the national debt three times over. That's how much money it is. It's an insane amount of cash. And the wealth gets even more concentrated for the richest of baby boomers, because the baby boomers that have $5 million or more of wealth account for half of that wealth transfer that's going to take place. So it is a lot of money coming from a very relatively small group of people. Right now, believe it or not, the average age of a billionaire is 69 years old. And that's why this wealth transfer has already begun. And over the next 20 years, you're just going to see people in my age group obtain an obscene amount of money, guys. But the problem is, is that millennials that are doing okay or not as good as those that are going to be obtaining this huge inheritance want to try to keep up with the Joneses, right? They see them jet setting, going on yachts, taking these luxurious vacations, doing all sorts of things like that and want to keep up, even though they might not have the finances to do so. Even well-off millennials, which they consider anybody, any millennial has $250,000 to $1 million in net worth. Those millennials are considered well-to-do. 30% of people in that category have admitted to sometimes buying items they cannot afford to impress others. And also 41% of those affluent millennials admit to funding their lifestyles with credit cards or loans versus only 28% of Gen Xers and 6% of baby boomers doing the same. It's not just Gen Z that's doom spending and has a spending problem. It's also millennials. But the one fundamental thing that this is going to change, guys, is over the past four decades or so, almost all of the millionaires and billionaires created in America have been self-made, okay? About 88% of them, in fact, have been historically self-made. That is a large chunk of self-made billionaires and millionaires. But that's no longer going to be the case pretty soon because of all this inheritance coming down the pipeline. In fact, there was a study by UBS last year showing that all of the newly minted billionaires last year who inherited their fortunes actually racked up more wealth than the self-made billionaires for the first time in about nine years. And all the billionaires under the age 30 on the Forbes latest billionaires list inherited their wealth for the first time in 15 years. So anybody who's under 30 right now who just became a billionaire did not earn that money. They received it as an inheritance. But knowing these statistics now makes me wonder if all of these new millionaires and billionaires, especially the ones who inherited their wealth, are going to be buying up all the real estate. Are they going to be starting businesses and investing anything into the economy in order to help that side of things? But one thing that worries me the most is how much other millennials who are not doing as well and seeing this wealth transfer are going to handle it emotionally and psychologically. And if they're just going to continue doom spending and trying to keep up with the Joneses or if they're just going to ignore all of that and try to get ahead for themselves. Because, you know, the problem is now, guys, with social media, people see things and they want it to, you know, and unfortunately, that's human nature. It really makes me wonder how people are going to handle this. One thing I like to talk about here on the channel is all the lies that we're constantly being told by the media and the government and the Fed. But today I want to focus on a few different types of lies showing you how some things are just hidden and right in front of our eyes. And some people are aware of these things and some people aren't. And the first thing I want to bring to your attention, one of my viewers sent me an email because he sold his grandfather's house. The house sold for $160,000 and they ended up selling it to somebody who ended up being a flipper and they wanted to flip the house like everybody else wants to now. Everybody wants to flip the house and make a fortune, right? I don't know if they knew it was a flipper or not. But then he sent me the listing of the house from when he sold it and the new listing from the flipper. And here's the problem, guys. When you come across listings like this, you're unaware that this was a flip or what's the history of the house because they use little conniving tricks when they input the property into the MLS to make it look like a brand new house that's never hit the market before. It doesn't have any sold history, doesn't have any tax history or anything like that. Well, how is that possible? How do they do that? Well, they just cheat. They fake the listing. They put in the wrong information because when you look at the original listing of this house, you can see the address is 11 Longwood Drive, Unit 72, Whiting, New Jersey, right? And then you can see right there the past sold history of the house and all of that stuff, right? But when you look at the new listing of the house that's on the market right now, clearly they're asking almost double for the house at $285,000. What do you notice about the address? It's a little bit different. Instead of just putting 11 Longwood Drive, they put 11A Longwood Drive, okay? And just that one little difference that putting that A after the first number in the address is enough to trick the MLS system into thinking that this is a different property than it really is. So sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't because also MLS is like to match up folio numbers for different properties to make sure that they know which property is being inputted in the MLS. But sometimes the system can be fooled like this and appear as a brand new listing. Homebuyers who don't know any better are out there looking at these houses and thinking, oh wow, this house hasn't hit the market before. We don't even know when the last time this house sold at the surface glance, okay? After just looking at it for a minute on Zillow, you think that. But if you actually do your own due diligence and look up just the address itself and try to find the past listing, you'll quickly realize that this house was recently sold to a flipper for $160,000 and it's probably worth nowhere near what the flipper's actually asking. This is something that's constantly been hidden all the time, guys. So what you need to do when you're looking at a house and you see that there's no price history and no tax history on a website like Zillow or Redfin, just Google the address at the very minimum and try to find the same listing on those websites or a different website without those letters next to the property address because chances are that part of it is just a scam and they're trying to make it look like a new listing when it really isn't. For those of you who are wondering where I'm at, I'm up in Palm Coast for a few days so you're going to see some different content over the next few days. Now here's another thing that's being hidden right in front of our faces is this whole agenda with electric cars, guys. And it's not really just about electric cars, it's about electricity in general. But obviously there's been a big push for people to drive electric cars. And here's the problem. A lot of people that work on the electric grid and the infrastructure, electricians have written me and they tell me, hey Michael, you know, the grid is not set up for all of this extra electricity that we're going to need in order to power all these electric cars. We're nowhere near close to that. Well there was a new story today that came out that kind of confirms that. We keep hearing about how inflation is going down and that nothing to worry about, the feds got it all under control. Well, one thing that's not going down are people's electric bills. In fact, it's been going up faster than the pace of inflation. So people already have to worry about if they can afford food. And now people are going to have to start worrying about if they can afford their electric bill. Now, ironically enough, the land of Teslas where everybody seems to be driving a Tesla over in California is feeling the squeeze the most with their electric bills because their customers recently got a 13% increase in their PG&E rates in January. But the reality is electricity prices are up across the board nationwide. The average is 3.6%, but in some places it could be higher. Like in California, for example, even here in Florida, we got a notice at the end of last year saying that our FPL bills were going to be going up too. So what's behind all these increases in the power bills? Well, upgrading the power grid. In fact, a lot of the power grids are undergoing multi-billion dollar replacements right now. And they're also trying to make the power grids more resilient to natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, things like that. And so these power companies are saying there's been a massive uptick in the demand for electricity over the past few years. So these upgrades are 100% necessary. They say that the demand for electricity will be about 5% more in 2028 than it was in 2023 and nearly double the increase that power companies were expecting only just a year ago. So they're basically scrambling to upgrade the power grids and basically they can't do it fast enough. So they have to charge more to try to encourage people to use less electricity, which is kind of ironic. Which brings me back to the electric car point here is because there's been a huge push and even financial incentives from our government to go ahead and buy an electric car. They give you a big tax credit for buying one and they say it's cheaper to drive than a gas car and all of that. But the electric bill's going up. So how much longer is that actually going to be true? And they say that even though they're expecting a 5% increase over the next couple of years, there's a high probability that that is a large underestimate. It might actually be a lot more than that. And guess who gets to pay for upgrading the electric grid? Well you do as a paying electric customer. They have to raise your rates for that also in order to have the money and the employees to pay for upgrading all that infrastructure. If you take a look at this chart here, it shows you the CPI and you can see that electricity is actually even outpacing food since 2021. You see how much the inflation has risen on these items, but electricity has outpaced everything guys. So literally all the stuff we need, like I keep saying, is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Gas unaffordable, electricity unaffordable, food unaffordable, a place to live unaffordable. So maybe some of these people that have been talking about the whole you'll own nothing and be happy, maybe they're right. Now they do say here that once the grid has been fully upgraded that they can potentially lower everybody's bill by spreading the cost over more people's bill over the long term, which can eventually lower the bill. But I don't see that happening because I see the demand for electricity just continuing to go up, especially if they keep pushing electric cars as the new standard moving forward. You don't have that many people that have an electric car right now. And just think about all the extra demand on electricity, how much more that's going to push the grid into the future if everybody were driving an electric car, guys. I mean, it's not sustainable. It's not even just electric cars either. They're trying to make it so that in certain places, I think in New York City, that you're not allowed to use gas powered appliances and stuff like that anymore, especially when you're remodeling or building a brand new place. You can only install electric appliances moving forward, stuff like that. I think California does stuff like that, too. And guess what? That just puts more and more demand on the power grid. Check this out. Palm Coast's second oldest tree. I have no idea how they know that, but this thing is pretty massive. So just like everything else that has shot up in price, they're saying, oh, eventually it's going to go down, but it's not going to go down by that much. We just talked about California, for example. They saw the biggest increase at a 13% jump in their rates at the beginning of this year, right? Well, PG&E over there in California is predicting that by 2026, their electric bills will go down by 2.8% once some of their grid has been upgraded. Like okay, guys, it went up by 13%, but now it's going to go down by 2.8%. Who is that helping? It doesn't help anyone. It's still at least 10% more expensive than it was last year. And as inflation continues to get worse, it's probably going to be even more than that. They talked to one lady over there who lives just in a two-bedroom apartment, nothing fancy, not a huge house or anything like that. And a year ago, she was paying $240 a month, which is already really high for just a two-bedroom apartment. Now she's paying 330, guys. Put that into perspective. I have a three-bedroom condo, okay, three-bedroom, three-bathroom. It's a pretty big place. And my electric bill is about $215, $230 a month. One of the really hot months when I use the AC a lot, that's like the number one driver of the electric bill at my place. And it's still lower than this lady's bill than it was a year ago. That's a 38% increase in her bill. So they like to say things like, oh, it only went up 13% when in fact, in the real world, when people see the real increases, it might have gone up a lot more than that. So those of you guys see all these hidden lies that are right in front of our face, they lie to us with listings on the MLS. They lie to us about the economic forecast and the economic data. They lie to us promising that electric bills are going to go down in the future, but we've got to raise it by a lot right now in order for that to happen. I'm sure a lot of you guys don't actually believe all this stuff, but I like to point it out because in case some people are thinking that this stuff is actually true and is actually going to help them in some way, I want to make sure that they're aware of it, that none of this is designed to help you. Everything today is basically a scam. It's like you literally have almost no companies out there or businesses trying to help their customers in any way anymore. Everybody's just trying to extract the maximum amount of value and money out of your wallet. That's it. That seems to be the sole goal. Now, obviously, they have to upgrade electric infrastructures at some point in order to keep up with the increased demand, but the timing just couldn't be worse, right? At a time when everything costs more than ever, that's when they're doing this. That's the funny thing you have to think about. Out of all the times they could be doing this, they're doing it now, now that life is unaffordable. You know what else is being hidden? Hidden is the amount of realtors that are leaving the National Association of Realtors, which means that they're basically quitting and giving up their licenses because they're not making money, okay? Andrew sent me this story, how NAR is starting to hide this data, guys. It's crazy because previously, the NAR had membership reports published all the way back to the 1970s on their website, which has conveniently recently been deleted. Well, why is that? Why are they trying to hide that? Well, maybe because they don't want people to know how many real estate agents are quitting the business after the NAR settlement, or a way to hide how bad the housing market's actually doing. That could be another reason. It doesn't really matter the reason. It's just another lie, another thing being hidden, so that way people don't see what's really going on. So this woman that was investigating this, trying to figure out what happened to all of these reports that used to go back to the 1970s, she contacted the National Association of Realtors, and they told her, well, if you want that information moving forward, you're going to have to contact your local association individually, and they'll give you that response. Like, huh? I mean, there's like hundreds, maybe even thousands of local realtor boards, guys. It's just insane how many of them that there are, and now they want you to go to them individually to find this data. Well, why won't they just share it on their own? They were sharing it for 40 years, and now all of a sudden it's being held private? And if you guys take a look at this chart that goes all the way back to at least the year 2000, you can see the NAR membership has been going down as of the last year and a half or so, and they've lost about 32,000 members in the last 12 months. That's a lot of people quitting, but still not nearly enough. If you look all the way back to the 2008 market crash, when there was about 1.4 million Realtors, it got all the way down to a million, guys, so the numbers went down by 400,000. You had a lot of people quitting over that time frame, and I think that the timing of this, just like everything else, is very convenient, and they're starting to hide this data so that way people don't realize how many Realtors are quitting, which can be a sign of trouble in the housing market. Maybe it means things aren't going as well as we're being told. So, you know, it's just one thing after another with all these people, and I'm happy to point out all of these lies and deceiving behavior here on the channel, so at least the small percentage of the population that watches my videos knows about it, and they can share it with other people, let people know what's going on. So just keep your eyes open out there, and if you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to the channel, and if you don't want to wait for my next video to come out, check out this one on the screen right over here, and I'll see you in the next one.