614: 75-Cent Gas, Permanent Inflation, and Your Biggest Expense

Keith Weinhold explains why inflation has become a permanent part of the post–World War II economy and what that shift means for today's financial system. 

He breaks down economist Dr. Mark Skousen's five structural reasons behind never-ending inflation and ties them to the hollowing out of the middle class and the "last generation to live normally" concept. 

Keith then introduces opportunity cost as the biggest financial expense most people overlook and illustrates how leveraging low-cost, long-term debt to buy productive real assets can turn inflation into an advantage. 

He closes by outlining a practical hierarchy for which debts to eliminate first and which to keep as tools for long-term wealth building.

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Complete episode transcript:

Keith Weinhold  0:01  

Welcome to GRE. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. In less than 40 years, America has gone from 75% gasoline to permanent inflation. Then learn about the biggest financial expense you will ever have in your life. It's not taxes, housing, interest charges, inflation, children, or healthcare. Most people have never heard of it today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Homebuyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties. It's an executive coach. For nine years now. Their CEO Terry Kerr and his COO Pat Nix have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one-on-one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to DanielThomashHind.com. H-I-N-D. That's DanielThomashHind.com, and sign up before spots fill.

Keith Weinhold  1:41  

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Speaker 1  2:14  

You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world, this is Get Rich Education.

Keith Weinhold  2:31  

Welcome to GRE from Bavaria, Germany, to Batavia, New York, and across 188 world nations. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. In the 19 the 1988 movie Die Hard, there's a California gas station sign in the background that's visible. You can see it there. The gas price on this sign is a jaw dropper. Unleaded 77.9 cents per gallon, regular 70-4.9 cents per gallon. That now looks like it belongs in a museum next to rotary phones and blockbuster video cards. Yes, California gas for 75 cents, and the movie Die Hard. It had all these actors from yesteryear, like Bruce Willis and Reginald Vel Johnson. Yet you, depending on your age, you might remember 1988. It's not like ancient history. Now we all know that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, like Milton Friedman said, but is there more to this? Is there more than the Fed targeting 2% inflation, just like it says on their website? Oh, there sure is. And by the way, with a little research, it looks like California Gas averaged 95 cents in 1988, not 75 like it shows in Die Hard, but in any case, the point is still there. And today, inflation keeps running hot. Four years ago, the pandemic made CPI inflation peak at 9.1 percent. Today, the hangover effects of tariffs push it up, and the Iran war are turning up the heat even more, with the latest reading above 4% Inflation is running at more than double what the Fed wants. You can even make the case now that inflation is out of control. But here's the thing: inflation has exceeded that 2% target for 60-three consecutive months now. I mean, think about what that means. My gosh, just imagine having an important target that affects every American and missing it 60-three times in a row. That's kind of what's happening now, and they're. Going to keep missing it. So this streak of inflation above 2% started back in March of 2021 during the pandemic hangover, and it is still going strong after 63 months. Nobody knows where this is going to end. Most Americans get crushed by rising prices because their wages don't keep up, and you know collectively they sort of think we are concerned, but then they mostly keep doing the same thing while their lifestyle quietly shrinks. So consumers despise inflation. Everyday investors are lukewarm about inflation, and leverage real estate investors are smiling like they found a 20-dollar bill in last winter's coat. Leverage real estate investors are pretty ecstatic about inflation. Now the history gets super interesting.

Keith Weinhold  5:59  

Okay, how did we get into this, where we just always seem to have inflation? So learn the history, and then I'll tie it back to how it affects you as an investor. Because before World War II, inflation behaved differently. The old pre-1945 pattern was that we had inflation during wars and booms. We had deflation after panics and depressions. So therefore, the result was that over long stretches, price levels often just moved sideways. We used to have recessions more often back 80 plus years ago than we do now. So therefore, you just had these price levels move sideways because a recession even prompted deflation, actually a strengthening of purchasing power. But then after World War II, inflation basically went permanently positive. I mean, yeah, permanently positive, where inflation is just always turned on with very few exceptions to that. In wartime, now we have inflation. In peacetime, now we have inflation. During the Super Bowl, now we have inflation. It is inflation, no matter what is going on. Right then, so what changed? Prominent economist and GRE podcast guest here, Dr. Mark Skousen. He has cited five major reasons that inflation became a permanent fixture from 1945 until today. And Mark Skousen was here on the show with us almost exactly two years ago because he's also the founder of a great event called Freedom Fest that Nareesh and I broadcast a show from, the five reasons that Scowson cites for never-ending inflation are first, never-ending wars. Now this doesn't only mean formally declared boots on the ground wars where tanks are rolling, never-ending wars. It means this permanent state of global military readiness that we have today, where we have overseas bases, defense contractors, right with the military-industrial complex. We have NATO commitments.

Keith Weinhold  8:17  

We have anti-terror operations, naval patrols, intelligence agencies, and all this enormous machinery that's required to keep America as the world's security backstop. Well, all that costs an awful lot of money, and when government wants more money than it collects, it has a favorite trick: just create more dollars and create them out of nothing. I mean, it's like ordering another round of drinks for the table and then putting it on the unborn grandchildren's tab. The second reason for the never-ending inflation is the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve and how that's changed over time because the Fed they were originally supposed to defend the dollar, defend the gold standard, and act as lender of last resort. Today it mostly just does the last one. It acts as the lender of last resort, and it's really not even last resort. I mean, she shit seems to patch any significant hole in the economy by creating more dollars and then pumping them into the system. When markets wobble, banks panic, or politicians overspend, or the economy catches any kind of cold, you know, the Fed often just shows up with this fire hose of liquidity. Now, sometimes that's necessary, but either way, it means more currency creation. So, the Fed it began as this sort of sober hallway monitor, but now they're often the responsible party that needs monitoring. But no. No one is going to stand up and do it because no one in power wants austerity under their watch because that is extremely unpopular. The third reason for permanent inflation is the Bretton Woods Agreement. You've probably heard of this, but let me summarize what it briefly means. Okay, Bretton Woods was the 1944 deal that basically created the post-World War II global monetary system? It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency. If you remember anything from Bretton Woods, just remember that it did that. It made the U.S. dollar the world's reserve currency, and the dollar was pegged to gold at $35 per ounce.

Keith Weinhold  13:29  

And finally, the fifth reason for never-ending inflation post World War II is Keynesian economics. I mean, you probably at least heard the term before. It's been thrown around here from time to time. Named after John Maynard Keynes, K E Y N E S. And before I go on, I invested in real estate for a long time before I learned all this stuff. Probably close to a decade of investing first. So I taught myself this material, Keynesian economics. That's the belief that demand is what drives economic output and employment. So, if you only remember one thing about Keynesian economics, it's that you need demand, and it stokes demand. It says demand drives everything, and what I mean by that is the spending, spending from households, corporations, and government. So, in plain English, when private demand weakens, the government should step in and spend. That's what Keynesian economics says. Well, that means deficits, borrowing, stimulus, support, programs, relief, rescue packages, emergency measures, and see what happens is that temporary measures somehow become permanent measures wearing a fake mustache. Remember, even Nixon said removal from the gold standard is temporary. Well, that was now 50. 55 years ago, in theory, the government runs deficits in bad times and then tightens up in good times. But that doesn't really happen because, in practice, government often runs deficits in bad times and good times, war times, peace times, election years, non-election years, leap years, all the time running deficits, spending more than we take in, and when deficits become normal, well, then currency creation has got to follow. That's the consequence. Well, these five forces that I told you about for never-ending inflation, the reasons that I just shared with you-they are now structurally embedded. They are not going away.

Keith Weinhold  19:03  

I mean, there is even political resistance to deflation in this system. Investors benefit the most when they own one thing: real assets tied to long-term debt. You probably knew that I was going to say that because if the dollar is designed to slowly melt. You don't want to be the one holding the ice cube. You want to own the freezer. That's the control that you have. The first half of the year recently ended. It's time for our asset class rundown. From the midpoint of last year to the midpoint of this year, single-family home values are up only about one and a half percent. That's the average of Case-Shiller and FHFA. Apartment building values are down 1% in the past year. When it comes to rents per Zillow, single-family home rents are up 2.8% in the past year to an all-time record of almost 20-$300 Apartment rents are up just. 1.3% nationally. Sunbelt Apartments were the weak spot. Apartments.com said the South was down seven tenths of 1% year over year, and the mountain region down one and a half percent. With San Antonio, Denver, Austin, and Phoenix among the weaker markets, that's due to oversupply in those areas. 30-year mortgage rates down from 6.8 to 6.6% The S S&P 500 up 21 percent on AI optimism, despite a war in Iran. Though down in past months for the year, gold is still up 21 percent, silver soared 63 percent, Bitcoin down 45 percent. I mean, speculative digital assets have really gotten a cold shoulder. Oil up 4% although it went on a wild ride, and CPI inflation reheated to 4.2% That's our asset class rundown.

Speaker 2  22:59  

This is our rich dad poor dad author Robert Kiyosaki. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.

Keith Weinhold  23:17  

Welcome back to Get Rich Education. I'm your host Keith Weinhold. I want you to listen to something along with me, and then I'll come back to comment. This is from the parallel truth. It's called the last generation to live normally, and it's less than two minutes in length.

Speaker 2  23:32  

We have to talk about something that sounds dramatic, but it is becoming true. Your parents may have been the last generation to live a normal life-not an easy life, not a perfect life, but a life where the basic deal still made sense. You could get a stable job, you could buy a house, you could raise children, you could save some money, you could retire one day. And even if life was hard, most people still believed that if they worked honestly, their future would slowly get better. But look at what happened to your generation. You work more, but own less. You study more, but feel less secure. You have more technology than any generation in history, but less peace, less time, and less confidence about the future. Your parents were told, "Work hard, and you will build a life. But you are being told that, "Work hard, and maybe you can afford rent. And the most disturbing part is that this did not happen overnight. It happened slowly. First, housing became an investment instead of a basic need. Then, education became a debt trap. Then, healthcare became too expensive. Then, stable jobs disappeared. Then, everything became a subscription: your house, your car, your software, your entertainment, even your future. Everything slowly became something you rent but never truly own. And while ordinary people were falling behind, the economy kept looking strong on paper. The stock market went up, billionaires got richer, companies made record profits. Politicians kept saying that everything was fine, but if everything is fine, why does an entire generation feel like it is drowning? The truth is, your parents did not live through normal history. They lived through a rare window where ordinary people. People were allowed to share in the wealth of the system, but that window is now closing. The old promise was simple: work hard, buy a home, raise a family, retire with dignity. The new promise is different: work forever, rent everything, delay children, carry debt, and call it freedom. So maybe young people are not lazy. Maybe they are just the first generation honest enough to admit that the old deal is dead. Your parents were not lucky because life was easy. They were lucky because they were the last ones who got the deal before it was taken away.

Keith Weinhold  25:27  

Yeah, there it is-the last generation to live normally. That's really a fresh slant on the hollowing out of the middle class. The rules have changed. Inflation is entrenched. Now you know why. Back in 2020, the pandemic accelerated that effect, and yet it's just unbelievable to me that people think working hard and saving money is enough to get you the lifestyle that you desire. Now I am not against hard work, it's the fact that people think that that's all that it takes. Before we hit the permanent inflation era, it might have made sense for you to say, save your money, pay all cash for a cheap fixer-upper property, and work hard for years to fix it up yourself. Oh, and then you could own a modest home debt-free. Today, even if you could do that, why would you? Instead, you can just prudently finance your way through life. You could have instead borrowed for two or three already renovated properties and let debt, inflation, and perhaps even tenants do the work for you. Above all, do the right thing before you do things right. That's what I like to say. Well, the way you get wealthy is by owning a lot of assets, not by grinding in the salt mines to pay off your debt. Those that are debt free are often asset poor. The biggest financial expense that you will ever have in your life. Do you know what it is? It is not taxes or interest charges. It's not even inflation or housing or healthcare or having children, most people have never heard of it. You probably have, but most people have never heard of this biggest financial expense you'll ever have, and they certainly don't know how to avoid it.

Keith Weinhold  27:34  

Say that you're 35 years old and you put 100k under a mattress for 30 years until you're 60- years old. Instead, if that would have been invested at a 12% annual return, do you know how much that would have grown to? That would have grown to $2.996 million All right, basically 3 million bucks, a 30x increase. Therefore, it would be a 2.9 million dollar mistake to save money, and what this means is that the biggest expense you'll ever pay in your life is called opportunity cost. Yeah, opportunity cost is life's biggest expense. It's the return that was foregone when you chose one option over another. So opportunity cost is not what you spend; it's what your money could have become had you put it somewhere more productive. All right, now that was a pretty extreme example of 100k under a mattress. As a listener to this show, you are probably more savvy than a person that would save big lumps of money for close to zero return. Let me give you a better example of how when you pay all cash for something, you've usually just made your future self poorer. A friend of mine heard the episode last year where I talked about buying a new car for myself, a BMW X3 SUV. As it is, you probably remember that episode. Though I could have paid all cash for the car, I put the minimum down payment in there and then financed as much as I could because of a favorable 4% interest rate that I got on a car loan. Well, my friend Jesse heard that episode. This influenced him. So what he did is he bought a Subaru for his wife. Although he had planned to pay all cash and could have paid all cash for the car, Jesse got financing, and he did better than me. He got just a 1% interest rate somehow. Wow! It was actually nine tenths of 1% but let's just call it 1% What a deal! Instead of paying all cash for the car, he held on to that chunk of money. Instead of tying it up in a depreciating asset, he is financing it all. Now I don't. How much the Subaru costs, but let's just say it was 50k to keep the numbers simple. Well, look, if Jesse feels like he can get a 10% return over time by investing his money instead of sinking it into a car, how much does he profit by borrowing? Of course, he has the advantage of keeping his funds more liquid as well, but how much does he actually profit from this arrangement?

Keith Weinhold  30:24  

Well, the math is so easy that you can even visualize it in an audio format here. Now it depends on the loan term, but the simple spread is a 10% investment return minus a 1% car loan cost. That is a 9% positive spread on 50k. That's roughly $4,500 per year in benefit. That's before any taxes, risk, or fees. $4,500 a year just for doing some loan paperwork. Like if you wonder whether the loan paperwork is worth it or not, that's what we're talking about here, and that's 375 bucks a month. So if you're wondering if it's even worth it taking the time to get a car loan when you could pay all cash, it probably is. All right, now that's the upside. What about the risk that's associated with taking a loan instead of paying all cash, well, the caveat here is that the 1% loan is guaranteed, but the 10% return is probably not, and that risk gap does matter. If you're financially fragile and you can't make the payment with another pot of money, well, then you risk default. That is over leverage risk. That's the worst case scenario. All right, what's the flip side? The flip side is that you could earn a return even better than 10% As we know, with real estate pays five ways on investment property. If you earn a 20% return, now you're making $9,500 a year on the spread, not $4,500, but a 10% return. That is the base case. So again, by paying all cash instead of getting the loan, your future self would be poorer by $4,500 a year. And now, my friend Jesse, that learned this from me, he's actually a CFA, a chartered financial analyst, a sophisticated money guy. But he had simply been overlooking this. And said another way, what you're doing here is that over time, your investment is paying you more than your interest is costing you, and in my life, I have been doing exactly this sort of thing all over the place for decades. An interesting thing that I hear about this, although it makes me scratch my head, I've heard a few people say this. It's just like, oh well, I don't want to have to deal with a car payment? I just rather be done with it and move on. What is there to deal with? Just set up auto pay with preserving funds for say a 10% return. You're then going to see more dollars flowing into your account than you will out of it. I mean that part can just be automated.

Keith Weinhold  33:19  

My life and finances are set up this way. In fact, when I get a loan for a rental property, I have had mortgage loan officers that are looking at my finances. They tell me that I have more stuff flowing into and out of my checking account than they've ever seen anyone have. I'm I'm financing and arbitraging my way through life passively. This is thanks in part to inflation. I am not paying very much at all in that biggest financial expense that we all have in our lives-not taxes or children or housing, but opportunity cost. I am avoiding paying that. This is the world that we live in today, a lot of times debt reduction is horrible advice. Debt free that can keep people from falling over a cliff, but it stalls any wealth creation. Now the debts that usually make the most sense to pay down they're the ones with high interest, variable rates, no tax benefit, and no productive asset attached. And here is the priority order that I use for paying down debt or paying off debt. First, it is credit cards. Pay down these first almost every time. I mean, a 20% or even 30% credit card rate. This is like financial quicksand. You don't need a sophisticated investment thesis when you can get a guaranteed 20-4% quote-unquote return by eliminating this debt. The next place I would pay down are payday loans, personal. Loans and consumer finance debt. I mean, these are usually bad debts because they're at a high rate, have a short amortization, and they're usually tied to consumption instead of an income-producing asset. Pay these aggressively too, and then next in priority is paying variable rate debt that could reset higher. This isn't quite as important to address.

Keith Weinhold  35:24  

We're talking about things like HELOCs, adjustable rate loans, margin debt, and some business lines of credit. Some of those can become dangerous when rates rise, even if the rate's tolerable today. The uncertainty can be a bit of a problem. Now, when it comes to should you pay down student loans, consider that. low fixed-rate student loans that might not be urgent. It sure wasn't for me. High-rate private student loans that could be different. That could get more of your attention. You also got to weigh things like tax benefits. Look out for forgiveness programs when it comes to student loans, those haven't been quite as available lately under this administration. Also, look at employer repayment benefits before you rush to pay down student loans, and then really the last one: low fixed-rate mortgage debt. Pay that last if you ever do. In fact, it is quite possible that I will always keep this debt type around that low fixed rate mortgage debt. So really, my rule of thumb here is to kill toxic debt. Be careful with unstable debt, and don't rush to pay off cheap fixed productive debt if you ever pay it off at all. You and I covered a lot of ground today, starting with 75 cent gasoline in California, all the way to the biggest expense you'll ever pay throughout your life, being something that most people have never heard of: opportunity cost. Coming up on the show here, a lot of good episodes, including a great guest and I are going to discuss a new way to invest in residential real estate that we haven't discussed before, and it will massively boost your cash flow. If you found today's show valuable, whether it was the history of why we have permanent inflation or the idea of passively financing your way to wealth, rather than only working harder. I would be grateful if you share this episode with a friend. Just tap the share button in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and send it to someone who would benefit from hearing it. Or take a screenshot of this episode and post it on social media. It helps more people find the show, and it gives you and your friends something smart to talk about with each other. Until next week, I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.

Speaker 1  37:53  

Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal, or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively. 

Keith Weinhold  38:21  

The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building at getricheducation.com.