[R] Remember When Inflation Was High and Rates Were Rising? [GREATEST HITS]

Merry Christmas, and welcome to the Afford Anything podcast. Today is Thursday, December 25. It is Christmas day. This week, all week, Monday through Friday, we are sharing episodes from the greatest hits vault as part of a special five day f, double I, r e series. Every day this week, we're focusing on a pillar of wealth building. Monday was financial psychology, the letter f. Tuesday was increasing your income, letter I. Wednesday was the second letter I, investing. And today is the letter r for real estate. Before we share today's episode, I wanna set the stage because this is a time machine. The episode that you're about to hear originally aired in May 2022, so let's climb into the time machine and remember what was happening. What's the context of May 2022? That was when inflation was peaking. In fact, one month later in June 2022, inflation hit its record peak at 9.1%. That's the highest inflation rate in forty years. So at the time that we recorded this, May 2022, we were right around a 9% inflation rate. We were at peak inflation. Interest rates were rising fast as the Fed was struggling to keep inflation in check. And because interest rates were rising so fast, people were worried that home prices were going to collapse. Today, of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know how the story played out over the last three years. But do we remember what we thought in the moment? Right? How do we get the full benefit of hindsight? We get the full benefit of hindsight by remembering what we thought at the time that things were unfolding. And so that's that's why I want to share this episode with you because it captures what we were thinking. It was it's a real time record. Right? What we were thinking before we knew how the story would end, before we knew the outcome. It's what I love about podcasting. We have a real time record of what we thought in the moment because later, after we know how things turned out, we often can mentally revise our memories, and we convince ourselves that, like, woah. We always knew. You know? We always knew what was gonna happen even when we didn't. And that, I think, is one of the most powerful things of podcasting as a medium. Like, podcasts create that real time record of what we actually thought in the moment, the uncertainty, the assumptions, the fears, the expectations. There's a record preserved exactly as it was. And when we understand that past uncertainty, we can recognize patterns when new uncertainty shows up. Right? And we start to see how narratives form. We see how fear repeats itself. We see how often the most costly mistakes come from waiting for clarity or from, like, wallowing in recency bias. Like, I remember back in 2015, 2016, 2017, people were saying, oh, real estate is way too expensive. Like, …