9/1/26 Doomsday, Debt & the Dollar — Plus a Trip to the Kern County Museum

The Moneywise Radio Show and Podcast Tuesday, September 1st BE MONEYWISE. Moneywise Wealth Management I "The Moneywise Radio Show & Podcast" call: 661-847-1000 text in anytime: 661-396-1000 website: www. MoneywiseGuys.com https://www.moneywiseguys.com/ facebook: Moneywise_Wealth_Management https://www.facebook.com/moneywiseguys/ LinkedIn: Moneywise_Wealth_Management https://www.linkedin.com/company/moneywise-wealth-management-bakersfield/ Guest: Mike McCoy, Executive Director for the Kern County Museum website: https://kerncountymuseum.org/ The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you, consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Mike McCoy & The Kern County Museum are not affiliated with nor endorsed by LPL Financial or Moneywise Wealth Management

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Live from the basement inside the historic Woolworths Building in downtown Bakersfield.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Call or text in at 661-396-1000.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through LPL Financial. LPL Financial and Money Wise Wealth Management are independently owned and operated.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Now, let's start the Money Wise Show.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  And welcome to the Money Wise Show. We are live from the basement of the historic Woolworths Building in downtown Bakersfield. For the next hour, you're on News Talk 96.1, 1230 a.m., K E R N, streaming live at MoneyWiseGuys.com. You can call or text into the show 24 hours a day at 661-396-1000. We are your hosts. I'm Sharad Waite and

• 1:03Speaker 04

  Sammy Abiyawi.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Great seeing you, Sammy.

• 1:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  It is very comfortable in these seats. We got some new chairs here in the basement studio.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, they, they, the older ones were old.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Really old. I, I think those seats that we used to have in here were from

• 1:23Speaker 04

  When Jesus was a child.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  When Jesus, yeah. Back in the day, back when we opened up, I mean, at least 15, 20 years ago.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  At least. You know. We recycled those into our old conference room, into the radio room, the padded radio room off Stockdale Highway, I might.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  That's right. And I think we got them from our office space when we were over on Ming and New Stein, over by the Olive Garden, which is where we were before we went to Stockdale Highway in 2000 and once we moved to Stockdale Highway on 2006 or '07. And so

• 1:58Speaker 00

  They did their job.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  They did. So they're upstairs, right? I'm using them as a, for the conference, for the conference room.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Philip from our contract, general contractor, Wallace and Smith, called me, he's like, hey, are you getting rid of those chairs? Cause I need one for my office. I said, I don't think you want this one. I don't think so. I mean, I'll give you one. I just don't think you need, you, you want this specific one.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I gave you, Sammy, about 40, 50 bucks. It's yours.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  No, no, I wouldn't. Philip has been awesome to work with and he's, he's, he's great. In fact, he's changing his gaming, gamer chair with something more comfortable and he's going to give that chair to Gabe, my son, so.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Score.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Oh, well, now that's a whole nother level. You're talking about gaming chairs.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what Stephen has right now.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, that's kind of a gaming chair.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  No, he's got, he's got a producer chair.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  I have a gaming chair at home in my office and it lights up and my son makes fun of me because it was his old gaming chair.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  So we don't throw out anything. We recycle and make sure we're money wise with everything.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Do you play video games, Stephen?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  I don't, but he, he upgraded to a new gaming chair. So I was like, don't throw that away. Like, put it in the office. And I sat down and it, and it has like lights that go up the side and it's got like the gaming. I don't know anything about it, but

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Hey, it was his Roblox chair and I'm like, hey dude, that was not even that old. So just, we're not throwing it away quite yet.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  And good stuff. Let's get right to the listener questions, Sammy.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Yes, sir. Going back to social security, I'm a widow. I'm putting in my husband's social security, not mine. What about the social security surplus? Vicky.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  All right, Vicky, thanks. Great question. I wish that I knew exactly more about the, the surplus side of the question. Cause I'm not sure what the, what Vicky means by the surplus. I would, I would guess that that, so let's, let's explain for listeners. She, Vicky here is saying that she doesn't have her own social security. She just gets her husband. So if, you know, as a widow, even if you didn't work, you're still entitled to your, to, to part of your spouse's, the spouse that passed away, to their social security. And you can receive that social security for as long as you, as long as you live. However, if you are working, then you're now contributing to your own social security benefit.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  And if you get to the point where your own social, social security benefit is greater than the survivor's benefit that you receive from your, from your spouse who passed away, well, then you could, that's a surplus. And so maybe that's what, that, that's what the listener's talking about here. And in that case, you would want to, you'd want to switch over and get that higher social security benefit that is based off of your, your life work, not your spouse's life work. And that, I mean, that, this goes to, you know, for, for anybody, if you are, if you're, if you're in a, a marriage and one spouse, one of you didn't work and the other did, you're still entitled, you're both still entitled to social security retirement benefits.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  The spouse that didn't work gets about half of the working spouse's income. But in some cases, when the kids leave, for example, now both spouses get, get to work and then another both contributing to social security. And the spouse who wasn't working is now contributing to social security. And so if they work long enough, it's possible that their social security benefit gets higher than their spouse's. So there's no, there's no splitsies, I guess. So, you know, maybe that's, maybe that's what this question is geared towards.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  I know yesterday we were talking about, you know, the social security, some people worried about it running out.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  And that's when it came in.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Well, then that's another question because right now, as it stands, if nothing happens and if Congress doesn't make any changes to the revenue, then it's going to, uh, it's going to stop paying a hundred percent of it. So it's not going to have the money to pay a hundred percent of its scheduled benefits and come the 2032. So we're about six years away from social security, social security. If nothing changes, the benefit's going to go down from a hundred percent and it'll have to drop down to about 78% of scheduled benefits.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  So, so there is, there is a fund that was created back in 1983 with social security reforms that, that were, they, I guess they had a surplus back in, in that. But that surplus is eventually gonna get depleted.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Right?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Is, I think, I don't know if this is what Vicky is referring to.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  By 2032.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  If nothing changes, of course.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  That's what we, what we touched on yesterday, Frank and I. Frank did, did a really good job, I thought, about just explaining how social security works. It's, it's, it's not a bank. It's, it's a fund as you go. So

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Us, as current employees are funding the beneficiaries

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  that worked.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  And absent of us increasing the workforce or having some type of reform, Frank gave the statistic that maybe everything is, every beneficiary is gonna get less than what they're getting today. If nothing changes to the tune of about 20%.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  So.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a, that's a good, good, I think that's something most people don't, don't remember. They, they, they see the headlines and they think social security is going to run out of money come 2032. There's going to be no more money in social security. Well, that's, that's not, that's never going to be the case. Social security is never going to run out of money as long as there are still people that are working.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  And contributing.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  And contributing. Yeah, which you have to. If you're working.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Unless you're not paying taxes and you're just doing everything under the table, you're contributing to social security. And so there's always going to be contributions going into social security. The problem is what you said, demographics have really altered that, the, the, the health of that fund because now we have people living a lot longer. Social security wasn't designed where people had life expectancy of 78, 79. And, and so you have people living a lot longer, but they're, they're still taking the benefit, but they're not contributing anymore. And then this is the, this is the, the biggest example of the, one of the largest economic challenges that we have across the globe now is, is the demographics. The fact that birth rates are down so low.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Substantially.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're not replacing, we're not replaced, developed countries at least are not replacing their own population. And the problem with that is you don't have young people contributing to the pension systems, to their, to the government pension systems, let alone they're not, they're, they don't have the workers they need to fulfill the jobs.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this is not just an America problem. I mean, Korea has the same problem. Japan definitely has had that problem since the 90s.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  And, and other countries, and even the, the developing countries.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Are, are now the birth rate is down. Like you, countries like, like Morocco, where the average birth rate now is less than one and a half per, per, per couple.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  It used to be three and a half, four, just 20 some years ago.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Right, right. It, it, and, and I've mentioned this before on the show, the trouble that countries have had in trying to increase the birth rate have not been super successful. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was, there were headlines about Singapore. I don't know if you saw this. Maybe we covered this on the show already, but Singapore, just a few weeks ago, is offering parents $55,000 to, if they have a kid. And then they, they're also covering, you know, healthcare, childcare, parental leave. They're trying to economically incentivize people to have kids, including like in Singapore, just giving them cash. Here's 50, 55 grand. You had a kid. Go pop a kid.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  I can tell you this, man, don't, and nobody should be having a kid for money. That, I mean, there, I guess you ride a fine line. You don't want the money to be so high that now people are just pumping out kids to cash the government check. And I guess we kind of see that a little bit now, you know, where people are having kids when they shouldn't be having kids. And now they're, because they just don't have the financial support.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of things have changed in the world. I mean, we can, I, I don't want to get into the philosophy of how family, uh, families now have changed substantially. Where, you know, you used to have three generations living in the same house, helping with, you know, the grandkids.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Then all of a sudden you go, like just again, 25, 30 years ago, here in America, you give birth and now some, one of the spouses need to stay home or you send somebody to daycare. I was sending Gabe to daycare. It was $800 a month.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  And that was probably a deal. That was probably a good deal.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  The minute he, he got enrolled in public school, I bought myself a nicer car.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Here's your car, pal.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Seriously.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  No, it's, it's, it's really the dynamic of how families are functioning today, I think, is what's stopping people from having kids. And of course, now we're dealing with a completely new generation.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Of of people that are in college and now going into the workforce. They can they are completely different than you and I, Sherrod.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it's I mean, yeah, here we we're really kind of showing our age a little bit. We're like, oh, look at this young young people these days.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  You're not even an unc, man.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  I know.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  You're way above unc, you and I.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Unc is thirty years old. Seriously, we're way above uncs.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we got we got that beat. There, you know, the average cost to raise a child from birth through eighteen years, not counting college, is about three hundred grand. This year, it's about three hundred grand. When you start doing the math, you talk about the childcare, you talk about the healthcare, you talk about the, you know, clothes, transportation, all of these things adds up real quickly, three hundred grand. And, you know, you're not when you're when you're having a kid, you're not thinking, you're not thinking about that. I know I wasn't. And I had three of them fairly quickly right out of the gates, young, right when Emily and I got married, started having kids right away. It just never crossed my mind, you know, like, how am I going to, like, I have three kids. That's that's three hundred thousand apiece.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  That's a million dollars it's going to cost me on the kids. That probably would have freaked me out as a young dad. I would have been like, well, I'm never going to have a million dollars.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, information overload is what you're saying. Like, it's accessible today. Maybe people look at that. To me, it's a little bit deeper than that.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  It's way deeper, yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Like how families work today versus back in our time.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  It not only, yeah, what support do they have? They don't have mom and dad and grandma and grandpa living with them to help with childcare. And then, you know, who can afford a home? How you how do you how do you afford housing, especially in California, right out of the gates with a young family? And this is a this is, I mean, when I when I think of some of our biggest economic challenges, it's the debt is certainly an issue. We're seeing a lot about the problems with with with sovereign debt, personal debt. There's the amount of global debt that is on that we currently have. That that's troubling, but I can think of several different economic tricks that can happen to sort of mask those underlying problems.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  But these these human problems of having children, birth rates, for example.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Man, that's a tricky one, and that is scary because I don't know. I have I have I have yet to find what this what a good solution is for that. And and yet, if we don't address it, this is gonna get bad.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  It's got something to do with, you know, younger people not drinking as much, Sherrod. You know, they don't drink as much like we used to. They don't give birth as much. I don't know. I mean, you get drunk, you make some stupid decisions sometimes.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I'm curious about that, too. You know, we joke, I joke about it because I I mean, I'm not a heavy drinker, but I'll drink every once in a while. I I feel like I'm I'm a responsible drinker. But, you know, there's all there's, you know, growing evidence that it used to be that you could have a little alcohol was good for you. You know, like, a glass of wine a day, actually good for you. It's it turns out that's not like there's no amount. There's no amount of alcohol that's good for you. A doc, no doctor that's that's worth anything is going to go, here you go, son, have you, I'm prescribing you a glass of wine.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  It's a marketing trick, Sherrod.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  One hundred percent.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  It's it's it's like selling us vitamin D pills.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Versus you going out to the sun and just absorbing it, let your body do the the work it's supposed to do.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Hey, you you mentioned vitamin D. I I did get a physical, like, lesson. Did I tell you about this?

• 14:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  I got a physical just, oh, less than a year ago, and I had blood work done. Everything was fine, except for my vitamin D levels. I've never had a problem with vitamin D, and I spend a lot of time out in the sun. Like, I'm out, I'm out in the sun all the time. I'm I'm I garden a lot, I'm out hiking, I get I get plenty of direct sunlight.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  I was thinking you're spending too much time in the basement.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Say, while he sits in this dark studio. I know, that's true. I got these lights down in here, but the vitamin D deficiency was something that came up. And so the doctor just gave me a prescription for vitamin D supplements. I didn't need the prescription. I just go buy and could take a pill a day, you know, a little a little vitamin D. So I started doing that, and you would you believe my my fingernails started growing like crazy? Now, I got I used to clip my fingernails like once, once every two weeks or something. Now it's like once a week, like double. My fingernails are like doubled and like, like, isn't that crazy?

• 15:41Speaker 04

  It is, it is. And but but but, I mean, to your point, just the fabric of the society, I think. And that's the deeper part of the conversation, the philosophical part of it that we don't have time for. But it's it's those are some of the things that not don't keep me up at night, but just I think about.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  They keep me up. They keep me up at night, big time. The other, you know, and we can go on on a few tangents. I almost kind of want to keep on this this doomsday theme. This is all.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Based off of this, this listener question asking about social security and the surplus. And of course, there's a lot of fear out there about social security running out in twenty thirty two. So we're six years away from social security. We have a we have over half of the of the country that relies solely off of their social security benefit for their income. You know, you can't afford, they, none of them can afford a cut, a twenty percent cut in there, no way.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  That's that's substantial.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Huge, it's huge. I mean, it would have, I would guess that it would involve civil unrest if it came to that point. And it goes to show why it's been so hard for politicians to fix this problem. It's so difficult to fix it. There's no, there's no one answer to it. There's multiple things that you have to that you have to address to try to to to to fix the lack of funding in social security. But you have also globally, as I mentioned, is this is the debt, just the total amount of debt that the that the world is is currently facing. You're going to see this, if you haven't already, there's a lot of headlines in the news about about our country's debt, which just hit forty trillion.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Yes, forty trillion dollars. We talked briefly about it, Dustin and I, last week, forty trillion dollars. It took us two hundred years to hit the first trillion in nineteen eighty one, nineteen eighty two, Sherrod.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  And since then, the last trillion, it took us five months. We went from thirty nine trillion to forty trillion in the five month time.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Well, that's only about ten percent of the total global debt. If you look at the the debt that the entire world has, now, I'm also throwing in not just government debt, but also personal debt, so household debt. Three, almost three hundred and fifty trillion, three hundred and fifty trillion. The the total global GDP is about a hundred trillion. So that means that we have about a three hundred percent debt to income ratio as a as a.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  So you said the global GDP is what?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  A hundred trillion.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Hundred trillion versus a three hundred fifty.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  Of debt.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. I mean, that that is frightening.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  It's well, I mean, if you look at it from an accounting standpoint, and you just look at balance sheet, right? You have you have assets and you have liabilities, it's a bankrupt. If if the world was a corporation, it would be bankrupt, right? Or the debt the ratio would be super, super high, that it would make you not being able to borrow money.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Right, yep. And and that's the problem that we're seeing right now. We're seeing bond yields go up. So interest, the interest that bonds are paying is going up because investors are requiring a higher return if they're going to lend the government money because they're looking at the government's ability to pay them back. And individuals and corporations are going, well, you've got all this debt. If I'm going to risk my money, I want to make sure that I'm going to get it back in a quicker amount of time.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  That's what increases the interest rates, yes.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  And then when you have it, when you have an increase in the interest rate, all it does is the rest of the bond's values go down.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Because why would somebody buy a bond that's paying a lower interest rate? They're gonna they're gonna pay for a higher interest rate bond, and so it devalues those those existing bonds.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Affecting affecting a lot of things. I mean, we had Adrian on Giovanni in the in the show yesterday. And if you're holding bonds at, you know, at three percent, and now bonds are selling at four point seven, right?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  You're holding bonds that have much, much lesser value affecting your balance sheet.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  And and and imagine the impact. I mean, interest rates, that impacts us too, as individuals, as as consumers, not just the government.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  I mean, your mortgage is based on those interest rates.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Your credit line, your borrowing as a small business is affected.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  You now, your growth is affected, right? And and so it's a deep, it creates a much bigger problem. Then then just hey, no, we have we're at forty trillion dollars and we there's no plan in sight to fix that.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  No, no plan and and and how we got here is year after year budgeting in more of more expenses than revenue that we're taking in, you know, we're running trillion dollar deficit budget deficits each year and it's always been that case.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  Well, didn't we get to like zero at one time during the Bill Clinton era?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  There was a surplus. There's actually a surplus in during during one of Clinton's term during during one of his terms.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I remember that picture or video that they had when he writes the zero.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Right, right. And it was, you know, I think it may have given a false sense of, oh, this is achievable, because nobody ever talks about that. And everybody always just assumes that there's no way that we can balance the budget. And it's the same issue that politicians have with trying to figure out the social security problem. It's like the it's like the political third rail that nobody wants to touch because somebody's gonna have to something's gonna have to change for somebody. And nobody wants to nobody wants to be the one responsible to do that.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  And same thing with when the when our government goes and sets these budgets, it's like, okay, we got to trim a trillion dollars off of our off of our expenses. Okay, where's it going to come from? And now we have with these debt payments, these debt payments now exceeding what we're paying for military, like our military budget, like it's costing us more to service our debt than it is for us to protect ourselves.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  I have a question slash comments for you, Sherrod. Now, imagine if the dollar was not the currency of the world. What would that mean to us here in America carrying all this debt?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Well, we we get a premium across the globe, a trade premium, meaning we we have a benefit, an added baked in benefit of at least 5% that we get just because the world uses our currency. It's it's a it's a massive benefit that we get. You see it when you when you travel abroad, right? And you're using dollars in a country that really wants dollars and you see how far your dollar goes.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  It's you take that, you multiply it by 100, and you have, you know, corporate jobs, you have the fact that gasoline and oil is traded in our dollar. You the reason, though, why people are using the dollar and the way it's the world's currency is because of our stable economy.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  And the dollar is just a bond. It's that's all that is. It's a it's a bond that's immediate liquid liquid that you can cash it in right way right away. Because you can hand it to that person, the person can look at it and go, this is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  And so you know that you hand it to a person, the other person goes, okay, I know that the government's going to back this up. I trust that it's going to be worth a dollar that it says here. And so you have that trust level. But the trust level is eroding, not just for the United States, but globally.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Globally.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Because every country is struggling economically. Every country is struggling to figure out a way to balance their budget and to and to come up with the deficits that they're seeing in their retirement plans.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Unless you're Norway.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Even yeah, I mean, even Norway's got their their struggles. I mean, they're leading the crowd in several different areas. But they're still they're still, I think, fundamental issues that are going on.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Birth rate is one of them.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, birth, exactly. There's always, you know, some country has every country has their problem, which I guess there's a silver lining to all of this. I would say that the United States at a minimum is at the top of the of the list of all of these. I mean, it's the top of the list in the countries in terms of of most of these problems that we're dealing with, in part because we have the world's currency, we have a stable economy, we still innovate and we we house these tech companies, for example, we have a lot of intellectual property. So, you know, we're the, as I call it in the past, the least ugly kid on the block. You know, there's a lot of kids on the block and they're all we're all pretty ugly, but we're the least ugly ones. We're still ugly, but we're we're

• 24:34Speaker 03

  not as ugly as some of these other countries.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Good, good discussion. Hang in there, folks. We've got a lot more to cover. We come back. Mike McCoy is going to join us from the Kern County Museum. I'm going to talk to Mike about what's going on over there. We're Money Wise. We'll be right back.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Thanks for tuning in. I'm Sherrod here with Sammy.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Joined now by Mike McCoy. Hey, Mike, welcome.

• 25:09Speaker 05

  Hey, thank you. It's always great to be in the basement.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  It is great to have you in the basement.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  You might need vitamin D, though.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you get down here in the dark for too long. Mike, you're executive director for the Kern County Museum, but also you've been involved in lots of things. You're from here.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I grew up in a little resort city just north of here called Oildale.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  Beautiful. That's my hometown.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  North of the river.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Fair resort, like, yes.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  But I very proud to be from Oildale.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Well, you're still you're still a part of Oildale, at least being the executive director of the museum. It's right there in Oildale.

• 25:46Speaker 05

  Bridge almost touches our property.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  It's good.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. How are things there at the museum?

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Well, good. You know, we're we were chartered in 1942, so we're 80 something years old. And every year, it's gotten better and better for 80 years. And I've been there nine, and I'd like to work one more year at least. And we've gone through and painted and fixed and roofed all of the 60 buildings on the property.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  And my motto is, if we can't fix it, let's paint it.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  At least make it look like it's done.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  We painted everything. The grass is green, the trees are all pruned. Every any given day during the school year, there's 200, 300 children out running around making noise, which I love. So.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Is that at the Lori Brock?

• 26:36Speaker 05

  No, it's the whole property. We have field trips.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 26:40Speaker 05

  The rite of passage for any kid in Kern County of 4th grade is to come out and pound acorns and learn what the Yocats did. But we have five different school tours.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Is that the rite of passage?

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Everybody I talk to say, oh, my God, I haven't been out there since I was in 4th grade. And you're talking to somebody than they're, you know, 70s. Well, maybe you should come back out. It's new and improved.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  It is. It is impressive. Last time I was out there, I was I was just stunned at how how much it's come along. It had been, I don't know, six months or a year since I'd been out there. And you had more signs in the neon sign garden and just lots of really cool stuff.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  That's been a labor of love. Because Corolla Rupert Enriquez, we just lost her this summer. She was a curator director out there for 21 years. She just recently passed away. But she and her husband, John, put six signs out there 25 years ago. And then and and then it kind of got to eight signs. And then in the last year now, we're up to 40. And these are all signs from Kern County history.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, like landmarks, you know, and beautiful.

• 27:46Speaker 05

  They all tell a story.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't see signs like that much anymore, do you?

• 27:51Speaker 05

  Not much, a little bit. There's one good sign museum in Glendale, and their claim to fame is they have the Green Frog Sign from Columbus and Alta Vista. But we have another Green Frog Sign we acquired. But there's not a lot of there's not a lot of neon sign museums. And there's walking tours, and there's places that have one or two, but we have 40.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's impressive collection.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  And each one of those signs is a very expensive, difficult project.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I was curious why we don't see them on what businesses don't generally invest in those types of signs anymore.

• 28:29Speaker 05

  No, neon had its heyday in the 40s and 50s. It's expensive to put the gas in, the real gas. We don't do LED. All our stuff's hand blown with the glass, real neon gas. So those are very expensive to do. There's only one guy left doing that work here in Bakersfield. Shout out to Ambrose McRedmond. He's an American hero working out of his garage.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  No kidding.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  And he does all of our neon blowing. And so we're very proud of the fact that all of our signs are original. They're all metal. We do have a couple of what we call illuminated plastic. But that's because, you know, the businesses were so iconic, we couldn't say no to Dora's Ice Cream.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What else is happening? What's new out there?

• 29:19Speaker 05

  Well, just real quick, I have attention deficit disorder. So every to keep me going in life, I have to have a project. I've always been like that since I was two years old. So my current projects on my desk right now is there was an old Buddhist church, 1910, on N Street, and had its heyday. And then the internment happened. Most it was a Japanese place of worship. Everybody was interned. When they came back, a lot of people did not come back. They went to the cities. This church kind of really started to decline. And then it had two arson fires in the last couple of years. So they were going to demolish

• 30:02Speaker 05

  the church. And the local Japanese community were really upset, the Nisei. And they go, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? So I was able to get some money and we harvested, salvaged the bell tower.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  So there's this big 14 foot by 14 foot bell tower. We cut that off of the building, craned it to the museum. And this year, we're going to build a Buddhist memorial to all the Japanese that were interned during World War II.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  It's an exciting project. Our sister city, Wakayama, Japan will be here this fall. So we're hoping to get the project started so they can come out and look at it.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  So that's a really cool project.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  No, that sounds really cool. I mean, that's, that's a, it's obviously, it's a, it's a part of our national history, but certainly our regional history. The, the fact that we had here in California, not far from us, the internment camps. And I know people, still in my life, I have friends in my life who were impacted by that, whose, whose parents or grandparents were, were interned and had a huge, it still impacts them, you know, today.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Well, I, I think we made a lot of very, a lot of these people are quite elderly now. They were in post in Arizona, but they're thrilled that we've taken it seriously. We've raised the money, the, the, the remnants of what we're going to create has been moved. It's on the property with a police escort and we're going to rock and roll on that this fall.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Wow, that's cool. So this was, this was a, the, the 1911 Buddhist temple was on in and 22nd?

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Yep, yep. And now it's a vacant lot.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Uh, is it because it burned?

• 31:39Speaker 05

  One week ahead of the wrecking ball. That's how, how we had to move on this thing. We did it.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  That, that is just, that's, I mean, that's, I mean, I love this town. I was born and raised here. This is where I'm going to die. Obviously, this, this building here, Woolworths, was definitely a, a, a passion project of mine and my wife's. You know, like, we, we genuinely want to, want to make this, our home, a better place. And so we, we certainly see the value in preserving the history that we have here, especially in our buildings. Because of what happened in 1952 with the devastating earthquake, I think we just, we lost so much of that culture in our history. And, and, and, and we've lost it in some of our people too, where they just don't.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  They didn't stick.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, they don't quite see the value in that, you know, just tear it down and build a new thing.

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Well, the one that still breaks my heart, well, you know, I lived in Sacramento a long time and they tore down the gorgeous El Hambré Theater to put in a Safeway. That was idiotic, but the equivalent here for this town was tearing down the Santa Fe Railway Station behind Bakersfield High School with the Fred RV Restaurant. Gorgeous Spanish Revival tore it down to make a parking lot for Mercy Hospital. I mean, you talk about complete blind idiocy. And I drive by there sometimes and I just see that parking lot and think, this is just absolutely awful.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  And, and that's the kind of thing that's gone on for so long that it just takes folks like you and your wife and your family. And then other people like my friend, Stephen Montgomery, Steve Humphries. That to really take a stand and save this stuff.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I've, I've heard of other, several examples. The other one is the Adobe House out at, and at Hart Park.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  The Peacock House.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  The Peacock House was just getting ready to be bulldozed down and, and thank goodness Bill got out there, somebody, or maybe it was Stephen Montgomery's.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  He was very involved.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just happened to see a, you know, a bulldozer out there and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. We don't have a lot of these Adobe structures out here, folks.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, Steve was in my office this morning, that guy, he's that president of the Historical Preservation Commission, the city manages. But he is a fierce warrior for preservation, restoration. So he was in my office this morning and I always take two pages of notes when Steve's talking.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a great resource. He was very, very helpful for us when we bought this building, gave us the whole, sat us down and gave us the rundown of the history and the, the, the architecture and, and all of that. An incredible resource. We have so many of these resources here. I mean, you're not, you're not retired. I'm not going to call you retired, but.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was a career educator and I, I was a really bad teacher, so they made me the principal. And then I was such a bad principal, I became superintendent of the school district. This is in Sonora, California, which is filled with historic buildings. In fact, the city council voted not to put crosswalks in the city of Sonora because it wouldn't be historic. And then the state made them do it anyway. That's where I was living, that's where I had my career at Auburn, California, Placer County. But I was there and then I met a pretty girl in a bar in Bakersfield, the old fashioned way, in Mexicali. And the next thing you knew, I was getting married, moving back to Bakersfield.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  That's what got you here.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Pretty kindergarten teacher, Suzie, and I moved back for all the right reasons. And I sold my 100 year old farmhouse that I had restored and we're having a ball. And I thought, oh my God, I moved me back to Bakersfield after being gone 30 years and it has been wonderful.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Oh, that's good.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  That's good. I mean, obviously, you know, we, we've seen a lot of people in our business go into retirement and, and waste away almost.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, decline. My mom was in education for almost 40 years and after she retired, you know, she, like, the, the decline was obvious. Because my dad retired, but stayed very, very active and involved and actually made more money in retirement than he did working for the government for almost 40 years. Just because he was like, okay, I can do my own projects, I could do my farmhouse, I could, so definitely I'm glad that you're involved, Mike.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Well, the joke is, you know, I'm 71, I tell everybody, I'm not old enough to play golf yet.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  I'm just not old enough. I got clubs and I'm not old enough to swing them. And I'll do this as long as my, I have a wonderful board that I love every one of these wonderful dedicated people. And they have a sense of humor because I'll come in and say, hey, I'm going to save a burned down church. And they, they just don't even blink, you know? And they're just, it's a wonderful crew. Cheryl Barbage is my chair. Gotta be the alpha female of Kern County. I mean, Cheryl is fearless. She'll shake down anybody for money. And when she believes in something, her and her husband Lou are just community treasures. She's my board chair. And people say, isn't she kind of bossy?

• 36:50Speaker 05

  I said, well, she did call me this morning, remind me to brush my teeth, but other than that, you know, but I, she is, I call her the blonde bombshell. And I've just got eight other heroes on my board and they're just go-getters. And as you know, you have to have a great team. So my museum team is amazing and we just get better and better every day.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  Well, you got to have a passion. I, I've seen, you know, those who thrive after retirement or those that are still engaged in some sort of meaningful endeavor, you know, whatever it is. Whether they're paid for it or not, staying engaged and, and involved in the world is, is so important. I think there's this, there's this false idea of, of working, suffering your working life so that you can get to a point where you no longer have to work. And then you're just going to find happiness and you laugh because it's so ridiculous. This is not how it works, but it's a, it's a, it's a story that is, is perpetuated somehow in our society. And that's just not how life.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  We talked about this earlier, you know, the lack of kids and stuff. A lot of the kids today, I mean, our young people are looking at them, I'm like, that's not the life I want. I don't want to work 40 years and then retire and my body's not even allowing me to travel.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then I'm going to be miserable, just like my parents are miserable.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  I was, when I was in Morocco last time, I met a group of Americans and this, this gentleman was 6'3", walking with, with a walker. But he probably, when he was younger, he's probably 6'6", 6'7" and he was, he can barely walk. And I was, I'm looking at him and I'm like, I, I want to travel now, man, while I'm still like able, so I can see everything. And I want to go up to the lighthouse, you know, it's narrow and I, I want to have the full experience. All that stuff just keeps, just incentivizing me out. I want to work hard, but at the same time, I want to have fun along the way.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I just did a sermon at my church and I talked about Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau. And he said that we waste the better part of our lives working, that you need to reverse it. So in your twenties, thirties and forties, you need to travel, have adventure, do all the things you want to do. And then go to work when you're 50, 60, you know, 70. As he said, you spend the best part of your life saving money and earning for the time in your life when you cannot enjoy it.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  And I just thought that was, of course, you know, it's hilarious, but, but, you know, I, like, I think I'm very lucky that I chose work my whole life that I enjoyed and was beneficial to the community. And that I was contributing and I felt good going to work. And I also worked places that were fun. I mean, it would, the work I did was fun. You know, I enjoyed building a football stadium or an aquatic center when I was a school superintendent. That's fun work, you know? New gymnasium for a community that had a 90 year old, you know, gymnasium that burned down. Build a brand new gymnasium that looked like the old one, those kinds of things. So that was fun. And then this has been the cherry on top of the cupcake, coming out to the museum.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  And just every day going in there and doing work and having fun with it.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and actually building something for the community, creating something that you hope will be here for generations. And that people can go and look at that Green Frog Market sign, you know?

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Or, or the church that's, you saved the, the, that's, that's, I mean, that would have been destroyed.

• 40:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So, and, and there's a lot of people in this town. Gail Beatty comes to mine, Mary Trichelle, that are very quiet people that are always in the backgrounds of things. They don't like being on center stage. Cheryl Barbage, I mentioned Cheryl. And they are just absolute community heroes because they've supported Cynthia Lake. They've done all this incredible philanthropic work, but really from the back of the stadium. They don't want to be in the spotlight. I, Mary gave me a nice donation once, Mary Trichelle. And she said, I will give you this, but if you tell anybody I gave you money, I'll kill you.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  And Gail's that way too, don't put my name on anything, but we do because we love her. And Joe Booney's a retired beekeeper and he gave us, and he donated a house. And he said, don't put my name on anything. So we put. 14 photographs of him in the children's garden. And he was furious. We put Uncle Joe, you know?

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  And it was all this informational stuff because he's a horticulturalist. And, and he still sees me, so I still got a bone to pick with you. But he wanted to be invisible. And so that's the people you know that are the heroes. They don't want their name on anything.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, they're definitely those, they're those silent heroes. And then you have even just the people who are willing to put their neck out there. I mean, even you, you know, you're out there a lot. You've got to be a public person. You're running the, you're running the museum.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  I'm retired officially.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  As a school, you know, school administrator. And I, but this is work I love. And I, every morning I'm excited to get up and get in there and get to work. And I think we all feel that way, everybody on the museum staff, you know? And if my maintenance guy's a little quiet and grumpy, we go out and eat Mexican food together.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  And then they, the next day they're back.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you mentioned you got maybe another year left there out there in your role at the museum. Do you have, you have plans after?

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Well, I keep getting all these interesting invitations. I had a consulting business where I was working in Asia and the Middle East.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  What were you consulting?

• 42:26Speaker 05

  I'm a school accreditor. And there was two organizations that I was working for. And I would go in to do colleges and high schools. And I enjoy that work because it's fun. And you get to go someplace like Cambodia or Vietnam for a week. And it's VIP. And then you get a blast off and travel since you're over there.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  I was coming back from Qatar a couple of years ago. And I called my wife and I said, how good's our marriage? She goes, why? And I said, well, I'm coming through London. I think about going to Dublin for St. Patrick's Day. She goes, go for it because of 10 years, you're going to be in the nursing home. So I did, I went there and stayed in a youth hostel and

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  And just had a ball with St. Patrick's Day. So I enjoy that work. I, I did university teaching for 25, 30 years on the side. That's always there if I maybe want to do that. So there's other things I can do, you know? And we have, my wife's an antique dealer. So we use my pickup a lot, you know? So we might, we had a gallery, in fact, just up the street for a while. And then we lost our lease to redevelopment for all the right reasons. So there's lots of stuff to do. But I, I just want to get to the point where the museum, everything I can do is done. And then somebody new can come in and maybe take a different tact with educational programming or something.

• 43:45Speaker 05

  And not have to worry about irrigation and roof lines and drinking water. And I've done all that, air conditioning, that all's been completed.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  You know, I was expecting for you on the show today to, for us to kind of focus a lot on just the museum or talk about what's going on, you know, with the, with the Kern County Museum. But this has been more of a discussion, at least in my opinion, about like what, what you do in your later career.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  You know, how, how to be successful in your, in your later career. And this has been inspiring, you know, at least for me. I've known you, I've known you for quite a few years, but just to be able to hear the energy that you still have and the optimism that you have in, at this stage of your career is really great.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  Well, the, the only advice I'd have for folks that are getting older is just don't get in a rut. So every day when I drive to work, I take a different route. I found myself doing the same walk every day, so I changed that up.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 05

  I, if it was up to me, I'd go to Elson Borough Restaurant every day for lunch. I don't do that. I try to eat in different restaurants. And instead of just being on the bike path A to Z, today I'm going to walk 20th Street, the length of 20th Street this afternoon. And, and also you get locked into, there's one author I like. He's a Swedish crime novelist. Well, you know what? I forced myself to pop out and read something written in 1820, my last book.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 05

  So to keep changing it up, keeping it different.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Except when it comes to romance, keep that the same.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Don't risk it there.

• 45:18Speaker 05

  Find the right one to stay with it, yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  A couple of listener questions that are listening right now. One is, which green frog sign is at the museum? Miss that place. Do you know which ones are?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  The large sign where the guy was tipping his hat is in Glendale at the California Neon Sign Museum. My friend, Irvin Pike, who's a retired plumber, one of my favorite humans, called me and he had saw a sign in a garage in Oildale. And it was an eight foot in diameter green frog sign because they'd had a second store up on Oswald for a while. So I was lucky enough to acquire that sign in a slit and it's beautiful.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 45:53Speaker 05

  And he does tip his hat, just not as dramatically as the other sign.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  I see, I see. Another listener question here, it says, I've always wondered, but does the money raised for Village Fest go to the museum? Is that a museum?

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Yes, it does. Village Fest is coming October 18th. It's one of our favorite fundraisers because we set up on Saturday with 75 antique dealers. And then the public comes in on Sunday. But we have locked and loaded a $5 charge to get in, children 12 and under free. So it is a very easy, inexpensive family day. Come out, look for antiques. We're going to have live music this year.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  Stepping on the grass, my favorite bluegrass band is going to be playing all day. So it'll be, and then we have food out there like crazy, all the food carts. And if somebody wants to bring a picnic lunch in, great.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  We got three new, we got two new picnic areas people can enjoy. And all the proceeds go to our museum.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  That's fantastic.

• 46:53Speaker 05

  And we make about $25,000 if we're lucky.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I mean, that's huge for the museum.

• 46:58Speaker 05

  That's a lot of money for one day of fun.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Oh, it's huge.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  And we enjoy it. Our staff, we all get these crazy T-shirts and we drive around in our golf carts. And everybody's having a good time. There's music, you eat a taco. We have our beer booth back, you know, for people to get thirsty.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 05

  And it's, it's a good day.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Uh, it sounds like, sounds awesome. Again, when, when is that, when's Village Fest coming?

• 47:18Speaker 05

  October 18th, Village Flea. And so that's really going to be, now Village Fest is coming up.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  That's different.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 47:28Speaker 05

  That's coming up in a couple of weeks. And we get half of the gate of that, which is enormous.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  So we'll make $25,000 without raising a sweat. And the Care4Kids is the charity, wonderful. All the money they raise goes for children welfare projects, back to school clothing, you know, anything to benefit children in schools. And that's a competitive grant process. I love those guys. They all bring 5,000 people out, beer, live music, you know, just crazy time, crazy party. Two days later, there's not even a gum wrapper on the ground at the museum. They do such a good job cleaning up after the party.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  It is amazingly organized.

• 48:17Speaker 05

  Frank, the owner of Fugati's here in town, is the tip of the spear for that. He and Rick Peace, and they have a large committee and they do an incredible job. And that's coming up in a couple of weeks.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Wow, that's great. Couple of great activities coming up.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  So that's Village Fest and then Village Flea in October.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, great. Anything else, anything else that you could say for our listeners to help support the museum?

• 48:38Speaker 05

  Just everybody be mindful of Safe Halloween. That's our big fundraiser. And we take the 30th, 31st this year. Thank you, Lord. It's a Friday and a Saturday. That's where we make our big money. And we've got 60 porches, kids can come out, there's no automobiles, they can walk around, we have live music, all kinds of food and fun. And so that's another big day for us this fall.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Uh, Mike, Mike McCoy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the Money Wise Show. Really appreciate all that you do for this community. You're really appreciated. Thank you, Mike. We want to remind all of our listeners that if you'd like to listen to this show or any of our past programs, go ahead and subscribe to the Money Wise Podcast. It's commercial free and on all major podcast platforms like iTunes, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And remember these three things, be smart, be safe, and always be money wise.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through LPL Financial. LPL Financial and Money Wise Wealth Management are independently owned and operated.