A couple of months ago, I noted that the housing market had a problem: there were too few homes for sale. Persistently low inventory means that there are a lot of frustrated would-be buyers out there, spending weekends at open houses. It also has led to home prices continuing to rise at a more than six percent clip from a year ago.
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The 2018 Retirement Confidence Survey (“RCS” – a joint venture between the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute and research firm Greenwald & Associates) is out and about two-thirds of Americans feel confident or at least somewhat confident in their ability to retire comfortably. Yet nearly the same share say that preparing for retirement makes them feel stressed.
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The unemployment rate edged down to 3.9 percent in April, the lowest level since December 2000. To put that into perspective, the top song in the U.S. that month was “Independent Woman, Pt 1” by Destiny’s Child, long before Beyoncé Knowles was known as “Queen Bey” or had a “Beyhive” with millions of followers! But I digress. According to the New York Times, “In the last 60 years, there has been only one sustained period where unemployment stayed below 4 percent: the late 1960s.”
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