2025: Ask Farnoosh: Are We in a Housing Bubble? Plus: BNPL Warning Signs, AI Shopping Scams & Should You Consolidate Your 401(k)s?

**Farnoosh Torabi** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
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**Farnoosh Torabi** (1:01)
Welcome to So Money, everybody. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. It's Ask Farnoosh Friday time, and we're answering a really good question today about what to do when after 20 years of working and changing jobs, you look up and realize you've got a lot of retirement accounts all over the place. A 401k here, a 403b over there, maybe even have a rollover IRA, maybe another account you vaguely remember opening during the Clinton administration. Do you consolidate all of this? Is there a benefit to having your money spread across Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, wherever, or does it just make your financial life unnecessarily complicated? This question really has an underlying fear to it, I sense, from the listener, which is what if I consolidate everything with one financial institution and something happens to that institution? They go under, there's a Bernie Madoff event. We also have a follow-up question about the Trump accounts. Last week and for many weeks now, we've been talking about these new Trump accounts. And you may or may not know that Robinhood, the trading and investing platform, is serving as the brokerage and sole initial trustee for these government-backed accounts. And one listener writes in, why?
Why Robinhood? Why can't parents just open the account at another institution? Was this simply a logistical decision to get the program off the ground, or did Robinhood somehow buy its way into becoming the exclusive provider? I had to look this up. It's a very good question. I did some digging, and I think the skepticism is fair, you know, but there is a more nuanced answer to all of this, somewhere between nothing to worry about to, this is totally fishy. It's something in the middle. Also, we're gonna unpack some headlines. The buy now, pay later market is growing, and the tool is no longer just there for the sweater or the TV you want to buy. It's increasingly becoming used for necessities, including groceries, rent, utilities, basic bills. So we're gonna talk about what this tells us about the financial health of our American households in this moment. And shopping scams are getting harder to detect. I was joking with my brother the other day that he sent me a video. It's like, you know, my mother asking me if this is AI or if it's real, and you look at the video and it's a dog on a bicycle, like pedaling his way down the highway.
And I don't know, like we all need to get more educated on what is AI and what is not AI. But I fear most for the older generation who didn't grow up with technology or the World Wide Web. And they're still trying to figure out how to get their printer to work. Now they have to figure out and distinguish between AI and not AI.
And the scammers are taking advantage of that. And so traditional advice of like, check for misspellings, look for awkward language. Does the website seem kind of sketchy? You can't really rely on that anymore. AI is getting more intelligent. And as a result, it's leading to a lot more scams. But first, let's start with a question that's been on my mind recently.
And it's this, are we in a housing bubble? If you tuned in last week, you heard me talk about the new realtor.com ranking that named Montclair, New Jersey, the second hottest housing market in the country behind Peabody, Massachusetts. And of course, I live here in Montclair. So naturally, whenever someone tells me something I own is suddenly hot, my next thought is, great, but how long until it's not? And that's just where my brain goes. Because we've lived through enough, we've lived through several economic cycles to know that markets don't move in one direction forever. And housing has been on an extraordinary run. Prices surged during the pandemic, mortgage rates later doubled, affordability became brutal.