90% Chance For A Rate Hike... Ask Me How I Know

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks. Invest in your life.

Kirk Chisholm (0:11)

Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host, and today I'm joined with Doug Hagran. Hey, Doug.

Doug Hagran (0:17)

Another happy, well, I was gonna say happy Friday to you, but we moved today to Monday. So another happy moment with you, Kirk. Hope you had a good weekend. I usually get to say, hope you have a good weekend, hope you had a good weekend.

Kirk Chisholm (0:29)

I did, although a bunch of people got a little under the weather at my house because the kids are back in school. So naturally, we're all getting sick. But otherwise, it was great. Saturday was beautiful weather, Sunday, it rains, so we got to stay inside and relax. But yeah, overall, it was a good weekend. How was yours, Doug?

Doug Hagran (0:44)

It was great. And now I know I'm supposed to see you live. We're supposed to meet up in Texas. So get over that or stay the heck away from me. I don't need it. I'll be fine. So far, we've survived the beginning of the school year, illnesses that come rolling through like clockwork.

Now, it's a good weekend. We took a visit down to a college on Friday with my daughter, a soccer, it's a Luther College, really interesting liberal arts college in Decorah, Iowa, just south of Minnesota. They have a really good science program, great music program. They actually have an Emmy for their Christmas program, which is incredible. You don't see it. It's walking through the music hall, and all of a sudden they got a case, and there's a shiny Emmy right there. You don't get to see one of those every day.

Had a nice time down there. Weekend was relaxing. I'm getting my son ready for fall activities. He's 13 He got his hunter safety. Finished that up over the weekend. So it's 40 degrees today to open the morning. So I'm not going to be happy to see fall coming, but even though it's nice to see it's cooling off a little bit, at least as the temperatures wind down, there's a lot of fun things to do into the fall. So I'm excited about that.

Kirk Chisholm (1:52)

That's awesome, Doug. Yeah, Liberal Arts College, that means it's expensive.

Doug Hagran (1:56)

Actually, great segue. It means it looks expensive on paper. These are $60,000, $70,000 a year colleges. But going right into it, of course, my daughter has a good GPA, that helps. Also with music, they have a couple of potential full ride scholarships for music. So this is really critical for people listening. $60,000, $70,000 a year school.

Right now, just within academic, and before we get any music scholarships, we're looking at $20,000 or less. And she's probably going to be competing for, worst case, $5,000 a year for playing saxophone. She doesn't even have to major in it. So yeah, it does sound like that, but we're probably going to be looking at $15,000 a year, maybe even better. I mean, college planning matters. There's great schools out there, but they're just about an hour south of Rochester where the Mayo Clinic is. So this school, as well as a couple of the other schools that she's looking at, have direct affinities and internships with the Mayo Clinic for pre-med. One of the other schools she's looking at, 16 out of 16 people that went pre-med got into medical school. I mean, 100 percent is pretty good statistic. On top of that, the music program travels all over the world, good soccer. And the one thing that's also good feedback about that liberal arts is that the medical schools have actually said, look, we like that they're not a completely finished product, but they're still a little bit moldable.

So yeah, if you're just looking at the price tag, yeah, it scares you away. If you actually dig under the covers, it's kind of like the old Warren Buffett saying, it was a good segue.

You don't know who's swimming naked till the tide rolls out. If your glasses are polarized, you can kind of see through the ripples and see a little bit under the water. That's kind of what the planning is. I mean, it's amazing how much money is out there that they will throw at kids, and the price tag is absolutely irrelevant. I mean, sure, you want to pay full price, go for it.

Kirk Chisholm (3:43)

Well, we got a lot to cover here. This weekend, I was actually spending Saturday, spent the day in the yard, just working the yard and stuff. One other thing I was doing, I was listening to a lot of podcasts. I love podcasts, long form, and I was listening to a few on AI.