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Chapter 1: What is the significance of discussing finances on Valentine's Day?
A couple's financial manifesto revisited and the Dowdy Dow has its day. You're listening to the Saturday Valentine's Day personal finance edition of Motley Fool Money. I'm Robert Brokamp, and this episode, I'm going to do something I've never done over my 14 years of podcasting.
I'm going to have my wife on as a guest as we look back on a plan for how we'd manage our finances that we wrote together 26 years ago. But first, let's discuss some items from recent headlines. On February 6th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average $50,000 for the first time after crossing $40,000 less than two years ago.
Plus, as pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal article, it has been the index to beat over the past few months. Since Halloween, the Dow has returned 5.9% compared to 1.8% for the S&P 500 and a loss of 2.6% for the Nasdaq.
The Dow, which was called the old man index by a 30-year-old investor quoted in the journal article, has benefited from a lower allocation to the recently lagging tech sector and higher allocations to surging sectors like industrials, materials, and energy. It is admittedly a quirky index, weighting its 30 holdings according to each company's stock price instead of their market capitalizations.
Currently, the top holdings are Goldman Sachs at 12%, Caterpillar at 9%, and then Microsoft, Home Depot, Amgen, Sherwin-Williams, and American Express each come in at around 5%. That makes for a diversified mix of holdings that, at least currently, is working out pretty well. Next up, mixed signals from the job market. Let's start with the good news. On February 11th, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that nonfarm payrolls increased by 130,000 for January, more than twice the number economists were expecting, and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.3%. Also, discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons declined to 8%. That said, most of the new jobs came from healthcare and social assistance.
In fact, without healthcare, the economy would have lost jobs over the past year, according to Moody's chief economist, Mark Zandi. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that job openings in December were at the lowest level since 2020.
And Schwab's Lizanne Saunders posted on social media a chart from Arbor Data Science which shows that the 12-week moving averages for Google searches on the terms unemployment insurance, filing for unemployment, and job boards have reached levels not seen since 2021. And now the number of the week, which is $5.8 trillion.
That's how much more the US government will spend this year than it takes in as revenue from taxes and tariffs. According to a report published this past week by the Congressional Budget Office, that amount of annual overspending is projected to grow to $6.3 trillion by 2036.
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Chapter 2: How did Robert and Elizabeth create their financial manifesto?
Of course, this just means that Uncle Sam will just have to keep on borrowing money. According to the CBO, federal debt will increase from 101% of GDP this year to 120% in 2036, surpassing its previous high of 106% of GDP in 1946, right after World War II. How a couple of young, newly married fools agreed to manage their finances when Motley Fool Money continues.
In January of 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, became encased in the ice in the Weddell Sea. Through determination, grit, and savvy, Shackleton would lead his men through a brutal winter, then over hundreds of miles of Antarctic ice, followed by 800 miles across some of the roughest waters in the world.
It is one of the most extraordinary and inspirational journeys in the history of exploration. Find this story and many others at the Explorers Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts or at explorerspodcast.com.
It's Valentine's Day, and there's nothing more romantic than talking about money with your significant other. Well, maybe not, but it is important because the evidence is clear that financial acrimony can lead to marital disharmony.
For example, a study entitled Examining the Relationship Between Financial Issues and Divorce found that, quote, financial disagreements are stronger predictors of divorce relative to other common marital disagreements, end of quote.
Soon after my wife and I got married 26 years ago, we decided to make sure we were on the same financial page by writing what we called our financial manifesto, which we then published as an article on full.com.
Here to talk about what was in it and how much we actually stuck to it is my wife, Dr. Elizabeth Brokamp, who is a licensed professional counselor, a professor of clinical mental health counseling, and the mother of four wonderful kids. Welcome to Motley Fool Money, Elizabeth.
Thank you so much, Robert. It's nice to be here. It's kind of like take your wife to work day.
I guess it is. All right, so let's set the stage. It was the year 2000. We'd been married for less than a year at that point, and we both worked at The Motley Fool. We decided to write our manifesto, and then we turned it into an article, even though neither of us were actually official writers for The Motley Fool at the time.
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