Managing the Job Market and Your Parents’ Finances: Tips for the Sandwich Generation
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What is the sandwich generation and how does it impact finances?
Elizabeth, do you enjoy sandwiches? I do enjoy sandwiches, Sean. And actually, I had a fire chicken sandwich two days ago and I had an egg sandwich yesterday. And of course, no cheese because we are lactose intolerant over here.
You know, for me, I'm all about a classic PB&J, preferably with chunky peanut butter. But today we're going to talk about a different kind of sandwich, the financial one that you can find yourself in when you're of a certain age. Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius nerds. I'm Sean Piles.
And I'm Elizabeth Ayola.
This episode, we're looking at how to help manage the finances of aging parents while also caring for children.
Mmm, the sandwich generation. I am inching my way closer to that cohort.
Exactly. But first, our weekly money news roundup, where we break down the latest in the world of finance to help you be smarter with your money.
Today, we're talking about the labor market and how we, the public, are feeling about the economy. NerdWallet actually has a new report looking at our perception of how things are relative to what they really are. Our news colleague, Anna Helhosky, is here with more. Hey, Ana. Hey, Elizabeth.
Ana, this was a big topic of conversation last fall, right? During election season in particular, economists were saying, hey, the U.S. economy is doing pretty darn well, while voters were saying, no, no, it's not, at least not where we live.
Yeah, that's right. And the disconnect continues. So I'm joined by NerdWallet economist, Elizabeth Renter. Welcome back, Elizabeth.
Hey, Ana. Thanks for having me. It's always a great discussion.
So something we've talked about frequently is the disconnect between how people feel and what data says, especially when it comes to the economy. Can you give us an overview about how personal experience tends to shape perception about the economy and, in this case, our relationship with work?
Well, we know that people base much of what they think about the economy at large on their own personal experiences, and the labor market is a massive part of the overall economy. You know, when you think about our personal experiences within the labor market, you might think about how long we've been at our job or how we feel about our pay and benefits and how these things change with time. or our experiences when we're searching for a new job. And interestingly, all of these things are also important on a macro level when interpreting the health of the labor market. But our personal experiences go beyond the data. We might gauge satisfaction with our pay increases on whether it feels like we're able to increasingly buy more stuff or better afford the stuff we have.
But it can also be influenced by what we hear and see on social media or in our social circles.
Now, specifically about data, can you give an overview of how the labor market has behaved over the last few years in terms of the data that we've seen?
Yeah. So we've come through a really interesting transition over the last, say, four years, which makes this a great time to talk about the labor market. Towards the end of the initial months of the pandemic, workers had the upper hand and could find a new, perhaps better paying job relatively easily. That's because the demand for labor or workers outweighed the supply or the number of workers. So companies had to compete for them. This showed up in the data as high quits rates and high hiring rates as people turned over in jobs. Now, however, things have shifted. In part because of the Federal Reserve's campaign to slow inflation, the labor market has cooled, and labor supply and labor demand are in better balance.
So in the data, that appears as lower hiring rates, lower quits rates, and also fewer job openings.
Now let's talk about labor sentiment. How optimistic are people about the labor market?
That's a great follow-up question to what I was just talking about. Because that cooler labor market means people are feeling kind of stuck. It feels worse now than it did then. It's more difficult to find work now than it was just a few years ago. So more workers are pessimistic. which is showing up in popular measures of consumer sentiment, like the survey from the conference board, for example.
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