Notices by Andrew Lokenauth (fluentinfinance@mastodon.social)

Poverty gets more expensive the longer you’re stuck in it.

Can’t afford a credit card bill? Next month, pay the bill plus interest and late fees.

Can’t afford a car repair? Later, pay for a tow, a bigger repair, and missed work.

Can’t afford a doctor visit? Later, pay an ER bill.

Can’t afford to fix a cavity? Later, pay for a root canal.

Poverty charges interest.

The typical home now costs $3,200 a month.

You need at least $120,000 a year to afford it.

Meanwhile, the median household income is $84,000.

An entire generation under 30 is starting to believe a home and family will never happen for them.

A generation with no stake in the system would rather watch it burn. Society isn’t ready for that.

A family of four now needs $178,000 to $301,000 a year to get by in America.

Meanwhile, the median U.S. household only earns $83,730.

The American Dream now requires an income most will never earn.

I have a joke about trickle-down economics.

Sadly, 99% will never get it.

Married and own a home by age 30 in America:

1950: 50%
1960: 52%
1970: 48%
1980: 45%
1990: 43%
2000: 35%
2010: 25%
2026: 12%

Crazy numbers.

$100,000 a year is the new $39,000.

In 1990, a $100,000 salary had the same buying power as about $255,000 today.

Today, $100,000 buys what roughly $39,000 bought in 1990.

A six-figure salary isn’t what it used to be.

TRUMP coin is now down 98% from its peak.

A $10,000 investment at its peak would be worth $204 today.

Around 1 million wallets have now lost a combined $3.81 billion.

Why would anyone invest in this??

720,000 people left the U.S. labor force last month.

This pushes the labor force participation rate down to 61.5%, its lowest level since 1976 (outside of the pandemic).

The biggest drop came from prime-age workers, aged 25 to 54.

These are peak working and earning years.

That deserves more attention than it's getting.

BREAKING: A rare, drug-resistant bacterium showed up in a Wyoming city's water. Investigators traced it to Mark Zuckerberg's $800 million Meta AI data center.

That water carried Cupriavidus gilardii. A rare bug that shrugs off most antibiotics.

It knocked two of the city's water plants offline for months.

That tells you where the AI boom is heading next.

Nearly half of American adults under 30 now live with a parent.

In 2019, it was 37%.

Since then, the median home list price jumped 34% to $430,000. Rent jumped 18%. The country is short about 4 million homes. The typical first-time buyer is now 40.

The day before Trump paused tariffs and sent the S&P 500 up 9.5%, his investment accounts bought 327 stocks worth up to $12.8 million.

It was one of the biggest one-day market rallies in history.

The trades were disclosed more than a year late.

The penalty was $200.

Parking tickets cost more than that.

Meta is up 10% after Bloomberg reported it’s building a cloud business to sell excess AI computing capacity.

Investors were worried Meta was spending too much on AI data centers. Now Meta is turning that spending into a new revenue stream.

That now puts Meta in the same arena as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

The average new car payment just hit $772/month. A record high.

4-year car loans used to be normal. Now buyers are stretching payments to 6, 7, and even 8 years.

1 in 5 financed new-car buyers pays $1,000+ a month.

That’s not a car payment anymore. That’s a second rent check.

Rent is up. Insurance is up. Food is up. Student loans are back. And the average new car is close to $50,000.

JUST IN: Trump bought up to $5 million of Axon stock.

Two weeks later, ICE moved toward a $220 million Taser deal.

Axon makes Tasers. Axon also controls 90% of the US Taser market.

And the White House says there are “no conflicts of interest.”

Politicians should not be trading individual stocks while the Government is handing out contracts.

Public office should be public service.

It's pretty crazy that insider trading is illegal for everyone except the people who make the laws.

JUST IN: A bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $25/hour has been introduced in the Senate.

The federal minimum wage is still $7.25. It hasn’t changed since 2009.

For years, the debate was $15/hour. Now it's $25/hour. Shows you just how much the cost of living has changed.

JUST IN: The first human trial of "reverse-aging" drugs has started.

Life Biosciences dosed the first patients with ER-100, a drug built to make damaged eye cells act younger.

The method is called cellular reprogramming. If it works, the idea moves beyond the eye. Liver disease. Nerve damage. Brain decline.

Longevity pulled in $8.5 billion in 2024 alone. The market's headed for $314 billion by 2030.

The Fed runs a real-time tracker of what people spend at stores & restaurants. Almost nobody watches it.

This week, it flipped negative.

Real spending: Feb +0.8% → April flat → May -1.3%.

What a turn. Here’s why it matters.

Stocks are dumping. $2 trillion wiped out from US stock market today. S&P 500 down 2.6%.

Crypto is dumping. Bitcoin crashed under $60,000. Over $130 billion wiped out from crypto today.

Gold is dumping. Gold down 4% today.

Nasdaq-100 down -4.8% and Nasdaq down 4.2% today.

$1 trillion wiped out from Semiconductor stocks today. PHLX semiconductor index down over 10%.

Trillions of dollars wiped out today. Absolute bloodbath.

At some point... this bubble must burst.

In Missouri, voters ousted 4 city council members. The reason? They'd approved a $6 billion data center one week earlier.

360,000 Americans have joined Facebook groups fighting data center expansion.

Energy bills are rising because data centers drain power grids. Wells are running dry near server farms. People fear losing their jobs. The revolt is here.