The new schedule was a response to the thousands of emails pouring in, as people were anxious, confused and needed help making sense of their financial choices in a highly uncertain time.

Those early inquiries morphed into a different type of question than I had previously never received in the dozen years of hosting a personal finance show: Is this really how I want to live? To answer, I would walk listeners through a series of probing questions to help them understand the options that existed.

These conversations prompted me to write a book, The Great Money Reset, a “guide to getting real and building your best life,” which will be available on January 24. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing snippets of the book to help you kick-start your personal transition, to break through whatever is holding you back and to help you thrive.

I open the book with a universal fact: To reset to a new place, you have to understand where you are today. In addition to tallying up what you have saved and any obligations that you have accumulated, you also need a detailed understanding of your spending habits.

I continue to be surprised at how many people discount the idea of focusing on consumption and/or are too ashamed about their spending habits to examine what’s really going on behind the behavior. Here’s an excerpt of one of my favorite chapters of The Great Money Reset:

“You might think you must blow your life savings to make a big change. Maybe not. People from all walks of life are rethinking their consumption habits. You can do the same, with an eye toward reducing expenses and directing those resources toward your dreams…

“There’s a powerful secret to achieving your dreams that I’ve been applying for some time, with considerable success. For the price of this book, I’m happy to let you in on it. It’s a behavioral strategy that’s simple, easy to apply, and guaranteed to work. Anyone can use it to feel more empowered financially, irrespective of where they live, how much they earn, or what they do for a living. So, are you ready? The secret to achieving your dreams is . . . spend less.

“Rather than arriving at ironclad judgments about any particular consumption choice, it’s most helpful simply to become more mindful of how we’re spending our hard-earned money and how it makes us feel.

“Uncovering our spending rules isn’t straightforward — it leads us into the complex netherworld that is our emotions. Here are some questions I recommend asking to help you understand your consumer behavior and the underlying psychology as completely as possible:

“Question #1: What do I really need in my life, and what do I only think I need?

“Many of us create rules premised on the idea that we require certain goods or services to be happy and healthy. We all must make purchases corresponding to the lower rungs of the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs — food, water, a safe place to live, heat, healthcare, and so on. When it comes to higher-order needs such as our need to feel connected to others or our need to be creative and feel self-actualized, our required purchases become less obvious.”

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

Fidelity’s 2023 New Year’s Financial Resolutions Study found that two-thirds of respondents are considering a financial resolution for 2023, a share that has remained remarkably consistent over time.

So too have the top resolutions: save more money (39%), pay down debt (32%), and spend less money (28%). But “for the first time in the study’s 14-year history, more Americans plan to save money for short-term goals rather than long-term goals as part of their New Year’s resolution.”

The short-term vs. the long-term shift likely has much to do with Americans’ contending with inflation and the impact that the three years of pandemic have made on our lives. Of those planning a financial resolution for the new year, the vast majority (94%) say they’re approaching it differently given events of the last couple years, with nearly half “considering more conservative goals. Those making financial resolutions hope to achieve ‘greater peace of mind’ and ‘live a debt-free life.’”

To help out, I am refreshing my resolution advice of year’s past:

Track spending

The start of the year is an ideal time to review what’s coming in and more importantly, what’s going out. To track your cash flow, download a free app or use your bank’s app. The idea is to figure out where you stand now, how much money is available to help achieve your resolutions, and then you can create an actionable plan to fulfill them.

Replenish savings

Many have depleted their pandemic savings to contend with higher prices. That’s why the number one priority should be replenishing or funding an emergency reserve that can cover six to 12 months of your living expenses.

Unlike the previous decade, where savers earned paltry rates on their “safe money,” many high yield savings accounts are yielding roughly 3% and 6-month Treasury Bills are yielding about 4.6%. (You can compare savings rates at depositaccounts.com or bankrate.com.)

Establish an automatic transfer of a set amount of money from your checking to build this fund. You should also use this fund to hold the money necessary to fund any large expenses that will occur over the next 12 months.

Reduce credit card or other high interest debt

With the Fed continuing to hike rates, the cost of servicing debt is not going away any time soon. After funding your emergency reserve, redirect the automatic payments to accelerate your debt pay-down, chipping away at the highest interest debt first and working your way down.

Contribute to your retirement account, to the best of your ability

The IRS announced increases to the annual limit on contributions to work-based retirement plans (401(k), 403(b), 457), which will increase to $22,500 (catch-up contributions for those over 50 increase to $7,500). The IRA limit will increase to $6,500, but the over-50 catch-up remains at $1,000.

Rebalance your investment accounts

After three stellar years of investing, 2022 challenged every investor’s nerves. While it’s human nature to feel skittish after enduring the volatility and the pain, try to avoid guessing the highs and lows – or when to get in or out of a particular market.

Instead, go back to basics: determine your goals and create a plan to diversify your investments across different asset classes. If you haven’t done so lately, rebalance your accounts to make sure that the percentages are in line with your desired allocation.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

Temporary/transient inflation is so 2021

Remember in March of 2021, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that pandemic supply chain bottlenecks were the cause of surging prices? 2022 was a brutal reminder that prices can stay higher for longer than most expected. The Consumer Price Index peaked at 9.1% in June, before decelerating over the past five months. Through November, CPI was up 7.1% from a year ago.

Interest rates can rise fast

In January, the benchmark federal funds rate was close to zero and now stands at 4.25 to 4.5%. In March, the Fed began with a standard 0.25 percentage point increase, on its way to the most rapid pace of rate hikes in modern times, according to Charles Schwab.

That made the cost of borrowing soar, with credit card rates reaching record highs, auto loan rates jumping to the highest level in over a decade, and home equity lines of credit breaching 15-year highs.

Recession may be on the horizon, but not here yet

Although the economy shrank in the first half of the year, activity as measured by GDP, picked up in the third quarter, and is moderating in the fourth quarter. One reason that the economy is not wobbling even more is the job market, which is producing about 200,000 jobs per month, despite losses in sectors like tech, real estate, and media. With wages solid, particularly at the low end, and Americans sitting atop pandemic-era excess savings of $1.7 trillion, consumers closed out the year complaining, but still spending.

Housing is wilting, but not dead yet

Although the Fed does not control the rates on which mortgages are based, the trend of higher rates fed through to those markets as well, pushing 30-year loans to over 7%. “The year-to-date rise in mortgage rates has still stripped would-be homebuyers of one-third of their buying power,” according to Greg McBride of Bankrate, which has caused housing activity to slump. That said, prices are not cratering yet, but most expect them to drop in 2023.

Asset allocation and diversification couldn’t save you

It has been a brutal year for investors, as aggressive rate hikes by global central banks caused investors to dump both stocks and bonds. That said, over the long term, it’s awfully difficult when to get in and out of markets. Researchers at Vanguard summed it up: “From 1928 through 2021, there were more than 23,300 trading days in the U.S. stock market. Out of those, the 30 best trading days accounted for almost half of the market’s return.

Being out of the market at the wrong time is costly. And many of those best trading days were clustered closely with the worst days in the market, making precise timing nearly impossible.”

Sam Bankman-Fried is the Bernie Madoff of the Crypto era

The more you read about Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), the CEO of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the more he looks like an old-fashioned scammer, like Bernie Madoff or P.T. Barnum.

The disheveled huckster now faces criminal and civil charges from the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. SBF attracted some of the most influential Silicon Valley venture capital, but new and complicated technologies, delivered by a “wizard” can lure even seasoned investors.

The best antidote? Ask a lot of questions and as always, don’t believe the hype.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

This week I am highlighting the wonks, who broke through the chatter and helped explain economic and market trends occurring in real time.

Guy Berger

As the economy reopened after the worst of the pandemic, something very weird happened to the U.S. labor market. All of the sudden, workers of all types were reconsidering their options. As analysts breathlessly recited the stats (the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey or “JOLTs” was ready for a closeup!), the term “Great Resignation” took hold.

Early in 2022, I spoke with LinkedIn principal economist, Guy Berger, who posited that millions of Americans were not quitting forever. Rather, they were finding new roles in different industries. He dubbed the trend “The Great Reshuffle.”

As soon as Berger laid out his case, I started hearing from people about the changes that he had described. Americans of all ages and all earning levels were rethinking their relationships with work. Some sought more consistent or fewer hours, others opted for lower levels of stress and quite a few used the pandemic as the springboard to start their own ventures. In addition to transitions among prime work age (25-54), Berger also correctly predicted that the pre-COVID trend of Baby Boomer retirement would accelerate.

James Mackintosh

Long before (OK, months in this case) politicians made Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing a wedge issue, James Mackintosh penned a stinging series in the Wall Street Journal, which exposed the flaws of ESG investing.

While reports from large firms and the consultants that support them (both of whom often were trying to market and sell ESG funds) touted higher returns and lower downside risk, Mackintosh pointed out that in many instances, time horizon matters. Just think of it this way: If you owned oil and gas companies from 2015-2019, returns were terrible, but amid the surge in commodity prices, these same companies saw profits (and their stock prices) soar.

This is not to say that Mackintosh thinks that environmental, social, and governance issues are not worthwhile, but his larger concern is that ESG investing “distracts everyone from the work that really needs to be done.” He adds: “Rather than vainly try to direct the flow of money to the right causes, it is simpler and far more effective to tax or regulate the things we as a society agree are bad and subsidize the things we think are good.”

Kathy Jones

As the bond market started to tank, I turned to one of the great explainers, Kathy Jones, the chief Fixed Income strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research.

Even when I spoke to her in May, Jones underscored that 2022 was likely to be an awful year for bond investors because the pandemic inflationary spike had prompted the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Jones explained that as interest rates rise, existing bonds lose some of their value because their yields become less attractive than those offered by new bonds. So, to entice an investor into buying your existing bond, you would need to sell it for less than you paid.

Even though 2022 would likely be the worst year on record for bonds, Jones saw a bright spot: 2022 would also be a watershed year for those who had bemoaned low income producing investment opportunities for the past several years. The steep rise in yields would be a salve in the future for those who were either purchasing new bonds or reinvesting into bond funds at lower levels.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

These authors, journalists, and filmmakers take what may seem mundane or complicated and bring it to life through engaging storytelling. Each year, I highlight those interviews that stuck with me throughout the year – and beyond.

Here are the standouts for 2022:

Daniel H. Pink

I first met Dan after he had written When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. His research from the fields of psychology, biology, and economics, illustrated why the timing of certain decisions is more within our control than we would think.

In 2022, Pink followed up with The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. In our conversation, we discussed the paradox of how we frame past experiences.

Pink calls it the At Leasts/If Onlys and it goes something like this: “‘I didn’t get that promotion, but at least I wasn’t fired’. At Leasts deliver comfort and consolation.” Contrast that sentiment with this one: “‘If only I’d taken a few more stretch assignments, I’d have gotten that promotion.’ If Onlys deliver discomfort and distress.” Why choose discomfort and distress over comfort and consolation?

Because doing so may allow us to dive deeper into and take accountability for our decision-making. It can also help us be more forgiving to ourselves and importantly, can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives.

Annie Duke

Duke is a data scientist-turned professional blackjack player-turned author of two books, Thinking in Bets and How to Decide.

In her most recent work, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, she tackles two opposing forces: grit and grace. In our high-powered, achievement-oriented culture, Duke notes that “grit is a virtue, quitting is a vice.”

She explores why quitting is seen as negative, when in fact quitting allows you to incorporate new information and make better decisions. “Having the option to quit is what will keep you from being paralyzed by uncertainty or being stuck forever in every decision you make.”

Duke underscores her thesis by citing cognitive biases which can help explain why people stick it out far too long, whether it’s a job, an investment, or even a relationship. “If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.”

Spencer Jakab

Perhaps you never really understood what the heck happened amid the pandemic “meme stock craze.” That was the period when investors used social platforms and discussion board sites like Reddit and Twitter to discuss and ultimately pile into companies like Gamestop and AMC Entertainment, ostensibly to punish short sellers – and stick it to the elites.

Lucky for you, Wall Street Journal columnist Jakab’s engaging book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors, tells the story of the GameStop squeeze, and the surprising winners of a rigged game.

Far from democratizing the financial world and markets, Jakab shows that the ultimate winner was the inside Wall Street crowd that feasted on retail investors.

Abigail Disney

Activist and filmmaker Abigail Disney may have had a tough Thanksgiving.

In her documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, she is pretty tough on the company that her father and uncle started decades ago. Disney interviewed Disneyland custodians over a two-year period (2018-2020), to shine a light on the disparity between workers, executives, and shareholders.

The film serves as interesting walk down memory lane of American capitalism.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

While you may not be able to control any of those big issues, this is the time of year where I encourage you to be proactive, especially in light of the changes that are around the corner in 2023.

Those changes are primarily due to the inflation adjustments within the tax code for tax year 2023. The IRS announced increases for the standard deduction, new ranges of income to which existing marginal tax rates apply, increases to the Earned Income Tax Credit, contributions to health flexible spending arrangements, and the annual exclusion for gifts, to name a few.

Additionally, the annual limit on contributions to employer-based retirement plans will increase to $22,500, SIMPLE IRAs will rise to $15,500 and catch-up contributions for those over 50 will increase to $7,500 (up from $6,500) for 401(k) plans, 403(b) contracts, 457 plans, and SARSEPs, and to $3,500 (up from $3,000) for SIMPLE plans and SIMPLE IRAs.

Got it? Good…now let’s do some year-end planning!

Think about 2022 taxes NOW

Use the IRS’s withholding estimator to see if you have had enough money set aside to pay your tax bill in April. If not, notify your payroll department to increase your withholding through the end of the year. If you are not working or are self-employed, you may want to make an estimated tax payment to reduce or eliminate potential tax penalties.

Slash your tax bill with Uncle Sam’s help

The best way to reduce your tax liability is to maximize your pre-tax retirement plan contributions before the end of the year. Most employer plans allow you to increase your contributions but be sure to readjust after the New Year.

Consider a Roth conversion

If you had lower income in 2022 or the value of your traditional IRA is down, it may make sense to convert to a Roth IRA. When you do so, the amount that you convert will add to your taxable income.

Considering that tax rates are historically low, paying the tax due now may be among the smartest decisions you could make over the long term. Once you convert to a Roth, the money will grow tax-free and when you retire and withdraw it, there will be no tax due. Because Roth plans are not subject to Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs), many use them to help control future taxation of Social Security benefits and/or increased costs of Medicare, which are income tested.

Down markets don’t impact RMDs

The IRS does not care that the value of your retirement accounts is down — you still must take your RMD before the end of the calendar year, or else you will pay a whopping penalty.

Embrace your losers

It has been a rough year for investors, but Uncle Sam may help assuage your suffering. If you have a taxable investment account, you can sell losing positions and use those losses against sales of winning positions. If you have more losses than gains, you can deduct up to $3,000 of losses against ordinary income. If you have more than $3,000 of losses, you can carry over that amount to future years.

When you reinvest the proceeds of these sales, be mindful of the IRS’ “Wash Sale” rule, which won’t let you deduct a loss if you buy a “substantially identical” investment within 30 days. To avoid the rule, wait 31 days, and then repurchase the stock or fund you sold, or replace it with something that is close but not the same (hopefully something cheaper, like an index or an exchange-traded fund!)

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

Two COVID-era charitable benefits have expired

The CARES Act permitted taxpayers who claim the standard deduction to get a deduction on their 2020 and 2021 returns for cash contributions of $300 they made to qualifying charitable organizations. It also allowed for a larger deduction (up to 100 percent of AGI, from 60%) for itemizers. Those two features are gone for 2022 and the rules revert back to what they were pre-pandemic.

Very few can claim a tax benefit for giving

To receive a tax benefit for giving in 2022, you must itemize your deductions. That means that you need to tally what you spent on state and local taxes, mortgage interest, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and charitable donations.

If your total itemized deductions are higher than the standard deduction amounts for 2022 ($12,950 for singles, $25,900 for MFJ, and $19,400 for HOH), then you would choose to itemize.

Only about 10% of tax filers itemize, which means that most people who give to charity are doing so for altruistic purposes, not for tax savings. You can try to “bunch” deductions into a single year to push you above the threshold, in which case you should accelerate charitable giving for that particular year.

Itemizers can still give with Uncle Sam’s help

If you have a taxable investment account, you can gift highly appreciated securities to charities: you’ll write off the current market value, not just what you paid, and avoid capital gains taxes.

Retirees can avoid taxable income and feel virtuous

If you’re over 701/2, consider a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD), which allows you to gift up to $100,000 directly from your IRA to a public charity (not to a private foundation, a charitable supporting organization or a donor advised fund), without having to include the distribution in your taxable income.

If you use the QCD, you can’t deduct the amount as a charitable contribution, but if you are lucky enough to not need the money for cash flow, a QCD will allow you to avoid paying taxes on the distribution, and it may also satisfy your Required Minimum Distribution.

Consider Donor Advised Funds (DAFs)

These accounts allow you to contribute cash, appreciated assets, or investments and grant to a charity at any time; write off the current market value (not just what you paid) to escape taxes on the accumulated gains; and recommend grants to your favorite charities whenever makes sense for you. DAFs also allow you to give in a year when you have had higher than expected income, or when you are bunching deductions.

Nuts and bolts:

Be cautious and vet your charity

Do not donate over the phone or give anyone your credit card or other personal information until you verify it’s legit with the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organization Search tool.

To see how much of your donation goes to supporting programs (versus overhead), access resources like the Better Business Bureau’s (BBB) Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Watch, GuideStar, Charity Navigator and GiveWell.

Keep good records

For any cash or property valued at $250 or more, you must have a receipt (bank record, payroll deduction or written communication) identifying the organization, the date and amount of the contribution and a description of the property.

For text donations, flag the bill with the name of the receiving organization, the date of the contribution, and the amount given. If you are facing the end of year deadline, use a credit card, so the donation is deductible as of the date the account is charged.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

Who is eligible for loan forgiveness?

Loan forgiveness ONLY APPLIES to federal loans, not private ones — or to Federal Family Education Loans that were issued and managed by private banks but guaranteed by the federal government.

The administration’s plan intended to provide a one-time loan cancellation of $10,000 to any borrower who earns less than $125,000 annually ($250,000 for Married Filing Jointly or Head of Household). Pell Grant recipients (student aid that is geared to lower income borrowers) would be entitled to $20,000. (The rationale for the larger amount is that Pell Grants used to cover nearly 80% of the cost of a four-year public college degree; now, they only cover a third.)

Parent Plus loans held by the Department of Education – and whose borrowers fall under the income limits, would be eligible to receive cancellation of up to $10,000.

While current students are also eligible for loan forgiveness, those who are claimed as a dependent would have their eligibility determined based on their parents’ or guardians’ income.

What should borrowers do right now, as the legal battle continues?

Given that federal loan payments are on pause through the end of the year accruing zero percent interest, it makes sense to get a jump on any outstanding balances above the forgiveness threshold amounts if you can afford to do so. Payments now will shorten the amount of time on your loan, which can be an emotional relief and may also allow you to fund other priorities sooner.

During this waiting period, go to studentaid.gov and make sure that you have auto-debit enrollment — doing so will keep you on track for the resumption of payments and help avoid missed payments and penalties. If your financial situation has changed, check out the DOE Loan Simulator to determine if a different repayment plan better meets your needs or if consolidation might help.

If you previously had not signed up for loan forgiveness, what should you do?

The Department of Education says that because of the current court orders, they are not accepting new applications. If you have already applied for forgiveness, they will hold your application.

The Biden plan also contemplated changes to Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans — are those at risk of being rolled back?

IDR plans are for borrowers who can’t afford the scheduled loan repayments. The repayment is based on what you earn, which is currently 10% of your discretionary income. The Biden plan contemplated that payments would be capped at 5% of income; would raise the amount of income that is protected from repayment; and would forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments, instead of 20, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. All of these changes are on hold until there is resolution of the legal battle.

Are there any updates on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program?

The Administration had previously eased some of the rules for PSLF, which means more people who work FULL TIME for government, the military or non-profit organizations may qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation.

What will loan forgiveness cost?

Debt cancellation will cost around $500 billion, according to analysis by researchers at the Penn Wharton Budget Model. However, adding forbearance and changes to IDR, costs could swell to $1 trillion.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

To start, the Federal Reserve got busy raising interest rates, which tends to hurt the earnings of growth companies, like those in the technology sector. Rate hikes might have been manageable but compounding the problem for the once-high flying tech sector is a simple fact: management got it wrong.

The storyline a year ago was that the pandemic had accelerated the trends that were in place: consumers, workers, and businesses were moving to a full online existence, where brick and mortar would be a thing of the past and so too would in-person experiences like going to the gym, attending concerts and events, and shopping for everything from toilet paper to cars to houses.

After cashing in on huge pandemic era profits, the leaders of many tech companies staffed up as if the trends would continue to fuel even more profits in the future.

A year later, the once-lauded geniuses of these companies had to sheepishly admit that they had gotten ahead of themselves. In a letter that announced a 13% reduction in workforce (11,000 workers), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the problem that he and many of his fellow tech CEOs made: “At the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

Meta, Getir, Twitter, Lyft, Carvana, Stripe, Opendoor, Netflix, Shopify, Snap, Peloton, Twilio – along with more than 700 other companies, have laid off almost 120,000 tech workers this year, according to Layoffs.fyi. These losses are occurring amid a labor market which has added an average of 290,000 workers per month for the past three months.

So where does this leave investors in the once high-flying companies?

The NASDAQ Composite and NASDAQ 100 indexes have dropped by almost 30% from year ago high prints, and many of the biggest names are down two times that amount. That’s a far cry from the end of last year when mega-tech firms helped boost the S&P 500 by almost 27%. In fact, tech was the biggest contributor to the S&P 500’s stunning 2019-2021 more than 90% gain, the best three-year performance since 1997-99.

As a self-declared wimp when it comes to investing, that three-peat of stock performance prompted me to warn, “We know what happened after that period — the dot-com boom went bust and it took a decade for the NASDAQ to recover.” To be clear, I did not have a crystal ball, but was pointing out that very little in the investment world is new or groundbreaking.

Yes, what moves markets is different, but the patterns remain the same. Human beings tend to get euphoric when times are good, and despondent when they are bad. It’s also why a year ago, when every crypto bro made you feel like you wanted to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum, you had to remind yourself that investing is a risky endeavor.

I don’t know whether the tech rout is over or if there are more shoes to drop. What I do know is that the patient investor who sticks to her game plan is usually better off than the one who jumps on the bandwagon in either direction. If that doesn’t sound like advice from a self-proclaimed investment wimp, I don’t know what does!

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.

In October, the economy added 261,000 jobs and the unemployment rate drifted up to 3.7%. Although the employment landscape is solid, as we enter the fourth quarter of the year job growth is decelerating.

Over the past three months through October, monthly job creation has totaled nearly 290,000, down from the monthly average of 407,000 for the whole year, and a significant slowdown from the 2021 pace of 562,000.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans participating in the labor force is still low, at 62.2%, down from the 63.4% before COVID-19. Bill McBride of Calculated Risk notes that “the overall participation rate is impacted by both cyclical (recession) and demographic (aging population, younger people staying in school) reasons,” which is why focusing on 25 to 54 year old workers makes sense.

In that age group, participation is “close to the pre-pandemic levels and indicate almost all of the prime age workers have returned to the labor force.”

The most important aspect of the jobs report for the Federal Reserve is wages, which were up 4.7% from a year ago. October was the first month where annual wage growth was below 5% since December 2021. Yes, I know workers want higher wages, but the central bank wants to see wages come down in order to help alleviate the four-decade in inflation.

It seems like a long time ago that the Fed started its interest rate hikes, but it was just this past March — then, the central bank was worried about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and chose a modest 0.25% increase in the fed funds rate. That action seems quaint, considering that the same officials have recently enacted four consecutive 0.75 percentage point increases, bringing the benchmark rate to a range of 3.75 to 4%, up from zero earlier this year.

Despite the Fed’s best efforts, prices are up by more than 8% from a year ago.

The problem is one that the central bank acknowledged in the accompanying statement for the November meeting: there is a lag between the action of raising interest rates and how quickly those higher rates impact the economy.

This new addition to the official statement suggests that the central bank could pull back on the size of future rate hikes, though Chair Jerome Powell has noted repeatedly that the Fed still “has a ways to go” before reaching the “terminal rate,” which is the rate at the end of the hiking cycle.

Can the Fed get to that magical terminal rate without throwing the economy into a recession?

That’s the question plaguing investors.

The economy contracted in the first half of the year, but came back in the third quarter, which more than erased the decline. But many Americans have buckled under the pressure of inflation, dipping into their pandemic savings in order to keep the wheels of the economy turning. As of September, the Personal Savings Rate dropped to 3.1%, down from the pre-pandemic level of 9.3% in February 2020.

With consumers under pressure and businesses preparing for a slowdown, most economists are penciling in at least a mild recession in the first half of next year. The reason is with every rate hike, there is a higher probability that the Fed’s campaign will slow down the economy too much, tipping us into recession.

Jill Schlesinger, CFP, is a CBS News business analyst. A former options trader and CIO of an investment advisory firm, she welcomes comments and questions at askjill@jillonmoney.com. Check her website at www.jillonmoney.com.