I'm so glad to welcome you here to the Clark Howard Show. You know, our mission is to serve you

with advice and information that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life.

Now, in today's episode, real estate prices is in so many people's minds right now.

I personally know several people who've been burned in the past trying to flip houses.

And I'm going to tell you why buying right now as an investment is probably not your best idea.

There can be certain circumstances that it works, but generally not.

Also, if you've got a teen and you want them working this summer, oh, man, you're going to be in

luck getting them working at higher rates than in the past,

even though the overall job market is sluggish, jobs for teens, plentiful. Sorry, kids. So home

flipping is something there have been, you know, the TV shows, you'll go to a doctor's

office and they're looking for something to just put on the TV that nobody's going to object to.

And so they'll put on these home flipping shows that just play one after another.

And it was quite a thing, was like really lucrative 15 years ago, 12 years ago,

maybe even up to seven years ago. Today, buying a home to flip, you really get burned. and buying a home is an investment that you rent out.

It's much tougher to make the money work.

I mean, you know, we talk so much in society and on our podcast and YouTube show about the

difficulty for a first time home buyer buying a home.

The same factors that make it very difficult for a first-time home buyer here,

I mean, pretty much everywhere in America,

is because of the fact that the price of homes escalated over a multi-year period, starting about the

beginning of COVID, at a rate far in excess of people's incomes rising each year. So the

inflation at home prices, as you know, went crazy for several years.

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