Happy New Year's Eve. In today's episode, we're going to cover financial and economic lessons

that we learned from 2024, as well as what's ahead for 2025. Welcome to the Afford Anything

Podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries

a tradeoff. And that's true, not just for your money, but your time, focus, energy, any limited resource you need to manage.

This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship.

It's double-eye fire.

I'm your host, Paula Pant.

I trained in economic reporting at Columbia, and I help you craft decisions that build wealth.

And speaking of wealth building decisions, what a year, 2024 has been.

The biggest takeaway from this year is that 2024 was a year all about the edges.

Those small shifts that end up making massive differences, we're talking

about the edges that tip the balance over to the inflection point. Because think about it,

we've got the S&P 500 up nearly 34% this year. Inflation has cooled back to a two-handle. That's higher than 2% less than 3%.

And yet, there's an intense undercurrent of caution from some of the biggest voices in finance

who warn us that we're not out of the woods and that warning signs around potential black swans

are present.

So today, we're going to unpack what happened in 2024,

from the resilient U.S. economy to some pretty dramatic developments in science and tech,

that frankly didn't get the attention that they deserved.

And more importantly, we're going to talk about what this means for your money in 2025 and beyond.

So let's dive in with what I think is one of the most compelling storylines of the year.

It's the story of gloom amidst growth.

...