Could Rising Rates Bring More Home Price Cuts? | Barry Habib

Interest rates are going up and mortgage rates are going up as a result of it. At the same time, we have a shortage in the housing market. The question is, will the housing market get impacted significantly? I would not be surprised if you saw some moderation or some modest declines nationwide in home prices over the next few months. Today, we sit down with Barry Habib, who sits on the board of Fannie Mae, the largest mortgage company in the U.S. He'll tell us what he's seeing right now in the economy and the housing market and where he thinks the housing market is headed. So you've got 1.4 million demand, 1.1 million supply. The Iran conflict started at the very end of February. Rates started going up, oil prices started going up, and we had seen much more elevated interest rates as you got into the period of time. Thing of it is, though, is that we have gone up another leg since then. Will home appreciation remain resilient with now this second leg higher? I am skeptical about that. I'm Siamak. Welcome to Marketing Saturday. Barry, it's great to have you on. Welcome. It is really great to be here with you, my friend. We want to talk to you about real estate, mortgages, and interest rates. Right now, the interest rates are significantly higher. And how do you see what's unfolding right now in the mortgage space? Well, it's almost like a perfect storm, unfortunately. You have an extreme amount of debt that is being issued by our government. Just the debt service right now is over a trillion dollars. We're spending more on that than we do on defense. But also with the AI build-out, you have a tremendous amount of corporate debt that is competing for money. And so you have a tremendous amount of supply. And in order to garner demand, you have to offer a little bit of a higher interest rate. But then you combine that with what you're seeing going on with inflation. Now, inflation is being driven predominantly by oil prices. Oil is in everything. And it certainly drives headline inflation, which includes energy prices. But even in the core readings, you do get energy that becomes part of that, that kind of seeps through into it. Things like transportation or manufacturing. The energy prices, oil prices always work their way into these things. And the readings that we have are troublesome. And you probably already know this, but a nice analogy that you can give that really helps understand why inflation affects interest rates is, imagine if you, who are listening, are lending money. And if you're lending money and you're lending on a mortgage, you receive in return for loaning out that money a fixed payment every month. And that stays the same. So let's just hypothetically say that fixed payment is $2,000. And you go online, you go to your Amazon account, and you have a list of things that you wind up purchasing with that $2,000. Next month, you get the check that you receive for the mortgage payment. You take that and you go through your list on Amazon, and you get pretty much everything on that list once again. But over time, what you discover is you can't get everything on the list. And the reason is because of inflation making things cost more over time. So what it's really doing is it's taking that $2,000 payment. It's still the same payment. It's just not going as far. It's eroding over time. So if you think about this as someone who's loaning money, let's just say I'm loaning money at 7%. And if I think inflation's at 3%, then I make a 4% rate of return. That's my net that I'm getting, and I'm okay with that. But if I think that inflation is moving higher, let's say from 3% to 4%, well, then what's going to happen is that my 7% rate of return now is being eroded by 4% inflation. I'm only making a 3% net rate of return. So I can't do anything about inflation. But what I can do is I can charge a higher rate. And by doing so now, I could preserve my rate of return. That's why when inflation goes up, interest rates rise. Now, conversely, if inflation goes down, or if I believe that inflation's going down, well, I can get more aggressive. I can maybe take more market share. I could say something like, you know, I could go with a lower interest rate because inflation's lower, so it won't erode enough of my return. So I could still preserve my 4% return by charging a lower rate. And that's why inflation is such an important factor in determining the direction of interest rates. And we want to talk to you about home prices as well. But before we get into that, how do you see, do you have any thoughts of where the interest rates are headed? It's a hard question to answer. Well, in the short term, they appear to be headed higher from our perspective. Now, eventually, I think we will see a reprieve. Now, a lot's going to depend on a lot of the news items that come out. We just talked about how important inflation is. We also have to look at the labor market because the labor market plays an important role. If there's softening in the labor market, that helps interest rates. If inflation comes down, that helps interest rates. The situation and the tensions in the Middle East, if it appears that there might be greater oil flow, but not only oil flow, but if the refineries stop being under attack, which is another component of it, then you could probably see interest rates ease. Another big factor is the Federal Reserve. So the Federal Reserve's role is twofold. They want maximum employment, and they want inflation to be at what they call price stability, which they deem to be 2%. There's no magic about that. That's just an arbitrary number that they came up with. It's got a long history. Alan Greenspan, in 1996, was pressured by Janet Yellen, who said, if you had to, what would be your idea? He says, boy, I hate to think what would happen if it got out of this room, but if I had to pick a number, I'd say 2%. And since then, it's been at 2%. So it's not as if it's scientific, but that's what the Fed has chosen as its target. And with inflation readings significantly above that, if you go by their favorite gauge, and I think we should talk about that for a minute, the favorite gauge is core personal consumption expenditure. So that's a reading that you get, but it is deeply, deeply, deeply flawed. And one of the problems you have with core PCE, is personal consumption expenditure, is that it includes certain things that are either very lagging, like things like shelter costs, which are about a year behind based upon the way they're calculated. And shelter costs, predominantly rents or owner's equivalent rent. If you take a look at real-time numbers, they're much lower than the readings that the BEA, the Bureau of Economic is looking at, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those two numbers are much, much higher than the real-time numbers. So we're getting kind of a head fake there. The other is portfolio management fees. Portfolio management fees make up about four-tenths of a percent of an inflated number on these readings. And what is that? If you have money invested with brokers or with a mutual fund, they assess a fee to your portfolio. Now, if that fee were going up from 1% to 1.5% or 2%, clearly that's inflationary. But they don't look at it that way. They look at it the net dollars you pay. So with a stock market that has risen so dramatically, the net dollars you're paying in portfolio management fees are higher. The way the Fed's looking at it, mistakenly, misguided in this approach, is that they're thinking that's inflation, that's hurting the consumer. In fact, that's the best money I would spend because that means my portfolio is gaining. Things are really good. So it's a horrible methodology to look at it. And they're trying to re-examine it. They might fix it. They realize it's a problem, and they're thinking about fixing it. Now, if you put that core PCE aside and you look at the other inflation measures, like core CPI, it's dramatically lower. It's like 2.5%. If you look at the trueflation numbers, which measures 10 million data points, that's about 2.4%. If you look at the Dallas Fed trim mean, which Fed Chair Kevin Walsh wants to look at, that's also at about 2.4%. What that is is, let's break it down, the Dallas Fed, which is one of the 12 district banks, they look at this measurement, which then trims it. They take all of the inflation inputs and they remove the top certain amount, the bottom certain amounts, the top 31%, the bottom 24%. And then the rest, they average it or the mean. So that's why trimmed and then the mean of it. And that's showing 2.4%. Historically, I've looked back over the last 50 some odd years, it's a much better gauge of inflation. And Kevin Walsh wants to be more focused on this. Now, these numbers tell us that inflation is not the big issue that the core PCE thinks it is, but the market's interpretation is inflation's too high. And that's why you have elevated rates. So to answer your question, the direction of rates, when you see a move up this suddenly in interest rates from the 10-year, combine that with the Fed hiking rates, and you see the labor market not as strong as people would believe, I don't think the labor market is as strong, something breaks. And when it does, whether it be recession, it's more severe recession, situation where liquidity seizes up, any type of urgent attention required situation, interest rates tend to drop rather precipitously. So I think that for the short-term rates go up, but then I see them moving back down, maybe getting back down on a mortgage, let's say into the sixes, on the 10-year into the fours, maybe meaningfully into the fours. Now, do you see this having a big impact on the housing market and the mortgage space? Yeah, clearly. Well, you have to look at housing two separate ways. Housing could be an economic driver, and that's the pace of sales, the amount of sales. That's been anemic. It's been when you combine new construction with existing home sales, been below 5 million units, that's very anemic considering the level of population we have. But then there's the other way to look at housing, and that is housing the investment. So I'm gonna buy a home, is that home gonna go down in value? We saw in the late 2000s, where I'm losing money, I'm upside down, I own more of my mortgage than my home, I'm worried about that, or is it going to be like it has been in 79 out of the last 84 years, where I will see appreciation, where home prices will go up? Now, so far, we have seen very resilient home price appreciation. And if you break it down month by month, since March, and why that's important is, yes, the prices went up in January, February, but on a monthly basis, even since March, home prices have gone up between March and July. The July numbers just came out this morning before we started recording. That's the most recent data we have from Kay Schiller. And that shows, boy, that's some resiliency, because if you recall, the Iran conflict started at the very end of February, rates started going up, oil prices started going up, and we had seen much more elevated interest rates as you got into the period of time. For example, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages were at 5.875 at the end of February, and at the end of July, to combine it with the measurement period, they were up 1% to 6.875. So you have a much higher interest rate, and yet home prices still continued to rise. Thing of it is, though, is that we have gone up another leg since then. Will home appreciation remain resilient with now this second leg higher? I am skeptical about that. I think you have two whammies here. You've got the fact that you're entering into a more slower season of home price appreciation and a leg up in interest rates, I would not be surprised if you saw some moderation or some modest declines nationwide in home prices over the next few months. Now, that could be a buying opportunity for an individual because you can get a little bit of a better deal coming in. I wouldn't expect, it's not gonna drop 20%, okay? That's not going to happen. But could you see some moderation between 5% and 7% in home prices? I think that's a little on the aggressive side, but it is possible. And you mentioned it's not gonna happen. Do you have the thought that there's a shortage of housing? Because there's some thoughts, people are saying there's a shortage of housing, and then others are saying it's not affordable. You bring up an absolutely great point, and you touched on two things that are critical to talk about. One is the affordability, so let's address that in a moment. But first, let's talk about the basics of economics. The first thing we learned in economics is what drives price, it's supply and demand. So let's talk about those metrics right now. Now, listen, the first thing we have to say is that real estate is very, very local. So it's gonna obviously differ depending on your local neighborhood. Your zip code clearly will have your own environment based upon what supply and demand is, based upon what the situation for employment is. There's a lot of variables that go into the population. So we have to understand that the numbers we're gonna talk about are on a national average level, but clearly, everyone's gonna feel different based upon their own neighborhood. Local area, because in some areas, like California, we don't build as much homes, and in some other areas, in Florida, Texas, and other places, we build a lot, and it fluctuates. Absolutely correct. So let's break it down on a national basis first. So if we look at demand, demand comes from something called household formations. So what does that mean? Imagine if you got mom and dad and a child. They live in a household. At some point in time, that child grows up and says, I wanna get my own place, whether it's buying or renting, and they move out. Well, you still have mom, dad, and a child, still the same family, but now they have two households instead of one. They have formed a household. And the most recent data, which is a bit dated because it comes out quarterly, it was from the end of June, we're gonna get a new number very, very soon, we'll probably get a new number here, which will be on a quarterly basis that'll represent from the end of September. The most recent data we have shows we are forming 1.4 million households per year. Now, maybe that drops a little bit because interest rates have gone up and that does have an impact on it, but that's demand. Supply, where does supply come from? It comes from builders building homes. It doesn't come from somebody selling their home because theoretically they might sell a home, but they've gotta live somewhere else. So it's neutral when somebody sells a home. But new stock of homes comes from builders. Builders have recognized the landscape of interest rates. They know things are slower. It's awfully expensive for them to build vacant homes and carry them. So they have dropped their level of production to 1.1 million. So you've got 1.4 million demand, 1.1 million supply. It's a recipe for very resilient home prices even in the face of higher rates. Now, whether this leg up in higher rates means something or not, we'll have to see, but this does bode well for different markets. Now, there are gonna be markets that have greater levels of inventory because of construction. You mentioned Florida, you mentioned Texas, but also Texas and Florida are two of the biggest areas of migration that people are going to, which to some extent do absorb that. So we have to, it's like a Rubik's cube. You gotta kind of think about all of these things and contemplate them. And we do break this down in our data for every marketplace, but it does, you have to go pretty deep on this. Now you mentioned something else with affordability. And clearly affordability is stretched. But a lot of times we see data like from Redfin, which tries to guess how many sellers there are from buyers. That is not gospel. So we have to understand that there's a lot of work that they're trying to forecast, and certainly they're trying to do a good job, but it is not definitive. And I think it might, in my humble opinion, exacerbate the fact that there are more sellers than there are buyers in this market. I don't think that their numbers are truly accurate when it comes to that. But on affordability, what we have to look at is the way that they often determine it is median income, median home price. There's an inherent problem there that most people forget about. And that is, if you look at median income, median means half the people less, half the people more. And in the half the people less, think about it. You're including people that are really not home buyers. That wonderful 16-year-old who's enterprising and working hard at a Wendy's or a McDonald's, they're truly not a home buyer. So you're including them, and you're making the numbers for affordability skewed to appear a lot worse than they truly are. I'm not saying they're good. They're definitely stretched. But the media tends to emphasize some of these numbers to make them look extraordinarily poor when, yes, they're under pressure, but they're certainly not as bad as the media would have you believe. A fix for affordability is if home prices kind of leveled off, came in a little bit. They don't have to come down that much. But the magic elixir is time. Because as incomes rise over time, you can very quickly make up that difference. In a sense, there needs to be another way of measuring the income, like the median income for the home buyers. So if you had a way of understanding, so people that are in their 30s, they start thinking about buying home and having an average or the median of those incomes. You're dead on. You're spot on. I mean, it's a very astute observation. And the way to do it would be to just remove the bottom quintile or quartile, which aren't ever going to be at this moment, a true home buyer. And then you could come up with more reasonable rationale to see where we are. As I said, it's still stretched. There's no question. Nobody's trying to say, it's a great affordability situation. It's stretched and it's difficult. But the numbers that are published are exacerbating the fact of where we are. Now, Barry, you mentioned the 1.1 million units that are coming online. Does it include the multifamily? Because we're hearing- It does. Okay. So still a shortage. Those are dwellings. Yes, it does. And that's another issue. By the way, it's a really smart question to ask. Because it sure does include multifamily and its individual dwellings. So if you're putting a lot of those multifamily units on the marketplace, those may be constructed more for the rental area of things. And that could potentially screw it. Now, remember, when we talk about demand, that 1.4 million households, some of that's going to go for purchases. Some of that's going to go for rental. But you could have some skewing there because if you're producing more rentals or less rentals, you could have a very tight rental market compared to where you have for the home buying market. And we just got numbers from ApartmentList that show that the rental market does have some slack in it. We see vacancies, which hit a peak of 7.2%, 7.3%. It's still hovering around 7%. And we know that year over year on new rentals, there's a difference. A new rental is, hey, I've got nobody here. Come on in. So you'll be getting a little bit more of an incentive there. New rentals are actually slightly down year over year, meaning the cost of that apartment from a year ago to today, it's actually tiny bit cheaper, not meaningfully less than 1%, but showing that there's no real pressure there. But now on an existing home, an existing home, the landlord says, hey, you're going to renew your rent. Well, I know it's a pain in the neck to move. I also know it's expensive to move. So they have some pressure that they can apply to you and typically garner around 3% increase on rents over those. So when you combine both, we're really seeing rents go up at about 1.5% a year. But now going back to those inflation readings, those inflation readings are showing where we were kind of a year ago when it was closer to 3%. So you're getting overstated PCE and CPI. In a sense, this 300,000 shortage, is this happening every year or has there been a trend over the last few years? How much is the shortage based on what you're seeing? Because we've heard numbers from 1 million to 10 million. It fluctuates rather significantly. So this shortage that you see, that is a current reading that we get. We can compare those every quarter, but this was truly exacerbated during the years where you saw great appreciation levels with COVID, where you were seeing about 1.8 to 2 million household formations and builders were in the neighborhood of 1.4, 1.5 million new homes being built. And that's why you had such enormous levels of appreciation. It's something that you wanna look at carefully if you wanna see the health of appreciation across the United States. So yes, you are correct. It's important to see that relationship between the two and how it has influenced home price appreciation. Why do you think the builders are not building? Because it looks like a good opportunity if you have like that much of a shortage. Well, first of all, again, it is very local, number one, but also builders need to be very cautious and careful and also be forward thinking. Because if they believe that the interest rate environment would be less favorable and they have to think about it, would that curtail demand? And it does. And the other thing that they have to think about is how expensive it is to build a home and then carry that home, the cost of that for it being vacant or having to then be forced to sell under less favorable circumstances and give even greater levels of incentives or price discounts. So they wanna try and manage their portfolio wisely and maximize profitability. So that's why they don't wanna flood the market because it could backfire. Now, in terms of how would you go about buying a home right now, would you see this as a good opportunity to buy a home? Or do you think that this tightness in the market will continue for a number of years? I really think right now, even though interest rates are higher, it's a very good opportunity to purchase a home because you might be able to negotiate a little bit more with the seller than you have been in the past. I feel that you will make appreciation going into the future. Historically, it's probably closer to 4% or 5%. But even at a modest rate of appreciation of about 3%, what most people have to remember and you have to think of is that the leverage is magical in real estate. So let me start with this. Of all the net worth in the United States, statistically, more than half of it comes from home equity. So it's very hard to be very wealthy without investing in real estate. Or it's very hard to gain wealth without real estate as part of your portfolio. Now, a lot of people will say, well, the stock market's been great and I have my money in the stock market. And because I have my money in the stock market, it's gaining about 10%. Why would I wanna take it out of there and put it into real estate where maybe that home might appreciate 3%? Doesn't make sense on the surface, but it really does. Let me explain why 3% can be greater than 10%. So you see, let's use an example. Let's say a couple has $50,000 in the stock market and they're renting. Well, if they're getting 10% on that money, that's pretty darn good. That's roughly $5,000 a year and they're feeling good about that. But if they were to buy a home, let's just say that home's $500,000, they pull their 50,000 out, they put 10% down on the home and now that 3% appreciation, it's not on the 50,000, the 3% is on the 500,000. So really on their investment, they're making not 3%, but 30% because of the leverage. And instead of making 5,000 in the stock market, they profited 15,000, which is 3% of $500,000. Now, clearly somebody listening is gonna be thinking this through and they're gonna say, yeah, but hold on, Barry, but they've also now got a mortgage payment. You are absolutely correct, but this is the beauty of real estate. This is the magic of real estate is that while you do have a mortgage payment, you know what you don't have anymore? You don't have the rental payment. Real estate is the only thing that gives you an offset for adding the leverage. Now, somebody might take it a little further and they might say, let me challenge that even further and what if the mortgage payment, which more than likely will be significantly higher than the rental payment? Yes, that is, let's say likely that it's higher, but that's the gross payment. You need to think this deeper. Part of the mortgage payment is principal. And principal can make up a pretty significant portion of the payment compared to how much greater it is than renting. So maybe that mortgage payment's more than rent, but wait a second, principal is not a cost. It's a forced savings plan. Instead of it sitting in the checking account, it goes into equity in your home. Your net worth does not change with the principal payment. So it's not a cost. So take that into consideration and the payment, you'll be surprised how close it gets to renting. The second aspect is you will likely see a bigger tax benefit from it. So once you do that, you might actually be cheaper than renting. And then the third is what happens over time. Well, your mortgage payment's fixed, but that rent, as I said on renewals, is gonna average 3% rise over time, which can be very significant. In a short period of time, that rent's gonna eclipse the mortgage payment. So the benefit of home ownership, even in a higher interest rate environment, creates a tremendous amount of wealth. And remember, rates likely will cycle down, no guarantee, but when they do, you can always refinance and take advantage of that. Very interesting, Barry. Thanks for explaining this in depth. And what about the 30-year mortgage? Because this is something unique to US and a lot of people may not appreciate it because in other countries, the rates adjust every five years, even in places like Canada, UK, and the whole world, essentially. What are your thoughts on the 30-year mortgage and how are we able to do it here in the US? Well, explain, first of all, I wanna underscore your brilliant point that, and most people don't know this, is that that's one of the blessings in the United States. So let's think about this. Let's think about where we were interest rate-wise five years ago. And if you bought your home in almost any other country other than the United States, you more than likely got a ridiculously low rate, maybe in the 2% or 3% range. Five years later, you're loan adjusted. And as you can see in this environment today, you'd go from 2% or 3% to 7% or 8%. That would be a significant payment shock. But in the United States, that person that bought their home with 2% or 3% five years ago, they're paying 2% or 3% today and if they'd like to for another 25 years from now. Now, how does that happen? Well, mortgages carry risk and the risk is not of somebody making the payments necessarily. The risk is what happens with interest rates. So if you have a bank, a bank, imagine a bank, most people think in the United States, banks are lending money. They're not. They might, you have a bank or a mortgage company that collects the payments, but they do not hold the mortgage. The mortgage is too risky. Why is it risky from an interest rate perspective? Look, let's just take that same example, right? Let's just say if I lent money a few years back at 3%. Well, that might've been a good going rate back then, but if interest rates rise dramatically, let's even say just to use round numbers to 6%. Well, if I wanted to value what my mortgage is worth or if I wanted to try and sell it to somebody else, who is gonna buy that mortgage paying 3%? If anywhere else you can go, you can get 6%. If I wanted to sell it, I'd have to discount that very deeply in order to entice somebody else to buy something that yields 3% when they can get 6%. I might have to cut the value of it in half, even if my consumer is paying me my mortgage early every month. So as you could see, it's a very risky endeavor. Now, conversely, you could make money if interest rates went down and you had a higher mortgage. But banks don't wanna play that game of Russian roulette. They wanna know a fixed steady return. So that's why in other countries, they don't play that game. They do these adjustables, maybe taking the risk out to five years where they can then adjust. But in the US, how can we do this? Well, we do it by offloading the risk. How do we offload it? Well, that bank or a mortgage company, what they do is they've originated the loan and then they sell it. They sell it now to a wholesale lender. And that wholesale lender then takes it and they will sell it to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. So again, everybody's passing this hot potato. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they're smart. They know they can't hold this thing either, but they go to Wall Street and they get these big pools of mortgages and the folks on Wall Street turn it into something called a mortgage-backed security, which we're the only place that has this mortgage market with mortgage-backed securities and they sell it. Who does Wall Street sell this to? Well, all of us. You might be surprised. Look at your insurance plans, look at your mutual funds, your IRAs, your 401ks, us. We take on the risk, which is why one year our portfolio might go up 12%, the next year might go down 7%. But it is the public that takes on the risk. Everyone else along the line, the mortgage company, the wholesale, the servicer, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wall Street, they make a piece of the pie and they sell it and let go of the risk. Fascinating. Thanks for sharing that with us. Now, you have an amazing story yourself and can you walk us through that, how you got into this? You know, I've been very, very blessed because I've been faced with some real challenges, but I've also been given some amazing opportunities. I mean, I would have never imagined as being, you know, first born in my family here in the United States and having, you know, my parents very poor, my dad passing away when I was a young boy, being able to, you know, say, wow, my goodness, here I am, one of eight members of Fannie Mae's board, you know, a fortune 25 company, having many different businesses that I've been able to grow and establish, whether it were in the mortgage industry or real estate, in theater, where I've produced Rock of Ages, the 27th longest running show in Broadway history, having the opportunity to be in the airline business, other things that I've just been absolutely blessed to do, being a professional speaker now for more years than I want to admit, you know, over 30 years being able to do that. So it is incredible, but I've also been faced with, like everyone else, tremendous adversity that comes with that. You know, one of the things that I've been faced with just a couple of years ago was being diagnosed with a very, very nasty form of cancer, a double-hit B cell lymphoma, and it is a very bad prognosis. So I had to understand that once I was given that, I had the option of mentally being in a position where I could say, okay, well, I will either feel sorry for myself, fold, freeze like a deer in the headlights, or I could have an attitude of, okay, what can I control and what can I do next? And look, regardless of who you are listening to this, we all have adversity and we've overcome that. It may be in a love relationship, it may be financial, business, family, and God forbid, health. When you're faced with that, so many people, they feel sorry for themselves, they freeze. What we have to do is, as best as you can, remain optimistic. It is scientifically proven. One of the common threads amongst the most successful, but not just successful, happiest people that are there is optimism. And the other is gratitude. You know, I've always done this. It's in my book, my number one best-selling book, Money in the Streets, right behind me on Amazon. And in that book, I talk about this before my cancer diagnosis. I wake up every morning and I literally say out loud all the things I'm grateful for because it sets your mindset. It allows you to be from a point of gratitude. You'll see opportunities better. You'll be more joyful. You'll be able to withstand bad news when it happens. But what I decided to do is, when I had my chemo, it was the most rigorous. It's called EPOC-R. And each one of those letters stands for a different poison, drug that they give you. It's devastating. But what I had to endure was six rounds. Every three weeks was a round, six rounds of it. I had to actually have a bag that I carried with me strapped to me with constant infusion. I still have my port here, which you can kind of see. I still have my port, which for five days constantly. And nevermind the way you feel, but you think about that. But what I decided to do is I decided to say, okay, what can I control? And that was my attitude. And I remained joyful. I remained positive. I didn't say, I want to be miserable. Whatever time God gives me, I want to be happy for those periods of time, because that's what it's all about. So whatever the adversity people are facing, think about the fact that, look, time is really limited. You get something like I've been diagnosed with, you really realize your time is limited. And I went through all of that chemo. And you know what? I remember the day it ended, August 2nd, 2024. I was with my family, no hair, no eyebrows. And we took pictures outdoor. There was a rainbow and this and that. I was like, oh, it had to be a sign. It's over, this, that. Only to find out when I did my PET scan that all that chemo and it didn't work. Okay, doc, what do we do next? That was my attitude. It wasn't to crumble. It wasn't to give up. It wasn't to fall apart. What's next? What are we going to do? And by the way, never missed a day of work. Never had it where I was just wrapped up in a ball. Always productive. Went out, even with the bag around me. Went out to dinner. Next step was radiation. Did 10 rounds of radiation. It wasn't easy. And that didn't work. Okay, doc, what do we do next? It was CAR-T. And CAR-T is something that is space-age. They take your T cells, which is supposed to combat the cancer. They program them and then put them back in you. And that is a very difficult procedure to go through. You know, they wanted me like monitored every day for cytokine responses and this and that. Thank God I made it through that. Only problem is, is that it didn't work. Now you start to worry about and run out of options. But thanks to the positive attitude I had, thanks to the fact that I kept going out and doing things, it's just because of the grace of God. I was able to meet Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiam through a contact. And he has Immunity Bio in Los Angeles. He owns part of the Lakers. He owns the LA Times. And he has created this drug, Angtiva, which through good fortune, I was blessed enough to be able to get on a clinical trial. And I've helped many other people now get on that. And miraculously, that drug put me into remission, which I am still in today. I'm very, very grateful for it. Now you celebrate quietly, but hopefully this remission will be durable and continue. But I, you know, obviously this is through God's grace, but I believe so much had to do with optimism, gratitude, remaining positive, and staying focused on what could I control and what can I do next? Because that's the only way it led me to this. So whatever obstacle, if you're listening, that you may be going through, that is the best way to get through it and the best way to get positive results to the other side. Now, Barry, how did you learn this, to have gratitude and joy and this optimism and move along, don't give up? Well, you know, there are so many influences in our lives, you know, and so many people deserve credit for having that type of knowledge that we gain and experiences. So I try to always be a student. You know, I try to always learn and I watch how others deal with situations. So I've learned a lot. I'm fortunate that I get to be good friends with Tony Robbins through speaking. We do a lot of events together. I speak to a lot of, and you know, a lot of the things that Tony teaches has to do with being grateful and having this optimistic mindset. I mean, I've always kind of had a little bit of it, but you really need to cultivate it. And I think that people believe that, you know, well, that's not me, I can't, you can. There's nothing you can't do. There's nothing you can't change. And I think it is very, very important because really what we're all trying to do in this life is just be happy. I mean, really, that's the goal, right? We just want to be happy. It plays such an important role. You know, we have to remember that we want to have financial goals and we should pursue them. You need them as part of happiness. It is, you know, secondarily achievement goals. And you have to pursue those because you need to be moving forward. You need to, you know, if somebody would say describe happiness in a single word, it's progress. You know, if I were in a position where I needed to lose 20 pounds, if I lost seven, I'm not in my goal, but I'm feeling happier. Progress equals happiness. So you want your achievement goals. But there are a lot of people that achieve a lot and are pretty successful financially too, but they're still unhappy and they're missing fulfillment. And fulfillment for most of us, that comes from being service to others, doing something meaningful to have an impact on others, to help others. Exactly what you're doing, right? My friend, you're doing that. You're living it. You're embodying that being of service to others and adding value by bringing people that can deliver a message that hopefully can resonate and be helpful. And I hope that my message today was able to do that as well. Thank you so much, Barry. This is very inspiring. It was great to have you on, Barry Habib. Please come back in the studio and meet with us. And we'd love to hear some updates from you in the near future. Oh, it's absolutely been a privilege to be with you and I thank you greatly. Tell us what you think about this conversation with Barry. And what do you think about mortgage rates? And right now, would you buy a home? Make sure to tell us in the comments. I'm Siamak Korami. This is Market Insider. We'll see you next time.