Stock futures rise slightly ahead of the first trading week of the new year

Traders on the floor of the NYSE, Oct. 21, 2022.

Source: NYSE

Stock futures fell Monday evening as traders braced themselves for a flurry of economic data and the minutes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting this week to kick off the new year.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 72 points, or 0.2%. S&P 500 futures shed 0.28% and Nasdaq 100 futures lost 0.44%.

All of the major averages closed 2022 with their worst losses since 2008, each snapping a three-year win streak. The Dow ended the year down about 8.8% at 33,147.25, and 10.3% off its 52-week high. The S&P 500 lost 19.4% for the year and now sits at 3,839.50, more than 20% below its record high. The tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33.1% last year. It’s starting 2023 almost 34% from its record, at 10,466.88.

Inflation sparking “the worst defeat for both stocks and bonds in decades” was the biggest investor narrative for 2022, according to Greg Bassuk, CEO of AXS Investments. The new year kicks off with a cloud of worry that a “harder-than-desired landing” by the Fed and its inflation fighting moves could push the economy into a recession.

“2022 was characterized by an inflation-blindsiding market rout, in part because the year was kicked off with Wall Street and Main Street both anticipating a containment on rising prices and a Federal Reserve that would hold rates at lower levels,” he said. “But a fiercely opposite reality endured as inflation skyrocketed.”

“Moving into 2023, as prices remain materially elevated, investors would be prudent to consider inflation-sensitive assets, as well as cyclical and other stocks that tend to do well in rising price environments,” he added.

Investors are getting a bundle of data in the first trading week of the year and investors will be watching closely, looking for opportunities to adjust their portfolios to recover from the 2022 carnage. Wednesday is a big day with the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, better known as JOLTS, due out in the morning and the minutes of the Fed’s latest policy meeting set to come out in the afternoon.

They’re also looking forward to Friday’s December jobs report, the final employment report the Fed will have to consider before its next meeting on Feb. 1. There are also several speeches by Fed presidents scheduled Thursday and Friday.

First up, however, are S&P Global manufacturing PMI and construction spending, due out at 9:45 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

Walgreens Boots Alliance and Constellation Brands will also report their quarterly financial results on Thursday, though it’s an otherwise quiet week for earnings reports.

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Wickr Me, Amazon's encrypted chat app, stops accepting new users

In this photo illustration an Amazon logo is displayed on a smartphone with stock market percentages in the background.

SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

Wickr Me, an Amazon-owned encrypted chat platform, stopped accepting new users after Dec. 31 and will shut down completely on Dec. 31 of this year, according to an announcement from the company.

The decision, first announced in November, follows several controversies surrounding the ultra-secure chat app, which allowed users to sign up without a phone number or other potentially identifying information, making it a favorite for security-minded groups including hackers, drug dealers and journalists.

In June, an NBC News investigation revealed that Wickr Me had become a go-to product for many people trading child sexual abuse material. The investigation identified 72 court cases from the past five years in which the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it’s commonly known) to trade child sexual abuse material. Law enforcement officials and a representative for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children told NBC News at the time that Wickr wasn’t doing enough to detect or report the trading of such material on its platform.

In a statement provided to NBC News in June, an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said: “Amazon is committed to preventing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in every segment of our business, including Wickr, which maintains strict Terms of Use that clearly prohibit illegal activity. We act quickly on reports of illegal behavior, respond immediately to requests from law enforcement, and take the appropriate actions. Anyone found to be in violation of our terms is subject to account termination.”

“Wickr absolutely responds appropriately to, and cooperates with, law enforcement on these critical matters,” the spokesperson said.

In its statement in November, the company explained that it was shutting down Wickr Me to devote more resources and focus toward its business-to-business products, AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise. The post did not mention the business it has with government agencies, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

When NBC News tried to create a new test account on the app on Jan. 1, it displayed a pop-up saying: “Wickr Me will not support new users starting 31-Dec-2022. Wickr Me will be unavailable after 31-Dec-2023.”

Wickr was founded in 2012, applying high-level encryption to a consumer-messaging product. By 2015, the company had raised $39 million in funding. That same year, numerous outlets reported that the Islamic State terrorist organization was using the app to recruit new members. In 2016, one of the first successful prosecutions against someone trading child pornography on the app was reported by the Deseret Morning News.

In June 2021, Wickr was acquired by Amazon Web Services. Since the acquisition, the company had faced questions about its government contracts with agencies like Customs and Border Protection, and attracted attention with its role in records-related scandals in which the app was used to automatically destroy government communications.

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How San Francisco can tackle two of its biggest issues: office vacancies and housing

San Francisco is facing its highest office vacancy rate since 1993. Commercial real estate firm CBRE said in a recent report that 27.1 million square feet of a total of 90 million square feet is currently vacant.

“The issue started with the pandemic,” said Colin Yasukochi, CBRE’s executive director at its Tech Insights Center. “Prior to the pandemic, in the city of San Francisco, our office vacancy rate was about 4%. Which meant that 4% of all the space, the millions and millions of square feet of space that we had in the city, were vacant. Today, that number is more like 26%.”

With remote work gaining popularity, the problem is only expected to worsen. San Francisco has been referred to as the work-from-home capital of the United States, with the American Community Survey finding that 46% of employees in San Francisco worked from home in 2021, up from 7% in 2019. 

To combat the rising number of office vacancies, one local legislator is pushing to convert empty office buildings into residential buildings. Matt Haney, a Democratic state Assembly member, says tackling the empty office problem could help the city take the much-needed steps it needs to address the housing crisis. 

“What we can’t do is just leave these buildings empty. That would be bad for our city’s downtown. It would be a total waste,” Haney said. “There are some obvious things that we can look at, where we can meet some of the other needs that we have and actually solve another problem that we have, and that’s our housing crisis.” 

Under the Housing Element, the state of California is mandating that San Francisco build 82,000 new units of housing, including affordable units meant for low-income residents, by 2031. In order to meet that goal, the city needs to build 10,000 units of housing per year starting next year. However, San Francisco Mayor London Breed believes that task is easier said than done due to the lack of support from local legislators. 

“It’s going to require that we make some major changes that I know our legislative body is not going to be open to,” Breed said. “But if they don’t, what’s going to happen? State support for affordable housing is going to be taken away. Tax credits and all the things that we enjoy to support the ability for us to build housing in the first place in San Francisco is going to be taken away.”

The latest CBRE report published in early December said that office vacancies reached a nearly 30-year high in the third quarter with a vacancy rate of 25.5%. And those rising vacancy rates are having a major impact on the city’s economy.

“We are facing an over $700 million budget deficit, mostly as a result to the challenges around our empty office spaces, as well as we’re seeing businesses closed in the financial district,” Breed said. 

CBRE data revealed that so far in 2022 there have been 42 office conversion completions in the U.S., but only 17% of those have been into multifamily homes, while 46% has been office-to-lab conversions. 

“The rents that you can get for a life sciences lab space are much higher than office space. So it makes that conversion financially viable,” said Yasukochi. “We have high demand for residential still, but not at the price that would be required for a developer to be able to do that from a financial perspective.” 

Under current market conditions, many developers lack incentives to build housing, and strict housing policies often mean developers go through lengthy processes that can turn a profitable project into one that loses money and time. 

However, in many cases developers are already at a point where they are investing in costly upgrades. Office conversion typically takes place in older, Class C buildings in need of major repair and remodeling and often in unfavorable locations. While an office-to-residential conversion may require the stripping of a building, in most cases it’s still much cheaper than building from the ground up.

“The most important thing from a developer standpoint is what makes the most financial sense,” said Marc Babsin, president of Emerald Fund, a real estate development company that completed one of the largest office-to-residential conversions in the city at 100 Van Ness Ave. 

“There’s a lot of things that are standing in the way of converting office to residential. The biggest one being that the numbers aren’t working today because construction costs are so high. There are things that the government could do to make it easier,” Babsin said. 

The San Francisco mayor said the problem is that it takes a long time to build housing, especially given all the requirements.

“We have so many laws on the books already in terms of height limitations, in terms of open space, in terms of number of units, in terms of everything that you have to do to build,” Breed said. “And then on top of that, we make people go through an insane process which takes an extremely long time.”

While office-to-residential conversion is seen as a step in the right direction to address San Francisco’s housing crisis, it is years away from being a solution. Breed says the city needs to build more housing in any manner. 

“We just need all housing,” she said. “You know affordable housing sounds good, but when you go through the process to try and get access to affordable housing in this city, it is hard and it is really, really challenging. And the system that we have tried to repair under state and federal law has been very, very difficult to work under. And so as far as I’m concerned, we need to be as aggressive as we can to get more housing built.”

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Retailers brace for tougher times and more frugal customers in 2023

A shopper goes through shirts in the kids section at Old Navy in Denver, Colorado.

Brent Lewis | Denver Post | Getty Images

January is typically an overlooked month for retailers.

Shoppers make returns and exchanges. They come to stores with gift cards in hand. And they may spring for workout clothes or other items to follow through on New Year’s resolutions.

But this year, January carries higher stakes. The next few weeks, which close out many retailers’ fiscal year, could help determine whether the holiday quarter is a win or a bust. It’s an important time for helping stores clear out excess inventory, too. January could also set the tone for 2023 — when some economists and retail industry watchers anticipate the U.S. will tip into a recession.

So far, early holiday results have been better than some economists and retailers feared. Sales from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 rose 7.6%, according to data from MasterCard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment. The figure includes restaurants and is not adjusted for inflation, which rose 7.1% year over year in November.

Yet there are signs that shoppers may be running out of gas. Credit card balances have ticked up. Personal saving rates have fallen. And sales of big-ticket items like jewelry and electronics have weakened.

Plus, Americans’ spending spree during the earlier years of the pandemic, fueled by stimulus money, boredom and socked-away savings, have made for tough comparisons.

A pivotal January

Retailers enter 2023 reckoning with the fact that store traffic already lagged during peak weeks of the holiday season.

Across six retailers — Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Kohl’s and Macy’s — foot traffic dropped by an average of 3.22% year over year for the weeks from Black Friday through the week of Christmas, according to data from Placer.ai, an analytics firm that uses anonymized data from mobile devices to estimate overall visits to locations. It also declined by nearly 5% when compared to pre-pandemic patterns.

Now retailers are more on edge.

“It seems like a lot of the brands are anticipating a bigger thud in January,” said Stacey Widlitz, president of SW Retail Advisors, a consulting firm.

She has noticed more retailers are dangling gift cards to drum up sales. For instance, Urban Outfitters-owned retail chain Anthropologie on Friday offered $50 toward a future purchase for online shoppers who spend $200 or more. But that bonus cash must be used by Jan. 31, when the company’s quarter ends.

Widlitz said those offers are focused on nudging shoppers to make purchases during a time when there’s often a post-holiday lull. It is also retailers’ last chance to sell through excess inventory and start the new fiscal year in a cleaner position.

“It just looks like they’re trying to push people to get into stores after the new year,” she said.

But for some, a more budget-sensitive consumer could be an opportunity.

On an earnings call last month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said he anticipates a boost in sales as consumers feel stretched from holiday spending. Like many other retailers, Walmart’s holiday quarter includes January.

“Sometimes these quarters work out where the very end of December and January end up being stronger when people are particularly price sensitive,” he said. “So that’s kind of what I’m expecting.”

Already, the discounter has attracted wealthier shoppers with its lower-priced groceries and household staples. For the past two quarters, about 75% of its market share gains in food came from households that make more than $100,000 a year.

Yet like competitors Target and Costco, it has had a harder time selling discretionary merchandise that tends to drive higher profits than selling milk or paper towels.

What will the new year bring?

Economists are closely watching consumer indicators as the year begins.

On the positive side, said Michael Zdinak, an economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, unemployment is low and the jobs market is still very tight. There are signs that inflation has cooled, with prices rising less than expected in November, the most recent month of available federal data.

On the other hand, he said food prices are still high, retail demand is weakening and savings aren’t looking as robust.

Personal saving rates have declined significantly. The percentage of disposable income that people save was 2.4% in November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s down from an average of 6.3% pre-pandemic, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which crunched the numbers from 1991 to 2019.

Zdinak said that low rate is unsustainable, especially as consumers have been spending money they put in their savings accounts during the earlier months and years of the pandemic.

Economists at the market data firm anticipate a recession to begin in the first quarter of 2023 and to last two quarters.

Zdinak said the downturn will be fueled by slashed orders and less manufacturing as many retailers clear through unwanted inventory after consumer preferences changed abruptly in 2022.

Then there are headwinds for consumers. Reality may soon hit families who have blown the budget on gifts or holiday travel, said Widlitz of SW Retail Advisors.

“Everyone gets through the holidays in denial and Feb. 1, when you get your [credit card] statement, or Jan. 15, whenever it comes, it’s like, ‘Oh!'” she said.

Caitlyn Freda contributed to this report.

Pivotal January for retailers looking to rebound from awful year

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Here's how much money it takes to be considered middle class in 20 major U.S. cities

The middle class has been shrinking throughout the last five decades as more Americans have entered either the upper or lower income brackets, according to Pew Research Center

The latest data from 2021 shows the share of the population in the middle class continues to hover around 50%, around where it has been since 2011. Prior to that year, the share of middle class Americans had been consistently shrinking since a peak of 61% in 1971.

Pew defines “middle class” as those earning between two-thirds and twice the median American household income, which in 2021 was $70,784, according to the United States Census Bureau. That means American households earning as little as $47,189 and up to $141,568 are technically in the middle class.

But other factors like family size and location can change what middle class looks like for you. Here are the income thresholds for the middle class in the 20 most populous U.S. metros:

Remember, this is based on just one definition of middle class. There are other statistical-based definitions of middle class and an even broader list of more anecdotal definitions.

Generally speaking, anyone who isn’t living “paycheck-to-paycheck” but couldn’t necessarily stop working tomorrow and be financially secure for the long-term might consider themselves middle class.

At least half of the U.S. adult population has consistently identified as middle or upper-middle class since 2002, according to Gallup polling. The poll does not define middle class for respondents, but simply asks if they identify as upper, upper-middle, middle, working or lower class.

Though the share of upper-middle and middle-class-identifying adults was larger — around 63% of adults in 2003 — before the Great Recession, it never fell below 50%, and still hasn’t even through the brief, but sharp, recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

As of April 2022, 52% of adults consider themselves middle or upper-middle class. And statistically speaking, they could all be correct. But given different life situations and perceptions of wealth, there’s a good chance not everyone who feels middle class actually is, and vice-versa.

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Don’t miss: How much money Americans say they need to make to feel rich 

How a couple making $78,000/year in Wyoming spend their money

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2023 looks good for the market — especially for one 'extremely attractive' asset class: Fund manager

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Nasdaq closes out its first four-quarter slump since dot-com crash

The once high flying tech sector has endured a heavy selloff this year amid concerns that the sector’s growth could be curtailed by rising interest rates. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is down more than 14%.

Chris Hondros | Newsmakers | Getty Images

A lot has changed in technology since the dot-com boom and bust.

The internet went mobile. The data center went to the cloud. Cars are now driving themselves. Chatbots have gotten pretty smart.

But one thing has remained. When the economy turns, investors rush for the exits. Despite a furious rally on Thursday, the tech-laden Nasdaq finished in the red for a fourth straight quarter, marking the longest such streak since the dot-bomb period of 2000 to 2001. The only other negative four-quarter stretch in the Nasdaq’s five-decade history was in 1983-84, when the video game market crashed.

This year marks the first time the Nasdaq has ever fallen all four quarters. It dropped 9.1% in the first three months of the year, followed by a second-quarter plunge of 22% and a third-quarter decline of 4.1%. It fell 1% in the fourth quarter because of an 8.7% drop in December.

For the full year, the Nasdaq slid 33%, its steepest decline since 2008 and the third-worst year on record. The drop 14 years ago came during the financial meltdown caused by the housing crisis.

“It’s really hard to be positive on tech right now,” Gene Munster, managing partner of Loup Ventures, told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan on Wednesday. “You feel like you’re missing something. You feel like you’re not getting the joke.”

Tech has been like a horror show this year, says Wedbush's Dan Ives

Other than 2008, the only other year worse for the Nasdaq was 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst and the index sank 39%. Early dreams of the internet taking over the world were vaporized. Pets.com, infamous for the sock puppet, went public in February of that year and shut down nine months later. EToys, which held its IPO in 1999 and saw its market cap grow to almost $8 billion, sank in 2000, losing almost all its value before going bankrupt early the next year. Delivery company Kozmo.com never got its IPO off the ground, filing in March 2000 and withdrawing its offering in August.

Amazon had its worst year ever in 2000, dropping 80%. Cisco fell 29% and then another 53% the next year. Microsoft plummeted by more than 60% and Apple by over 70%.

The parallels to today are quite stark.

In 2022, the company formerly known as Facebook lost roughly two-thirds of its value as investors balked at a future in the metaverse. Tesla fell by a similar amount, as the carmaker long valued like a tech company crashed into reality. Amazon dropped by half.

The IPO market this year was non-existent, but many of the companies that went public last year at astronomical valuations lost 80% or more of their value.

Perhaps the closest analogy to 2000 was the crypto market this year. Digital currencies Bitcoin and ether plunged by more than 60%. Over $2 trillion in value was wiped out as speculators fled crypto. Numerous companies went bankrupt, most notably crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed after reaching a $32 billion valuation earlier in the year. Founder Sam Bankman-Fried now faces criminal fraud charges.

The only major crypto company traded on the Nasdaq is Coinbase, which went public last year. In 2022, its shares fell 86%, eliminating more than $45 billion in market cap. In total, Nasdaq companies have shed close to $9 trillion in value this year, according to FactSet.

At its peak in 2000, Nasdaq companies were worth about $6.6 trillion in total, and proceeded to lose about $5 trillion of that by the time the market bottomed in October 2002.

Don’t fight the fed

Despite the similarities, things are different today.

For the most part, the collapse of 2022 was less about businesses vanishing overnight and had more to do with investors and executives waking up to reality.

Companies are downsizing and getting revalued after a decade of growth fueled by cheap money. With the Fed raising rates to try and get inflation under control, investors have stopped putting a premium on rapid unprofitable growth and started demanding cash generation.

“If you’re looking solely at future cash flows without profitability, those are the companies that did really well in 2020, and those are not as defensible today,” Shannon Saccocia, chief investment officer of SVB Private, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Tuesday. “The tech is dead narrative is probably in place for the next couple of quarters,” Saccocia said, adding that some parts of the sector “will have light at the end of this tunnel.”

The 'tech is dead' narrative will only last short term into 2023, says SVB's Shannon Saccocia

The tunnel she’s describing is the continuing rate increases by the Fed, which may only end if the economy enters a recession. Either scenario is troubling for much of technology, which tends to thrive when the economy is in growth mode.

In mid-December, the Fed raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 15 years, lifting it to a target range of 4.25% to 4.5%. The rate was anchored near zero through the pandemic as well as in the years that followed the financial crisis.

Tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC in late October that more than a decade of zero interest rates “perverted the market” and “allowed manias and asset bubbles to build in every single part of the economy.”

Palihapitiya took as much advantage as anyone of the cheap money available, pioneering investments in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), blank-check entities that hunt for companies to take public through a reverse merger.

With no yield available in fixed income and with tech attracting stratospheric valuations, SPACs took off, raising more than $160 billion on U.S. exchanges in 2021, nearly double the prior year, according to data from SPAC Research. That number sank to $13.4 billion this year. CNBC’s Post-SPAC index, comprised of the largest companies that have debuted via SPACs in the last two years, lost two-thirds of its value in 2022.

SPACs slumped in 2022

CNBC

‘Bargain basement’ shopping

The IPO market is as bad as it was in 2001, and quick improvement is unlikely, says Bullpen's Davidson

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This 26-year-old quit her job to ask strangers how much money they make—now she's scoring 6-figure brand deals

In May, Hannah Williams made a leap a lot of people only dream about: She quit her day job as a data analyst to become a content creator full time.

At the time, she’d had a few months of success through her personal TikTok, where she shared experiences about job-hopping and negotiating her salary, which inspired her to launch Salary Transparent Street, a TikTok series asking strangers a question you’re not supposed to: How much money do you make?

The series went viral, and Williams saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“I knew that you don’t just have an account that is that successful that quickly, without it being monetizable in some way,” she says. “I was ready to figure it out.”

Within months, Williams and her fiance, James Daniels, both quit their jobs to focus on turning Salary Transparent Street from a few TikTok videos to a full-fledged business. They’ve crisscrossed 10 states, interviewed hundreds of people and landed six-figure brand deals. So far, Salary Transparent Street has brought in nearly $600,000, and the couple live off a $200,000 per year salary.

CNBC Make It caught up with Williams, 26, on how she prepared for the big quit, the highs and lows of being your own boss and advice to workers who want to chase their own dreams in 2023.

How she quit her job: ‘Failure wasn’t the worst thing’

While Williams finally put in her notice around May, she says she was mentally ready to quit long before. The biggest thing holding her back? In order to build out Salary Transparent Street the way she wanted to, Williams would need Daniels (the series’ cameraman) to also quit his office job in government contracting.

It was a big risk to lose steady income and bet on something new. But Williams, a data analyst by training, crunched the numbers and saw that the leap could be profitable.

“I knew that there were brand deals there that were very niche and perfect fits for us that might take a couple of months to figure out, but they were possibilities,” Williams says. Plus, since the couple didn’t have kids or a mortgage, the timing couldn’t be better to be a little risky.

As Williams sees it, “failure wasn’t the worst thing.” She could always go back to her old job or find a similar one if the series didn’t take off. The worst thing, really, would be to not try it at all.

So, with $10,000 in savings, Williams and Daniels put in their notice.

Within two weeks, Williams connected with two agents who provided $24,000 in seed money for Salary Transparent Street’s first two months. Williams and Daniels used the money to pay their bills, pay for basic living costs and travel to film.

Salary Transparent Street continued to gain momentum, reaching millions of viewers. Williams landed partnerships with brands like Fiverr, The Knot and Cleo, a budgeting app. Then, in September, a big account came through: Williams signed a six-month deal with Indeed, the job-search platform, for nearly half a million dollars.

The downsides of being your own boss

Building your own social media brand doesn’t come without challenges. Just like with any job, Williams says, being your own boss also has some downsides, the biggest one being that the internet never stops.

“So you can throw holidays out the window, you can throw a weekend out the window. It’s incredibly difficult when your work is kind of your life, and that work-life balance you had before completely disappears,” she says.

With that said, she’d much rather put in that effort on something she built, rather than working a weekend for a company she’s not as invested in.

Another side effect: burnout. “It’s been a really interesting lesson to learn that working all the time is definitely not the answer to getting stuff done,” she says. “Eventually, your brain just can’t handle anymore.”

To deal with burnout, Williams says it’s been crucial for her to understand when she’s most productive, and when she can give herself a breather. For example, she likes to steal away time to work on administrative tasks in the morning before other people are awake and asking things of her.

Then, to keep from getting overwhelmed, she schedules out her work by the hour, including when she should take a break to go for a walk or read. “If it’s on my calendar, I’m going to follow it,” she says. Scheduling breaks builds in accountability. “It’s been difficult to realize that I need to take a break and just chill for a little bit, and then get back to it. And that’s going to help me be more productive rather than going at full-speed all the time.”

Finally, another big downside to being an internet entrepreneur is moderating comments on her video and social media posts. Not only can it be a time suck, but sometimes comments can be hateful, which Williams says weighs on her mental health. Now that she’s scaled the work, she’s also hired an executive assistant who helps with content moderation, who’ll earn $80,000 per year with health benefits and PTO when she becomes a full-time employee in January.

Advice to job-seekers in 2023

As much as Williams wants to tell others to take risks and make big career moves, she also knows people are worried about the economy in 2023. “If we do fall into a recession, it just means that there’s maybe a little bit less advantage for you in the labor market,” she says. “So just be informed of that and make calculated decisions.”

That doesn’t mean you have to stay in a bad situation, though. You can still leverage information out there to figure out if you’re being underpaid and ask for a raise, or move to a more resilient job, employer or industry.

“When I quit my job, I knew that my backup plan if I failed was going back to my old job or going back into an industry where I had a strong career,” Williams says. “There are so many resources out there that can empower you to make a change if you want to.”

She adds: “Don’t be afraid to take risks. Just make sure they’re informed decisions.”

Making an impact

How this 26-year-old earns and spends $25,000 a year just outside NYC

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There's still time to get health insurance through the public exchange — and you may qualify for help paying premiums

FatCamera | E+ | Getty Images

Anyone without health insurance has about two weeks left to get 2023 coverage through the public marketplace — and subsidies could make it affordable.

Open enrollment for the federal health care exchange runs through Jan. 15, with coverage taking effect Feb. 1. (If your state has its own exchange, the last day to enroll may be different.) After the sign-up window closes, you’d generally need to experience a qualifying life event — i.e., birth of a child or marriage — to be given a special enrollment period.

Most marketplace enrollees — 13 million of 14.5 million in 2022 — qualify for federal subsidies (technically tax credits) to help pay premiums. Four out of 5 customers will be able to find 2023 plans for $10 or less per month after accounting for those tax credits, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

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Some people may also be eligible for help with cost sharing, such as deductibles and copays on certain plans, depending on their income.

For the most part, people who get insurance through the federal (or their state’s) exchange are self-employed or don’t have access to workplace insurance, or they don’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid.

As of Dec. 15, nearly 11.5 million people had selected a plan through the marketplace, according to CMS.

The tax credits are more generous now

The subsidies are still more generous than before the pandemic. Temporarily expanded subsidies that were put in place for 2021 and 2022 were extended through 2025 in the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August.

This means there is no income cap to qualify for subsidies, and the amount anyone pays for premiums is limited to 8.5% of their income as calculated by the exchange. Before the changes, the aid was generally only available to households with income from 100% to 400% of the federal poverty level.

The marketplace subsidies that you’re eligible for are based on factors that include income, age and the second-lowest-cost “silver” plan in your geographic area (which may or may not be the plan you enroll in).

How this 26-year-old earns and spends $25,000 a year just outside NYC

For the income part of the determination, you’ll need to estimate it for 2023 during the sign-up process.

Giving a good estimate matters

Be aware that it’s important to give a good estimate.

If you end up having annual income that’s higher than what you reported when you enrolled, it could mean you’re not entitled to as much aid as you’re receiving. And any overage would need to be accounted for at tax time in 2024 — which would reduce your refund or increase the amount of tax you owe.

“You don’t want a nasty surprise when you do your taxes the next year,” said Cynthia Cox, director for the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Affordable Care Act program.

Likewise, if you are entitled to more than you received, the difference would either increase your refund or lower the amount of tax you owe.

Either way at any point during the year you can adjust your income estimate or note any pertinent life changes (for example, a birth of a child, marriage, etc.) that could affect the amount of subsidies you’re entitled to.

Falling behind on premiums can mean getting dropped

Be aware that if you don’t pay your premiums (or your share of them), you face coverage being canceled and claims going unpaid.

For enrollees who get subsidies, coverage is generally dropped after three months if premiums are not caught up. For those who pay the full premiums because they don’t qualify for subsidies, there’s only a grace period of about a month before cancellation, depending on the state. 

If you end up without insurance, you can’t re-enroll through the marketplace unless you qualify for a special enrollment period.

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Wall Street veteran names the stocks that could go to $0 — and his favorites in tech

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