Hey friends - happy Friday. The only existence we know with absolute certainty is right now. Enjoy it.

🌎 The Big Picture

Here's what you need to know this week:

• The housing market is shifting toward buyers, but high mortgage costs are keeping most people on the sidelines.

• Business costs jumped hard in August, and diesel was the culprit.

• Small business owners are still feeling good, but hiring gaps, rising costs, and slowing sales mean a more cautious fall ahead.

• Subscription spending is quietly turning into one of the fastest-growing chunks of the household budget.

▶️ The housing market is shifting toward buyers, but affordability is keeping most people on the sidelines.

The National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales dropped for the second straight month in August. At the same time, unsold homes have stacked up to a 4.9 months' supply, the highest we've seen in over a decade. More supply means more choices, less competition, and real room to negotiate.

Prices are moving down. The median list price in August came in at $424,500, down 1.3% from a year ago. That's ten consecutive months where prices have come in lower than the same month the year before.

So why aren't buyers jumping on this? Mortgage costs. The average 30-year mortgage rate climbed back to 6.67% in August, up from 6.05% in February.

The rest of 2026 is probably going to stay quiet. Zillow reported that newly pending sales, a solid forward-looking signal of deals getting agreed on, fell 2.6% below a year ago in August.

If you're a first-time buyer, run the numbers on what 6.67% means for your monthly budget before you fall in love with a price. If you're selling, pricing strategy matters way more than it did two or three years ago, so don't skip that conversation.

▶️ Small business owners are still optimistic, but hiring gaps, rising costs, and slowing sales mean a more cautious fall.

Every month, the National Federation of Independent Business surveys small business owners across the country on hiring, sales, costs, and confidence. August's reading dipped a bit from July, but July was the most optimistic owners had felt in a year.

Hiring plans are still ambitious, with a net 17% of owners planning to add workers over the next three months, well above the historical average.

But they can't find people. About 1 in 4 named finding quality staff as their single biggest challenge, and 35% said they had open positions they simply couldn't fill. That's 11 points above the historical average.

Costs are back on owners' minds too. Roughly 1 in 6 named inflation as their top concern, more than double the long-run average, and it's tied with taxes as the second-biggest thing keeping owners up at night. And sales slowed: more owners reported falling revenue than rising revenue, by the biggest gap since late 2025.

Even with all of that, owners are still slightly more optimistic than their long-run average. But when you put together open jobs that can't be filled, mounting cost worries, and slowing sales, Main Street is clearly heading into fall with more caution. For workers, that could mean a slower hiring market. For shoppers, it probably means prices unlikely to come down.

▶️ Subscription spending is quietly turning into one of the fastest-growing chunks of the household budget.

Bank of America Institute dug into millions of customer card transactions and found that Americans' subscription bills in July were up 7.7% from a year earlier, outpacing overall card spending by more than a point and a half. And that faster growth has held for two straight years now.

A few things jumped out in the data:

• Streaming and big retailer memberships now make up 43% of all subscription spending, up from 41% over the prior two years.

• Gen X still spends the most on subscriptions overall, with older Millennials right behind them.

• Gen Z's total subscription spending jumped nearly 14% in July, about four times faster than a year ago.

• The reading and information category, which includes AI tools, is the smallest slice at 7%, but it's growing faster than every other category.

There are still real open questions about where this goes, especially as more services raise prices and people start auditing what they actually use.

But here's the thing about subscription spending: it flies under the radar in most budget reviews. It compounds quietly across categories, and when you add it all up, the total is almost always higher than you expected.

When did you last do a full audit of your recurring digital bills?

🏭 The Companies Everyone’s Talking About

❔ The Big Question of the Week

Scoops app users: We have taken the beta app offline for a short period for some major updates. Can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on! Reach out if you have any questions.

We’re going to switch up the content in this spotlight for a bit to make sure you all have the info you need to master your week.