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Eddie Hanline and his wife bought their first house in Durham, North Carolina, in 2020, back when mortgage interest rates were super low. Then as the years passed, with their family growing — along with two small businesses they’d started — they realized they needed more space. But the market had changed.

“With the increase in the interest rates and having such a good interest rate on our current house, it was a tough sell,” Hanline said.

That’s when they found out about a company called Acre Homes, one of a handful of startups that offer a form of fractional homeownership, an arrangement in which a group of people share ownership of a property.

Hanline found a bigger place in a suburb of Raleigh. Acre Homes bought the house on his behalf, with cash. Hanline put 5% down upfront and makes a monthly payment to Acre, comparable to what he would have paid for a mortgage. But he saved about $100,000 that he could instead invest in advertising, staff, and software for his business.

“Investing in all of those things would have taken a back seat to qualifying for a mortgage,” he said.

After three years, the couple can buy Acre out, renew for another term, or walk away with 50% of any appreciation in the home’s value.

So far, Acre Homes is just available in the Carolinas and Georgia, with plans to expand in the southeastern United States. But it’s one of a handful of startups offering a form of fractional homeownership.

With Jubilee Homes, customers can buy a house but rent the underlying land, reducing their down payment and monthly expenses. They get a 99-year lease, and after an agreed-upon term, the rent rises 3% a year.

Customers can paint the walls, build an addition — do whatever they want with the property. They also bear most of the cost, including property taxes, insurance, and property maintenance.

Tradeoffs like these are one reason fractional ownership hasn’t really taken off, said Jenny Schuetz, a housing economist with Arnold Ventures, a national philanthropic organization.

“There are versions of this that have been floating around for a long time,” said Schuetz. “They haven’t really gotten to scale, and I think part of the problem is when people buy a house, they want all of the upside.”

Up until last year, construction workers were not in high demand.

“A lot of that had to do with just higher interest rates were really starting to weigh on the extent to which firms in an industry like construction could expand,” said Nicole Cervi, an economist with Wells Fargo.

But last year, job openings in construction started to stabilize. More recently, they’ve been picking up. Meanwhile, average wages in construction are up more than 4% from a year ago, outpacing wage growth overall.

“And if you look beneath the surface, obviously there’s many different types of construction, a lot of that growth in construction payrolls is coming from non-residential construction,” Cervi said.

Courtney Shupert, an economist with MacroPolicy Perspectives, said that’s welcome news for the workers building data centers, because wage gains in construction are outpacing inflation. It also helps that most data centers are being built in rural areas, according to Pew Research.

“Those wage gains go further in a rural area,” Shupert said. “So for those workers and those families, that’s really exciting.”

But those gains aren’t as exciting for the economy overall. Nonresidential construction jobs make up only 3% of the entire labor market, and even though the sector is hiring, it’s not nearly enough to offset all of the other sectors that have been slowing down.

“Information and tech has lost jobs,” Shupert said. “So has finance. So has mining, and trade, transportation, and utilities. So has manufacturing.”

Trading card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon, surged during the pandemic, but unlike some other COVID-era trends, their popularity has stuck around.

Take Magic: The Gathering, for example. Hasbro said that the game’s revenue jumped 32% in the second quarter, to a record $545 million. We interviewed the people who make the game happen.

Gavin Verhey knew he wanted to create Magic cards at age 11. He even got a jump on networking when a chance encounter with Randy Buehler, the vice president of game design, gave him a road map to eventually working for Wizards of the Coast on Magic: The Gathering.

The task in question: get a college degree and get really good at playing Magic. Like, pro-level good.

At 12, Verhey started his own “research and development program,” so to speak. He would invite friends over for sleepovers, and then they’d get to work.

“I would conscript them into making Magic cards with me,” he said, “and then overnight, my mom would actually cut up the cards that we had designed, print them off, and put them into card sleeves, and then we would actually play with them the next day.”

Verhey became a professional Magic: The Gathering player at 15, started college at 16, and eventually became a principal game designer on Magic.

“My family was really supportive of me. I don't know that they believed I’d turn it into a job someday, you know, but they were supportive of what I wanted to do,” he said.

Now, to the illustrations that truly transport the game to another realm.

I used to drive my dad crazy leaving lights on around the house. Power was way cheaper back then, but lightbulbs were also far less efficient.

Some 90% of households have switched to LED bulbs, according to one estimate, and experts told Marketplace’s Janet Nguyen these lights only account for 10% of electric bills at most.

"If you had a power bill of around $200 a month, then sitting in the dark all month would save you roughly $20," said Destenie Nock, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Electricity bills have risen by nearly a third in just the past five years — check out this map to see the cost in your zip code. If you’re looking to cut back, experts recommend running your heat and AC less. Easier said than done after America’s hottest July ever.