The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people spent their money, including what they spent it on. Now, as business restrictions have mainly lifted in the U.S. and vaccines are widespread, are consumers returning to pre-pandemic habits?

In this clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on April 26, Motley Fool contributor Travis Hoium discusses the changes people are making with their money now, and how that affects the broader stock market.

 

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Travis Hoium: So there are fundamental changes that are going to happen, but there are a lot of things that are going to go very much back to normal. Think about things like going out to eat, right? Like that didn't happen a lot for quite a while, but restaurants are going to come back. So where does that spending that you maybe weren't doing at a restaurant, you know, maybe you threw that into Netflix or, you know, streaming services.

Or some digital purchase like gaming, and now we're kind of undoing that, and I think that's part of what we're going to see over the next year. Again the strong companies are going to continue to do well. It's those -- this is why we're seeing the the high-growth companies that were still losing money get hammered in the stock market. This is why we're seeing SPACs that maybe shouldn't have gone public in the first place getting hammered in the stock market. These weren't mature companies and these weren't mature concepts from a business perspective. And so yeah, it seems like we're going to be going back to early 2020, maybe even 2019, kind of spending levels. You know, I mean, I'm seeing that even with my family. You know we're spending more money going out to eat and going to the entertainment places, and so I think a lot of people are going to be like that. And it's gonna be a tough transition year for a lot of companies as a result.