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4 no-bullshit steps to take right now
Figure out how much your life costs.
Here's how to get started.
Understand your cash flow, which means getting familiar with how money is moving through your existing system.
Check out this primer.
Start building your cash safety net in a high-yield savings account.
Want a deeper dive?
Pay off any high-interest debt.
Here's how.
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Update: It’s come to my attention that the team at Copilot are ever the strategists and are working on an integration to import data from Mint in light of the news that Intuit is shuttering the platform. What did I tell you? User-friendly kings & queens. I should disclose upfront that I used to work […]
I love financial visualizations. I feel like my brain doesn’t intuitively make sense of numbers—but when I see everything represented visually, it resonates. (Jump cut to me sitting on a bench outside my college calculus class on the phone with my dad, in tears.) A few years ago, I did an exercise I lovingly called […]
A piece of personal finance advice that always seemed too obvious to be helpful is to “live beneath your means.” “Means” feels like a word from a Little House on the Prairie reboot, and besides, “if you have $5, don’t spend $10” isn’t exactly an earth-shattering insight. I’ve always found it to be a frustratingly […]
This post will probably feel a little counterintuitive given the fact that I constantly promote earning as much as humanly possible, so let’s get one thing absolutely clear upfront: Earning more will skyrocket your investing journey to eventual freedom, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to spend less. I won’t waste time […]
2025 Update: This 2021 blog post was the original inspiration that became the first chapter of my book Rich Girl Nation, all about the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. Enjoy. This is one of those articles that feels like it requires a disclaimer, but I’m trying to get away from explaining away my opinions, so I’d […]
I once read that linking to a bunch of different articles in a post was the cardinal sin of online media, so I apologize for what I’m about to do – but if you haven’t yet, read How to Start Building Your Emergency Fund as a baseline for this post. This post isn’t intended to be […]
One of the saddest ironies of personal finance and wealth-building is that being poor is a very expensive state of affairs, while being wealthy tends to open doors to more wealth and more savings. It turns out that inertia isn’t just something that applied in the 12th grade physics tests I struggled through—it’s observably applicable […]
I’d like to start this blog post by stating the obvious: Nobody’s perfect. I pride myself on being excellent with credit cards: I regularly use my points to take free vacations, I’ve never carried a balance, and I’d consider myself relatively savvy (all right, much savvier than your average credit card user). Today, I’m going […]
Ask your average American who comes to mind when they think “personal finance,” and they’re likely to report one name above the others: Dave Ramsey. Ramsey is a jovial-but-punishing, debt-be-damned crusader whose teachings have infiltrated the middle class – and with good reason! He preaches the most stringent fiscal responsibility that (probably) works best for an […]
Listen, let’s just address one thing upfront: I am not someone who believes all debt is bad. I know this is a very popular debate (and it’s become increasingly fashionable to rank your own stance on debt in relation to Dave Ramsey’s), but my opinion is (mostly) informed by the data available to me. And […]
Let’s clear the air immediately on this one – I realize there’s an inherently judgmental tone when discussing spending “mistakes.” After all, it’s your money, not mine, so at the end of the day, who am I to call something that you’re doing a mistake? Here’s why I’m dubbing these decisions “mistakes” – because I think you’ll […]
Pssst: After you read this, don’t miss this episode of Rich Girl Roundup, in which we do a debt deep dive, including discussing the balance transfer card option. Before I began helping people with their finances in 2020, I didn’t have much experience dealing with debt. While it felt like a given at the time, […]
In 2020—on this very website!—I extolled the virtues of forgoing the (then-average) American rite of passage of a $550 car payment for the first decade or so of your investing life: “In 15 years, you pull a big ol’ f*** it, and you buy a Porsche Cayenne. Great. You deserve it! In the meantime, though, […]
Sometimes in life, we need to make a big purchase. The $50,000 wedding you only budgeted $25,000 for (oops). A 40-ft. aquarium to keep your cat busy during the day. A house with a backyard so it’ll distract your kid while you Zoom within an inch of your life. Oh, and four words: SoulCycle at […]
DISCLAIMER: This post is about your primary residence only, not a property that was purchased with the intent to be rented to create cash flow and had the numbers run accordingly. ducks & covers I know I’m about to take shit for this one, but I think – if you read this post to the […]
2025 Update: In 2022, we invited a pro-leasing guest on the show to discuss how, when, and why leasing a vehicle might make sense. Enjoy! Because I spent the morning getting my car appraised at CarMax like the good money blogger I am, it felt like the perfect day to sit down and write this […]
When I first moved to Dallas, I didn’t rent an apartment. I lived with my friend Kylie’s family. Long-time Dallas natives, they planted roots in one of the nicest, most coveted neighborhoods in Dallas in the mid-1980s – long before the neighborhood had the esteem (and price tag) it has today. Living in that house was […]
This long-time Money with Katie classic has been updated for 2025 with a chapter that was originally written for Rich Girl Nation and ultimately cut in the editing phase. In the original draft of the book, Chapter 4 was called “Big, Expensive Life Milestones,” and it covered housing, marriage, and kids. Ultimately, we decided to […]
At the end of 2022, Money with Katie officially became a million-dollar business: Our revenue hit $1.1m by December 31. (We really just squeaked over the finish line, but a win is a win.) While I shared some of the downsides of monetizing your personhood in this earlier episode, following your own curiosity and interests […]
This blog post is based on a few sections of Chapter 2 of Rich Girl Nation. If you enjoy it, consider picking up a copy! Every time I read something about negotiating a salary, a major takeaway is usually that everything is negotiable—e.g., if Corporate Daddy won’t budge on base pay, you can negotiate more […]
The following breakdown uses 2023 wealth data. Millennials are an interesting generation, because we usually discuss our avocado-toast-eating brethren as an economic monolith. We (mistakenly) assume all millennials are experiencing relatively similar economic hardships. But there’s one group of millennials—a small, unique subset with specific similarities worth exploring—that are actually doing a lot better than […]
What if I told you there was a way to spend more money, while still increasing your save rate? There is. It’s called “increasing your income.” Here’s the thing: This ‘advice’ is usually harder to swallow, because it’s not immediately actionable. It’s not able to be deployed identically by every single person reading this blog […]
“I work for my parents and they gave me a fat raise!” Just kidding. But wouldn’t that be funny? But luckily for you (and maybe unluckily for me), this isn’t an article on CNBC – so there’s no nepotism at play here. And truthfully, the intent of this article isn’t to provide some presumably magic pathway […]
Because this post is going to border on spiritual, I want to make this fat, practical disclaimer first: I am arguing that it is more economically advantageous for you to embody an abundance mindset. Regardless of your belief system, this will get you farther ahead. The best example I can think of for scarcity vs. […]
Whether you’ve recently lost your job or fear that you may, here’s a six-step guide on approaching your financials.
If you’re the intended audience for this post, it’ll do a few things for you: These are the intended outcomes of a successful visit to the Financial Pain Zone, so you can understand why we’re doing what we’re doing: You realize (after stripping away all extraneous spending) that your life satisfaction didn’t really go down. […]
How much should you have in your emergency fund? Writing that title feels like Personal Finance Creator® blasphemy, but I think it’s time we start examining things from a different angle. Let’s do a quick rewind: I can’t say for sure, but I think the idea of an “emergency fund” probably came from Dave Ramsey […]
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I love (love) the Instagram DMs I get on my Money with Katie Instagram because they provide such wonderful insight about what the people who frequent this site give a shit about. One DM I received recently made me laugh out loud: I’m 22 and none of what you talk about makes any sense to […]
Welcome to adulthood! You’ve made it. Your company-issued minivan and mortgage are in the mail; BYO-orthopedic shoes. In speaking with hundreds of women about their personal finances, a few themes emerge as big areas of opportunities. I’ve talked about some of them in the past: Paying off debt the wrong way – i.e., paying down high-balance […]
Last year, my husband and I started a new financial tradition (okay, maybe it’s fairer to say I strong-armed him into it) in which I tap into the small, shameful part of me that’s still in awe of management consultants despite their well-documented crimes against humanity and I churn out a deck like I’m getting […]
When I originally published this post in February 2021, my thesis was pretty simple: Comparing your financial situation and decisions to the gals you wine down with on Bachelor Monday probably won’t net highly favorable results, because you’re selecting your “financial frame of reference” based on unrelated qualifications. As I revisit the idea in 2025, […]
Ah, sweet marital bliss! The king size bed. The shared household responsibilities. The… joint checking account? When we were dating, Thomas and I waffled about the financial system that would make the most sense for us. Were we a totally separate, totally together, or “yours, mine, and ours” kind of couple? Eventually, we settled on […]
I go into much greater detail about marital finances (and the legal considerations therein!) in Chapter 4 of Rich Girl Nation, “I Thee Wed (and Spend Thy Bread.” If you’re interested in the full deep dive on money for couples, pick up a copy. Every time I post one of my monthly budget breakdowns, I […]
This blog post is based on a few sections of Chapter 4 of Rich Girl Nation, “I Thee Wed (and Spend Thy Bread.” If you’re interested in the full deep dive on marital finances, pick up a copy. The question of “how to combine finances” comes up frequently, so I figured now was as good […]
Leveraging travel rewards as a couple is arguably the world’s most fantastic money-saving loophole. I’ve isolated two things that lead Tom and I to bicker: When we don’t have a TV series to watch together. Without Netflix, our relationship hits the skids. When we stay home for too long. That second one is mostly because […]
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