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“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Rich Boy, 1926 “You know how people who come into money suddenly look better?” I texted my friend the other day as I breached the threshold of the grocery store’s automatic doors. “How does that […]
I rarely have occasion to visit sports stadiums anymore. Before this weekend, the last time I entered an enormous arena was not to be taken hostage by three hours of sports, but as a three-hour ritual devoted to my Emotional Support Billionaire, Taylor Swift. Still, every time I disappear into a herd of people shuffling […]
In June, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released a report that confirmed the obvious but unbearable reality that most aspiring homeowners recognized long ago: The median income cannot afford the median life. To meet traditional lending criteria for the middle-of-the-road home today, a prospective buyer would need to reliably pull down at least […]
I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet. Not just any influencer will do—my preferred shared hallucination is the business influencer, over whose sprawling imperial colonies the digital sun never sets. Recently, I’ve taken to watching a woman who I’m pretty sure is a scammer; one of those “coaches coaching coaches” […]
I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet. Not just any influencer will do—my preferred shared hallucination is the business influencer, over whose sprawling imperial colonies the digital sun never sets. Recently, I’ve taken to watching a woman who I’m pretty sure is a scammer; one of those “coaches coaching coaches” […]
For a few hours on the Fourth of July, I did the most patriotic thing I could imagine: joining local Safeway workers on the picket line as they continued a sweaty, weeks-long strike to protest unfair labor practices. The company had been using illegal bargaining tactics (“surveilling, threatening”) during contract negotiations, and the union—UFCW Local […]
The surgeon general’s pop-up shop, Robert Iger’s face Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles’ take on race Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more* to go Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul […]
There are a few notable examples of overlap between traditional personal finance advice and economic justice movements. Take, for example, last Friday’s “Economic Blackout,” organized by a group called The People’s Union. The Blackout challenged Americans to avoid shopping at megacorporations like Target or Amazon for a single day (Friday, February 28), an idea which […]
The other night, my standard millennial woman stomach issues started to manifest in a new and exciting way (I’ll spare you the details, because I value your subscription). My instinct to preserve my health defeated my desire to protect my sanity from insurance company billing departments, so I headed to the urgent care down the […]
Imagine for a moment that you have a magic browser plugin. When activated while viewing your portfolio, this mystical Chrome extension can scan your Wealth Planner and tell you which portion of your existing net worth you’ll never get to spend. Let’s say you learn that, of the money you’ve already squirreled away (and what […]
I used to be basically unaware of my financial standing. My Discover bills and rent were always paid on time, but I couldn’t tell you how much I was saving or what my net worth was. As such, my purchases were relatively low-drama affairs—desire, swipe, and move on, only to be reminded three weeks later […]
The other night, I was feeling guilty about how little I had accomplished all week. Almost as if on cue, the Instagram algorithm spearfished my anxiety: An ad for an “AI assistant” appeared. It showed a woman wiping down an already-clean counter in a candlelit kitchen. She was “finally cleaning her house,” she was learning […]
Almost 10 years ago, I lived in a city surrounded by hordes of other early 20-somethings. We were Venn diagrams of friend groups connected by mutual acquaintances or college roommates, hailing from all over the country and bringing unique backgrounds that were mostly unknown to one another. When you’re growing up, you usually know why […]
The last day of the year always seems to carry with it a vague, buzzing pressure. What begins in late November and early December as an eager invitation to a blank slate slowly mutates into something else as January 1 looms large. It’s a little like when you crack open a fresh journal—the Notebook That’s […]
“Some beliefs that are objectively false can be practically useful.” —Nick Maggiulli, “Why Luck Isn’t Real” Most of us probably have that friend that complains constantly about their job. Their financial situation. Their relationship. When you first met them, you probably sympathized. You probably wanted to help! Though after some time passed, you might’ve noticed […]
A two-year collective existential crisis birthed an interesting phenomenon in 2022: quiet quitting. While the term primarily began proliferating around the recesses of TikTok, it didn’t take long for quiet quitting to catch fire in the mainstream media. Publications breathlessly debated the topic and took pretty predictable stances: Gallup asked if it was real, the […]
I couldn’t resist naming this essay “Local Woman Discovers Leisure in European City,” as I recently learned all the cliches about life in Paris (and my reactions to them, as a former girl from the Kentucky suburbs) are deserved. Yes, the food tastes better, and somehow even a straight pastry-and-cheese diet didn’t make me feel […]
“I’m teaching my daughter that it’s perfectly acceptable to depend on a man,” the video begins, as a tan, slender woman twirls a gingham-clad girl dangerously close to a whirring KitchenAid. “That being a home maker [sic] is the number 1 career she should strive for.” My breath catches, not because I’m moved by her […]
In the fall of my senior year at my all-girl Catholic high school, we went on a mandated retreat. It was hosted at St. Anne Convent in Melbourne, Kentucky, the location where they shot the movie Rain Man, something they inexplicably reminded us throughout the weekend. The weekend-long retreat was designed to manufacture vulnerability: We’d […]
When I began writing about personal finance, it was to reach other women like me: college-educated young professionals, working their first Real Person jobs, and befuddled by how their biweekly paychecks disappeared from their checking accounts every month like water evaporating in the sun—effortlessly. Every once in a while, I’d get a message like this: […]
Something devastating is happening to airport lounges, and those paid to catalog subtle economic and cultural shifts are taking note. The food? “Sad.” The walls? “Beige.” The seating? “Overcrowded.” Wealth management professional, author, and now two-time The Money with Katie Show guest Nick Maggiulli recently analyzed wealth data he believes underlies this phenomenon: “The upper […]
Over the long weekend, I was toying with a creative prompt: “What are you afraid to write?” Reflecting on the last dozen interviews I’d done for Rich Girl Nation, the answer took the form of a complicated love letter to the self-help genre that raised me. To personal finance, my first true love: Our love […]
For a recent story published by The Cut, Bindu Bansinath surveyed 102 of the publication’s readers about the most “frivolous thing” they’d taken on debt to buy. Most of the submissions tracked with what you might expect from readers of New York magazine’s fashion-forward women’s vertical—Chanel shoes, plastic surgery, Ozempic—but a few curious inclusions stood […]
In 2021, I earned more in a month than I had earned in all of 2018. I was 26. Given all the buzz about oligarchy this year, I’ve been reflecting on the psychological experience of sudden material abundance: Becoming wealthier made me realize how much easier life is when your access to money is practically […]