My work will make you think differently about money.
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Every once in a while, a series of mundane events accumulates to produce a moment of out-of-body, blistering clarity. “Clarity” is not a mental state I’ve experienced much recently, but on my last day in California, it arrived unannounced while I idled in a Safeway parking lot. Earlier that morning, I had been speaking with […]
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 explosion of financial updates out of Washington in the past week has been overwhelming, the “breaking news” equivalent of projectile vomit. (The zone was flooded, as it were.) It’s reminded me a little of the flashes of bottomless panic I felt in March 2020 when it was clear there was a fundamentally unknown quantity […]
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 […]
Late last year in a one-woman attempt to save legacy media, I paid $70 for an annual print subscription to New York Magazine. (In all honesty, I was hoping physical reading material I couldn’t Command-T away from would provide a more ~tactile~ experience, and so far, I feel like a 19th century poet every time […]
I just turned in the manuscript for my first book. And while no part of writing 100,000 words is easy and breezy, there was one persistently itchy thread that wove itself into the pages of my growing Google Doc, relentlessly stalking me through the paragraphs like the deranged ghost of Clippy. Call it “the Lean […]
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 […]
As a personal finance hobbyist forged in the flames of fairly extreme FI/RE rhetoric, my perspective on wealth as a source of confidence was always unemotional, mathematical: By the time I’m worth $X, I can withdraw between 3% and 4% per year and comfortably live on $Y. It was a straightforward way to derive financial […]
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: […]
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 […]
This essay contains copious White Lotus season 3 spoilers. If you’re not caught up, please stop whatever else you’re doing and go spend the next eight hours in front of your TV, which is the only screen we’re celebrating today. Timothy Ratliff is screwed. While on vacation at a fictional resort in Thailand called the […]
Originally, this essay was supposed to be about the futility of extreme New Year’s resolutions. There were going to be jokes about announcing your intent to leave Instagram on Instagram; reflections on the cultural amnesia of skidding into yet another January 1 with a vague commitment to “meditate daily,” only to duly abandon it by […]