My work will make you think differently about money.
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Culture
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A cherished milestone of modern American adulthood is rewatching the 1990 classic Home Alone through Zillow-pilled eyes for the first time, witnessing the wings on either side of the McCallister house, and realizing, woah, those people were rich. So much so that a fun New York Times piece set out to determine just how rich, […]
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 […]
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 […]
As a pathologically ambitious college junior a few months into my first real internship, a generous, well-regarded full-time employee on my team pulled me aside after my #grindset and I handed in an assignment early. You’re doing a great job, she whispered, but I’m going to let you in on something: Don’t work so fast. […]
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 […]
I read an essay the other day from a guy who really, really hates the Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) movement. Jared, who writes the We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards newsletter, did not mince words: “This is the f***ing stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.” As a personal finance writer and semi-loyal […]
Last July, we moved into a new rental house, and despite our excitement about landing in NorCal, leaving Colorado was an exhausting move. By our first day in the new house, my nerves were fraying at the edges. And that’s when I heard it: Beep beep beep. Beeeeeeep, beeeeep, beeeeeep. Beep beep beep. My husband […]
The moment a crisp $20 hit my palm growing up, I took it as a cue to coerce a friend’s older sister to chauffeur me to the mall so I could raid the disheveled sale rack at Hollister. I was a spender, not a saver, and my frugal parents were nervous. Their “waste not, want […]
My junior year of high school, my formerly sporadic, mild acne that had been contained through measures like consistent courses of antibiotics and hormonal contraceptives bloomed into a case so severe that my dermatologist took one look at the constellation of painful, purple lumps dotting my jawline and declared it was finally time for Accutane. […]
When I first began making the rounds on the amateur podcast circuit as “Money with Katie,” I heard the same question posed with almost comic repetition: “Why do you think women lack financial confidence?” Oh, gee, Eric, I don’t know—maybe because we’ve been told our entire lives that we’re bad at math and our male […]
“Even with men doing more parenting than before, the majority of women are still left facing the well-rehearsed motherhood-versus-career dichotomy. But it’s not a dichotomy; it’s a socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.”—Laura Kipnis A few weeks ago, I betrayed my better judgment and found myself wandering innocently into the comments section of […]
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 […]
For the last four years, we’ve spent Thanksgiving with a few of my husband’s brothers and their families in a Colorado ski town (though the trip is far more “cheese boards” than “snowboards”). Every Black Friday after hanging out in the condo’s living room for two days, we venture out to the main village. There’s […]
The other day, a friend asked me what I thought of the “money manifestation” courses she keeps seeing online. Maybe you’ve seen their ads, too: Relatable-feeling, straight-to-camera videos featuring people who promise to rid you of your “money blocks,” using scientific-sounding language and vague assurances about forthcoming abundance. This type of material usually triggers my […]
