My work will make you think differently about money.
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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 […]
International Women’s Day nearly escaped my awareness this year. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one not in the spirit: About a week earlier, the “for women, by women” investing platform Ellevest announced it would be selling and transferring its roboadvisory accounts to Betterment this April. Ellevest explained in the fine print that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
When we first moved to California, our next-door neighbors—a very kind Gen X couple—knocked on our door and invited us over for dinner. In the following weeks, they’d pop over to check in, periodically lending a tool or an extra set of hands. One day while I was stuck in traffic coming back from San […]
Listen, Rich People, something you should know about me is that my brain is owned and operated by a trio of opposing, hustling forces (the Three Grind Mice, if you will), constantly grappling with one another for control. The first mouse is Curiosity, genuinely open-minded and steering me in the direction of truth, no matter […]
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 […]
I’ve written at length (both last week and at the end of 2022) about the realizations that helped me become financially savvy. But I’ve never shared the experience that occurred before those initial W-2 paychecks started coming. I faced a post-grad experience that will be familiar to most young people: Securing an internship after graduation—rather […]
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 […]
Imagine a group of kids: some short, some tall, some gangly, some sturdy, each with a varying level of athletic ability. Some are coordinated and quick on their feet, while others resemble me as a child (read: running on wobbly knees and timid in the face of physical threat, destined instead for drama club). There […]
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 […]
The other morning, I woke up with a strange impulse: I wanted to go to the mall. Work had been particularly intense for a couple of weeks, so wandering around a giant commercial space that smells like someone spritzed an Auntie Anne’s pretzel with Chanel No. 5 sounded like irresistible frivolity. This happens every few […]
Ever since that cursed Shein brand trip last summer in which American influencers toured the company’s Guangzhou factories and marveled aloud at how “not-sweaty” the workers were, the center of the Venn diagram between sustainability and personal finance came into full focus. For most people, financial health is contingent upon managing consumption habits—producing more income […]
No sooner had I pressed “Complete Purchase” on four roundtrip tickets from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle did I begin involuntarily envisioning the trip through a 16:9 aspect ratio. Captions appeared swiftly, as naturally as intrusive thoughts. My brain produced puns of its own accord, a vestige of my […]