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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 “Passion Planner” was first sucked into the gravitational force field of my striving at an internship in 2016, thanks to a young colleague who reeked of competence. She represented the sort of high-achieving twenty-something I was desperate to become, and she was always toting around her leatherbound daybook. In morning meetings, I’d ogle as […]

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. […]

“You can’t do anything with five [million dollars], Greg. Five’s a nightmare.”  Wow, two Succession quotes in one month? Someone cancel her Max subscription! Look, one day you’re waltzing through life downplaying Kim Kardashian’s private jet purchase (it’s a write-off!); the next you’re asking 180,000 people where we should draw the line on wealth accumulation. […]

A few months ago, a 93-year-old billionaire donated $1 billion of her wealth to a medical school to make it free for its students…forever.  It might seem counterintuitive that a billionaire making medical school free in perpetuity could inspire conversation about wealth limits, but in her piece for The Atlantic, columnist Christine Emba notes that […]

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 […]

We recently conducted a survey with the Money with Katie audience on Instagram, and the results shocked us. We had asked for a handful of economic data points, like age, location, what people spend money on, and how much their household earns. I’m not sure what we were expecting to hear, but it wasn’t this: […]

“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 […]

Sometime in the last year, a guy named Bryan Johnson entered the collective consciousness of chronically online people everywhere. He’s a billionaire trying to prolong his life as long as possible using newfangled, expensive technologies like blood infusions from his teenage son and a complete elimination of sugar, carbs, staying up late, and pretty much […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

“Millennials are entitled to a good life!” claims the entitled millennial, immediately drawing criticism from older readers who fire off short, snarky messages from their Galaxy Tabs. (Shout-out to Jim, an angry man with a Galaxy Tab who told me I’m a “woman who overcomplicates everything” and “a young person who has no common sense.” […]