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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The other day, I saw this chart floating around Twitter: This was rage-bait, and baby, I was hooked, lined, and sunk. It was accompanied by the claim that Jeff Bezos paid a 23% effective tax rate* on $4 billion in reported income between 2014 and 2018. Having just forked over multiple six figures in taxes […]
“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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
This week’s episode of The Money with Katie Show covers the expensive gauntlet of financial and physical labor required to transition loved ones into the “final phase” of their lives: potentially decades of retirement and eventually, end-of-life care. This transition from providing care to potentially needing it marks a sort of full-circle moment in the […]
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a listener who was grappling with the hollow trappings of prestige. She described graduating from an MBA program and starting a fancy management consulting job. She felt like she had really made it—for a little while. “Even though information about how management consulting sucks is widely […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]