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Personal Finance For Women

Chelsea Fagan & Berna Anat on Building Resources with Community, Taking Action Offline, and Consumerism

December 30, 2024

Culture, Feminism


Listen & follow The Money with Katie Show: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet and Berna Anat of New Dimes join us for our last Rich Girl Roundtable of the year. We cover everything from women and first-gen communities’ relationships with money in 2025 and beyond, to building coalitions IRL for the futures we want to see. Tune in to this episode, then head offline.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Katie:

Welcome back to the Rich Girl Round Table Weekly discussion of the Money with Katie Show. I’m Katie and it is our last Rich Girl Roundup of the year. And today Henah and I sit down with Chelsea Fagan and Berna Anat for a no-nonsense discussion about women, your money, and the next four years… right after a quick break.

Before we get into it, this week’s upcoming main episode is the long awaited episode that I alluded to with Dana Miranda on if a budget is something you actually need. I know, it’s a little apocryphal. Her book You Don’t Need a Budget is one that I have not stopped thinking about since I read it, so I’m excited for you all to hear the conversation too. Okay, so into the roundtable today: Regular listeners of the show, we’ll remember Chelsea from our self-care culture is making us broke episode and Berna from our recent Rich Girl Roundtable about building wealth as a first generation American; we will link to both of those in the show notes.

They are both widely respected in the field and have really, really thoughtful and holistic views in the world of money, particularly for women and first gen wealth builders. So I know they are personal favorites of both Henah and I. Chelsea is the co-founder and CEO of The Financial Diet, a personal finance media company that focuses on money and class and kind of where the personal finance meets those types of class politics. She really puts her money where her mouth is. So TFD is a company that has a four day work week. They have six weeks of PTO, they have a generous parental leave policy and Chelsea as the CEO also happens to be the fifth highest paid employee on their team of eight.

Henah:

Slay.

Katie:

So Chelsea, something I really appreciate about you is your multidimensionality as a person. It’s like I think there’s a temptation in the world of business or if you have this title of CEO to be very narrow minded or narrowly focused, but Chelsea is a home chef, she’s a novelist, she has fabulous style and she speaks three languages.

Berna is the co-founder of New Dimes, a personal finance, networking and media company that focuses on first generation wealth builders and that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a first generation American, but that you might be the first person in your family to be learning and applying this knowledge. So something I really admire about you Berna is your ability to simplify complicated information and you play the role of the authentic hype woman. So genuinely that even if something terrible is happening in the world, I’m like, I want to know what Berna thinks about this. I want to receive this information from her. I really appreciate the way that you deliver information that is so unique and I think is sorely needed in this world.

So thank you both for joining us today. Can we just get a quick vibe check around the table before Henah sets up our questions for us?

Chelsea:

Today, I’m feeling pretty good because my last real day of work before the holidays, so.

Henah:

Love to see it.

Chelsea:

Looking forward to celebrating with family. So feeling okay.

Henah:

Awesome. And Berna?

Berna:

Hello folks. So if you can’t hear it in my voice, I did indeed just come from two days in Disneyland with 16 people. So the true range of life the last few days and now we’re talking about the next four years. I’m appreciating the spectrum of life today. That’s how I’m feeling.

Henah:

The duality of women. So I would love for us to just dive in. I know it might feel like old news now, but around the time that we produced or how the last 40 years produced the next four episode, we decided to set up a round table with both of you because we’ve observed really useful information that you shared kind of after the election and you had such clarity and levelheadedness about what comes next.

So a couple of the questions that we can respond to today that have come in, the first one comes from Rich Girl Lynn and she said, “In light of the election results, should I be worried as a single woman about safeguarding my financial assets against misogynistic policies? What steps should I be taking now?”

The other question came in from Rich Girl Abby who said, “What is the economy going to look like under Trump? What effect will his plans for tariffs have on investments and are you changing your investment strategy in any way? Is now a good time to hang on to cash and do we think a recession is coming?”

So Katie, I know there’s a way that you kind of personally wanted to set this up before we dive in.

Katie:

Yeah, I think for me what I’m hoping we can achieve today and why I wanted to talk to you all is because in my head there is a constant balance that I feel like I am constantly running, which is how much of the talking points that we have heard discussed and how much of the commentary around there’s going to be a policy that might limit access to contraception. That was, I think in May, 2024 is when we first heard that. How much should things like that lead us to believe that we need to be taking action right now and where might we be unnecessarily concerned?

I think my fear is always that when the temperature is very high, I never want to be fearmongering in a way that is unproductive. I want to give people things that make them feel empowered to act, but I don’t want to be scaring anybody. So any immediate burning thoughts that anyone wants to share.

Berna:

Immediately I start thinking about the fact that my therapist just taught me a self-soothing exercise where you put the heels of your hands and you push them down your thighs. That’s my burning thought right now is this self-soothing need to think about all these things.

Katie:

Oh, interesting.

Berna:

What the financial version of that is something my community is talking about of soothing and managing your anxiety.

Katie:

So Chelsea, you were someone who sort of sprang into action right away after the election with a suggested game plan for people. What were the thoughts that you were having at the time?

Chelsea:

So I’m saying this as a wealthy white woman who lives in a blue state who could fly to Tokyo to get an abortion if she needed one. You know what I’m saying?

The ways in which my life will be materially impacted, not enormous compared to most people and most people in this country and certainly most people around the world or did not have a good under Biden and wouldn’t have had a good under Harris.

So I am very much of the opinion that if you are a person for whom this really isn’t going to be the end of the world, we have so many actual problems and so many of them expand well beyond the horizons of gender and I think we’ve learned among many other things that gender is not the unifying category that we want it to be. And so I feel like if you are one of the people for whom this is not the end of the world, it is not just your responsibility, but I think it’s also your ethical duty to focus on ways in which you can materially help people for whom it is much more severe.

One of my best friends is she started a gender transition this year. She and I have talked at length about living out of the country because I used to, so I’m very familiar with the process of getting visas and things like that. She’s one of those people where I’m like, yeah, I mean I might be getting out of dodge too if I were you, and she’s someone who I think, absolutely, sound the alarm. There are many cases across all different kinds of communities, but I just think we have to separate out what is the vibes based versus what is actually materially based.

Katie:

I think that exact distinction between “vibes are off” versus “my material safety is now compromised in a different way”—that I think is what I’m trying to tease apart here. In one of the questions I think you hear this of, should I change my investment strategy, and my initial gut reaction to that is like no, if you have a personal finance investment strategy, you’re going to be fine.

Berna:

Wordness to the turdness. Because now is the time to help those who are materially physically interested in their health and their safety and survival. We need to community up, lawyer up, and just resource up, because people are scared as hell—and not for their 401(k)s necessarily, but for their lives and their families.

Henah:

You had talked a little bit Katie about control and what is in our control. Chelsea, I think you had suggested refreshing your finances so that you can maximize flexibility when you need it or to use the extra funds that you have to give to someone else. Katie and Berna, you’ve both talked about mutual aid and making sure that the resources you have can be extended kind of in both formal redistribution and in just one-on-one conversations.

So I would just ask I guess for the three of you, is there any other sort of tactical advice that you would offer if you are in a position of where having that extra cash or having those extra resources could be redirected to people who need it in this time?

Chelsea:

I would recommend having, if you can afford it, have an emergency fund that’s for people beyond yourself, but at the end of the day you have to be politically engaged because ultimately everything we’re talking about here at some level is a question of policy.

You mentioned the maternity leave that we give. We can only afford to give that because the state of New York reimburses us for 70% of it. If we didn’t have that, we couldn’t afford to do it if we were in Texas with the same company operating the same way, we couldn’t afford to do it.

So I think it’s very important for, there’s a lot of studies that show that when people engage in other ways, whether it’s online or within personal groups or in their own personal choices, often that removes them somewhat from political engagement because you kind of scratch the itch psychologically and it’s just very important to remind yourself that none of that is a replacement for political engagement at all.

Katie:

Ultimately, I think a lot of the problems that we talk about on a personal finance show with respect to how much you should spend on rent or how to think about how your childcare expenses are going to impact your financial independence timeline or why do your healthcare premiums keep going up? All of these things are downstream of policy. So it’s a little bit frustrating to kind of feel like the role of personal finance is cleaning up the mess of policy failure at every turn.

Something that feels important to me just from a integrity standpoint is not ignoring that, but I do feel like sometimes it leaves us in this funky middle ground where the real solutions and the things that are going to fix this for everybody are not happening at the level of my individual budget or my individual philanthropic contributions. And I think that can be a challenging framing shift when there is this sort of learned civic helplessness of like, well, nothing I do matters. And I think that that’s why we have seen and will continue to see rising levels of vigilantism because people don’t feel like the system is responding to their needs.

Berna: Curious what kinds of conversations you all are having within the New Dimes network right now, particularly with the upcoming administration’s stance on immigration and immigrants?

Berna:

For sure. So it’s in moments these that I unfortunately think about fiction like the Hunger Games, which I think lots of us do, and in moments of explosion and battle, there are people who run in and try to storm the capitol and then people who run in and try to help and heal the wounded. And I think being inside of New Dimes really feels like we’re running around trying to help the wounded.

Because for New Dimes, it’s first gen folks, again, first gen wealth, a lot of us are the alpha kids, many of us are the alpha daughters of our families and we have lived our whole lives never putting the oxygen mask on ourselves and putting on another people. And so what I’m noticing in my community is it’s a much deeper freakout because we are already used to giving and sacrificing so much around us, and a lot of us know at a visceral level that this is policy failure. We need to stay politically engaged. There are ways that we need to stretch ourselves and live inside of the spectrum and hold all the truths of policy change, but also I’m bleeding right now.

The wild thing is a lot of the times we’re the space holders for everyone else bleeding around us. We are really finding a lot of solace in speaking with each other. For example, when it comes to things like usual personal finance advice, of course it’s like don’t make any said movements, get the basics down, but we’re also thinking about the basics of the people around us.

We’re having tons of conversations in the last month about like, okay, I’ve been freaking out about my situation, but my mom has $10,000 in retirement and she just got screwed on a fake ADU. Or I had just had a parent pass in the last year and you’re telling me I need to deal with my grief plus figure out trust and wills for the remaining parent, all that.

So it’s just juggling a lot of things that feel so every day so viscerally the emergency is right in my face that it’s difficult right now to also feel politically engaged and supported because first gen folks are also people who’ve been disappointed. So some of the conversations we’re having inside of New Dimes is of course figuring out your absolute basics, but then figuring out really scrubbing down into what those basics mean. Do you have an emergency savings? Yes, but then do you have an emergency savings plan for your family who could get deported at any moment? Do you have a plan for communication around if deportation happens? Where do we lawyer up when we couldn’t afford a lawyer in the first place? What free resources or funds or bail funds can we look into if we get immediately?

We’re thinking a lot about how social security and Medicare could be affected because a lot of us are in our elder care era massively. A lot of us have been in our elder care era since we were 12, and so now figuring out what does that look like on a day-to-day, month to month budget if my parents cannot be taken care of by the state, if—what does that all look like if their Medicare craps out and I have to take care of several generations of healthcare at once? It feels so immediate and so visceral. And so the conversations we’re having at New Ds is tactical, but also massively around mental health and kind of trying to streamline our care while juggling the care of so many other people around us.

Chelsea:

One observation on that. So I am the only person in my family who’s not living at or just above the poverty line, so similarly taking care of everyone, paying for all of my nieces and nephews and things like that. And I think part of what has always been very shocking to me is living in New York, working in media, working in these industries…most people in these spaces, they have no idea what life is like for the vast majority of Americans and how angry most Americans are. I’ve basically at this point stopped even trying to talk to my family about this because at what level are you just Rockefeller swinging in from New York City to come shower gifts and condescend to people about their cost of living?

But since my sister’s starting having kids, they have never once felt taken care of. They have land. So there’s agriculture. I mean the agricultural community has been completely abandoned by presidents of both parties. There are just so many communities.

What’s really striking to me about this election is we are starting to see fewer and fewer easy answers about who is voting for who. The most striking pattern that has emerged in this election is that across the board, the Democrats have essentially already lost or are losing the working class, all of them. And that to me is the scariest part of all.

And again, why when I watched, I was watching MSNBC the night of the election and I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, I was like, these people have no idea what it actually feels like for the majority of Americans. People are angry, they can’t afford basics. They’re done with this partisan framing of it and who knows what will come of it, but as you talk about all the time on your show, without this class consciousness we’re never good out.

Katie:

Something that this reminds me of is a piece of exit polling that someone pointed out to me where they said the only group that swung meaningfully for Harris were white college educated women, and I thought that’s really interesting. We were talking about it within the context of abortion and the overturn of Roe v. Wade. We were talking about it from the standpoint of that’s because white college educated women were the only people for whom Roe v Wade was truly meaningful legislation such that they may have felt like they actually lost something, whereas abortion access in red states for poor women, for people who worked for the federal government, Roe wasn’t great for them. That wasn’t a reproductive justice framework that actually did anything for them in the face of their material reality. Something like a Roe v Wade being overturned, I don’t know. It wasn’t galvanizing in the same way was the point that someone had made to me and I was like, that’s a really interesting way to think about it.

Something that I wanted to ask you Berna about is you had mentioned that you guys are kind of having these conversations with respect to, okay, if something happens to social security, if something happens to Medicare, these are real threats. We have been in our elder care era since we were teenagers in some cases, but what is the budgeting solution to that? How are you helping people deal with concerns around budgeting?

Because I’m sitting here, I’m like, I’m coming up blank. I don’t know what the fuck you do in that situation when that resource gets taken away because more money is not going to materialize from nowhere for you and your job. So where is that money coming from? What are you advising people to do and how are you helping them? Is it kind of like a hey, we hear you, we need to come together to figure something out?

Berna:

It matters a lot that at least inside the New Dimes community, you’re looking at people with the same look of incredulity who are dealing with the same exact, so we can’t stare at each other and have money come out of our butts essentially.

Like if social security craps out and Medicare craps out, we need to figure out how to cut our budgets even more? Or earn even more in order to absorb that loss? Some of the conversations a lot of us are having is we are, the word that comes to mind is ate, which is a Tagalog word for elder sister, elder cousin and just head HBIC of the family. A lot of the conversations we’re having is ate, you’re used to being like, I’m the only one taking on this burden. It’s just me. And many of us are now having to basically unpack that and figure out how to have hard conversations with the other adults in our family of like, I cannot ate by myself anymore. This is not sustainable. We have to be able to spread this responsibility across the family.

We have to be able to act like our families are our first mutual aid networks, which is very bizarre behavior for the ates of families because it’s all on us all the time even to find the resources. So a lot of the conversations we’re having are like, alright, how do I for the absolute first time in my life actually ask for help?

It’s also looking at the idea that we might have to allocate our resources in different places where mess with our priorities. Maybe we were planning on buying a home, can’t do that anymore because we’ve got to make sure the mom is covered if her Medicare craps out. Maybe we’re planning on having kids, so many reasons, insert Handmaid’s Tale, et cetera, et cetera here that it might be more challenging to have kids and my parents are my kids now. It just is what it is. This is the caretaking that I’m looking forward to into my life is that we all need to sort of batten down the hatches and it’s no longer let’s grow new income streams and figure it out.

Now it’s just like now we really have to get humble and ask for help and start dividing up our resources according to what is immediately in front of us. And as we’re talking about the necessity for paying attention to policy and keeping pressure on our political leaders, I’m like, I’m so glad that the people who have the capacity to do that can do that because capacity is at an all time low for first gen folks. So these conversations are really helpful.

Katie:

So it’s interesting, Berna, that you bring up the battening down the hatches budgeting element of this. We were just talking on a Rich Girl Roundup previously about how I think new Black Friday records were broken and that discretionary spending has been trending up for several months and something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of that data is the fact that to me, the big story of this election of our electoral politics of our country is the role that corporate interests play in our political system and the extent to which it has been captured by corporate interests.

I’m curious, Chelsea, you speak about consumerism a lot and on the interpersonal level, what do you think it matters to bear in mind right now about the way that we are spending money? You had shared something recently about thinking twice about supporting influencers who do nothing of sociopolitical value with their platforms and basically just shills.

Chelsea:

You guys know Pookie and Jett on TikTok?

Katie:

Oh, do I know Pookie and Jett on TikTok.

Chelsea:

Basically Pookie and Jett are this couple, they’re like an SEC frat sorority match made in heaven. She’s just like this very beautiful influencer coded woman and he’s this, he’s probably not even 30, but he’s always in a golf shirt. And just for context, so they’re like TikTok sweethearts, they just had their baby, everyone loves them. Their whole big thing is “Pookie’s looking amazing tonight” and it’ll be like him pointing at her wearing some beautiful outfit that costs $10,000 or whatever and that was their—

Berna:

This is for real? This is not parody?

Chelsea:

This is the real, this is not parody, this is not parody.

Katie:

I love that you asked that. I love that the clarification was needed. Thank you.

Chelseea:

I mean, for the record, I’ve never sought out Pookie and Jett, but I mean you spend enough time on TikTok, they will come past your feed. But anyway, so now for context, Pookie, the man, or no, Jett, the man, boy Pookie, he is very, very rich and that’s very clear in the videos. I don’t think she works and he works in private equity in the healthcare sector, which I mean if you’re making millions and millions of dollars a year working in private equity in healthcare, there’s almost nothing worse you could do ethically.

So anyway, and that’s widely known and people are still like, oh, Pookie and Jett slaying it again, but then it came out, he voted for Trump or he donated to Trump, and I’m like, okay, at some point we’re going to need to hold each other’s hands and be like this southern frat boy who shows up every day in a pastel golf shirt talking about how beautiful his wife is and he works in private equity in the healthcare space voted for Trump. Are you okay that you’re shocked and appalled by this? And their comments were unusable for days. They’re like, how could you, whatever. And I’m just like—

Katie:

And I think the counterpoint that someone would often make is I need an escape. I need someone who’s not talking about politics. I don’t want to go watch my favorite cooking influencer and hear them talking about electoral politics. I want to make a pot roast and not think about this for 10 minutes

 And so I think for me it’s like finding the line where you are, I guess aware or conscious of the fact that every time you watch somebody’s YouTube video, every time you click on a link that someone is sharing, you are monetarily supporting that person. So it’s just being the check of is this person adding value to my life? Am I okay with supporting their work?

And I think that’s where the private equity stuff bothers the shit out of me. What I think the class consciousness conversation is starting to drive home for people is the connection between the fact that this person works in private equity dentistry and can make millions of dollars a year taking away your healthcare is the same reason that when you go to the dentist you get an $800 bill because they’re saying, oh, well we’re not going to cover this cleaning because it was considered they upcoded you, right?

Those things are directly connected. The way that you are suffering in this system is directly connected to the way that this person is being enriched. These are not separate things happening in a vacuum. That is I think the lens that I now bring to some of this stuff.

Same with the TikTok restock influencers. And so I think that again, if we’re going to give this person tens of millions of views, just know that the money is going to be spent on single use PlasticTok.

Berna:

It’s not difficult to find creators who have found the ability to represent all of it, right? Yeah, I’m going to make stupid ass mindless videos about dogs or really engaged videos about cooking and pot roasts, but also share how my work is connected to the people of Gaza. Share how my work is connected to the sociopolitical spectrum. Share how my work and how you support me contributes to this other cause that I care about as creators. It is not that difficult to share the entire spectrum of who you are and what you represent.

When I see that in another creators, I’m like, now I’m going to support you with my whole body. Now I’m going to watch your videos with aplomb and I’m going to recommend your shit to everybody. It’s been too long now at this point for creators not to have found their ways of showing the entire spectrum and who they are top to bottom, and if they’ve been silent at this point, they have something to be ashamed about. So it is too late at this point.

I have my short list of creators in my head who I’m like, I know they’re about it and they’re hilarious and they can create on the entire range of these are my political thoughts and also this is how I disconnect and help you disconnect and we can do all we can do both.

Chelsea:

With consumerism in particular, I feel like it’s always just such a circular conversation that goes nowhere in terms of the responsibilities around consumerism because I feel like the real circumstances of some people are always used as a cover for people to whom it does not apply. The number of times we’ve had to go back and forth in our own comments section about, well, some people can only afford fast fashion.

First of all, we need to unpack that because even within that, how much fast fashion are we talking about and which fast fashion company and are we buying it new or secondhand even that’s worth unpacking. Similarly, like you said, Katie, with the single use plastics, some people need these things for ability reasons. Fair enough, fair enough. Do you need to be filling our waterways with single use plastics for every single part of your day because somebody somewhere needs them for accessibility reasons? Or similarly, do you need to be hiring an underpaid, often undocumented worker to perform 16 tasks a day for you just because somebody somewhere probably needs that service?

It feels like it’s this constant question of what about is, we did a video recently about, it was like we had the one about consumerism and then one about convenience culture. So many people in the comments were like, hello, I’m a person with a disability who doesn’t have thousands of dollars of disposable income every month to be spending on getting everything delivered. Whether or not you can engage with these services, it’s literally just a question of disposable income. But I do think often we use this sort of misdirection of whatever tool is at our disposal to justify the exact type of consumerism, thoughtless consumerism that we want to engage in regardless of who it comes at the cost of.

And Berna, I was thinking about earlier, you were talking about so many people are in a position where they can’t even think about electoral politics and because they’re just so overwhelmed. And I think that’s absolutely true and why I think if you are in a position like me where you do have the disposable income, I don’t have kids. I work a four day work week. I’m in a really good position to lock in, but often we are so focused on pointing to all of the people who voted all different ways and we never address the vast, vast swaths of the country who don’t even vote at all, and how many of those people don’t vote because they couldn’t even get a day off work because they have no paid leave because they don’t even know where their voting station is because they’ve been gerrymandered basically out of existence. And I think what I just really want to see from all of us, follow who you want, do what you want, but try to expand your sense of empathy beyond just figuring out who to blame for things not being the way you want them to be.

Thanks.

Katie:

Damn, Chelsea always brings it, man.

Henah:

I feel like she has no notes, she just spitballs everything.

Katie:

I know, off the dome.

Henah:

And I’m like, oh, 10 out of 10.

Katie:

On that note, Berna, you have talked in the past and in this conversation about feeling untethered and move to action at the same time, and you’ve talked a lot about capacity, which I think is a really important element of all of this. How are you counseling yourself and the people that you care about to expand that capacity?

Berna:

Yeah. Oh man. I mean, like I was saying before, capacity is at an absolute all time low on a personal level. I always go back to something that one of my favorite writers, activists, the educators, Michelle Mijung Kim says in her book The Wake Up, which is essentially all of this is a tapestry and the most you can do is take one string and pull like hell, and some days you might tug a little bit. Some days you might take it and run to the other side of the city, but that is sort of how we’re counseling the folks inside of New Dimes.

A lot of us are in this paralysis of we’re being called to care about so many things, and so a lot of us are shutting down, and so the one pull thing is that is sort of the guiding principle that’s getting us to give a shit every day. I’m also asking people to know what their reaction to trauma and crisis is, and no one starts to feel like burnout because nobody’s helped when you’re burnt out. I’m really telling folks to get to understand how they react to crisis and when they’re at an edge where you’re no longer helping anyone and you’re hurting yourself.

Reminding a lot of folks to take a look at things like the social change ecosystem map by Deepa Iyer and they sort of map out in a crisis, in a multi crisis situation. There are so many roles that you can take and a lot of us are just analysis paralysis as to where your role even is. Are you a storyteller? Are you a frontline person? Are you a caretaker? Are you a weaver? Are you a fundraiser? Taking one and going hard as you can in one direction is like all you can do, the capacity that you have is enough for whatever action that you can take today and then you got to pause and then you got to breathe.

It’s like learning how to pace ourselves in a way that we’ve never paced ourselves before. I say all this while literally looking at a mirror slash looking at myself in the camera here, I give this advice while also looking directly into my own eyeballs and being like, do you know when you’ve had enough? Maybe not, but we’re finding this balance together.

Henah:

And I find myself in this interesting time where I’m like, what can I do to really fuel up in the next four weeks before I feel like we’re all going to hit the ground running, so to speak. We know what he said he’s going to do on day one, week one, month one. So I’m curious, Berna, is there anything that you are trying to do in this time?

Berna:

These days, I’m—as many organizers are—just begging people to find a political home. A lot of people, especially first gen folks are like might listen to this conversation and be like, that’s all so great. I’m so glad you all have the energy, take care about policy because I’m so exhausted and just for the first time now we’re understanding what it means to start to organize what it means to dig into community, what mutual aid and the solidarity economy actually means. I’m begging people to find a political home and actually engage, and that literally means all those email lists that you signed up for when you were pissed about X, Y, Z in the last four, 10 years, when they send you those weekly invitations to go to their Zoom catchup, go. When your local organization is like we are having a fundraiser at the local rec center where you can learn about what, grab a friend and physically go, commit to actually physically showing up to these local organizations and to their hangouts and their meetups and their information sessions because they have the information for you. They’ve distilled what exactly it is you need to do. They are begging for attention and funds and anything because they’ve been in this work for decades.

A lot of this is not a surprise to the most marginalized communities and they’re like, we already know what to do in a crisis. We just need you to pay attention and show up consistently. So go do that. There are a lot of incredible creators who are putting together really beautiful guides too of just at the very basic level. If you can’t make rent tomorrow, here are four resources. If you need to figure out how to couch surf sustainably, here are some resources. If you need to figure out the most granular things, just drill down to your super everyday neighborhood levels.

I was talking to a friend the other day actually about this episode if and or when really hits the fan, no one’s going to be caring about arguing in the comments of a video or figuring out political or you’re going to be like, who in my neighborhood do I with that has the water filtration system? Who in my neighborhood do I with that actually has connections to immigration lawyers? It really is now time to put the whole community is important thing to practice in a way that might feel strange and awkward now, but you will desperately need in a physical visceral way soon.

Chelsea:

I totally agree with all that. I’ll also say as someone who has been creating content online as my full-time job, my entire adult life, more and more increasingly with an expressly progressive political bent, so much of progressive content and left content online is just incredibly unappealing. I saw a TikTok recently that I was standing up and saluting. It was like, what does your space offer to someone who doesn’t have money, education, social status, or any of these things?

If you are saying to yourself that the answer is anything other than nothing right now, it’s probably not true because most of these spaces are often incredibly exclusionary, especially around the topic of education, academia, all of these things. People don’t know these terms, they don’t read these authors, they don’t know these policies. It’s just not accessible to people.

And when you combine that with a very sort of, you should already know this stance, which I think a lot of, because I watch a lot of left YouTube and even I who feels pretty informed and engaged often leave feeling dumb. But the good news is to Berna’s point, the second you step offline and go into an actual room with these people, people are so kind, they’re so sweet, they’re all so nice. At the Working Families Party, if you go canvas for them that someone will show up with, they have little tote bags that are full of snacks and gum and water bottles and people will stop by and ask if you’re having a good day and is everything going okay, can I help you? And that’s how all of these spaces are.

Also, I think the people who are often the most unappealing and aggressive online about these things are the people who are the least engaged in real life and being gatekeepers online and feeling superior to each other online, the way that people were tearing each other to pieces leading up to the election. To me, whenever I saw that, I was just like, you have so much energy to do this. Take that down to your local city council and get a bike lane put in. What are you guys doing on TikTok screaming at each other.

And that is one thing that the right is much better at. I mean, they’re definitely starting to fracture now more and more, but historically they’ve been pretty good about forming a united front online. And as we saw, especially with the podcasts and the online content, those communities online that are opening the door to people in a way that makes them feel welcomed and included, that gets votes that gets people into office. And until we’re able to compete with that, I feel like it’s going to be very hard. But the good news go anywhere in real life and people are nice.

Berna:

That’s what kills me. I’m like what you’re looking for, the validation you’re looking for, the security, the safety, the friendship, the understanding you’re looking for is outside—get off your goddamn phone, touch grass. There are people who need your $5 in the mutual aid network next door right now, just unplugged for two seconds. I really feel like these next four years unfortunately, I mean I’m a social media influencer, but I’m definitely entering the era of like there’s not really±

Katie:

Four podcasters tell people to touch grass: Hey guys, go outside.

Berna:

Every argument you’re having online, it’s like 17 times less fiery when you’re in front of a person. I also, for the first time in my life, Chelsea, for some reason don’t why I decided to—my friends and I decided to canvas in Phoenix the week before the election because we were like, we all need to touch grass. That was us eating earth that was not touching grass, it was just rolling in manure in a very humbling way.

But it energized us more than anything on the internet could have ever energized us in a way that was real actual human connection. It makes me feel like I have actual influence. It helps the people that I look at and talk to every single day. It’s the antidote to all the feelings I have when I’m arguing with somebody in the comments of a video and knowing that it’s getting nowhere for nobody.

Henah:

This is a long game that we have to play. And I think having your local community will go a long way in keeping you sustained through those four years. But beyond that, because this is clearly something that has been brewing for decades and I think we’re going to need more local support more than ever to achieve what we all want to see.

Chelsea:

To me, what gives me a lot of hope is the more it becomes clearly an issue of Democrats losing the working class across all sections of the us, the more I think we’re going to get to a place where we learn that we have to share a country with each other, that there is nothing irredeemable about most people that most people can be spoken to. And that by definition that means that there is progress to be made and the tent can get bigger. The tent could almost double in size just from people who didn’t even vote. So I really think for me the next four years as someone who has the privilege and ability to engage politically, I am very excited at the possibility of being able to expand that tent.

Katie:

Yeah, I think you make a really important point too about progressive politics feeling bad. It’s so antithetical because if anything, these are the political ideas that should feel really good. They’re supposed to be grounded in this idea of collectivism and how can we make things better for everybody and how can we make sure that people have the things that they need. So if it becomes a space that feels very exclusionary and very elitist, we have to have the capacity to imagine something better and to offer up an alternative that feels really good and really attractive. But it’s like if the only thing that you have to offer is, well, we’re not that. That’s not an inspiring mission that doesn’t bring anybody new into the fold. And I think that you guys are both completely correct that that has to begin with taking the conversations off the internet.

I was talking to a family member recently who years ago was like, we always joked we’re like, that’s our Marxist brother-in-law. Like he’s always the guy that’s like, hey, have you read the latest issue of Jacobin? And we were like, and I think I talked to him over Thanksgiving kind of expecting to be like, Hey, let’s get into it. And he was like, dude, I can’t anymore. I feel like I just want to disengage entirely. And I was like, that was a real oh shit moment for me where I was like, okay, if we’re losing people that have been on this train who feel alienated by the vibe of this kind of stuff online, then we’ve kind of lost the plot.

The social mediafication of political engagement is because it scratches that itch because it makes you feel like you’re doing something but you’re not actually doing something. And I think this is something that I will personally own and something that I’ve come to realize is a shortcoming in my own life is feeling adept at having the conversations or reading the theory or subscribing to current affairs, but then being like, okay, but now what do I do with these ideas? How do I actually put these into action? This work has been going on in the real world for a long time.

And to your point, Berna, it’s like if you just plug into it, it’s already there. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In many ways, it’s kind of the best of both worlds because it has the real world positive consequences. You’re taking action in real life and it’s a sustaining and energizing type of action versus the, I feel like I’m doing something on social media, but it actually just makes me feel like nothing is really coming of it anyway.

Berna:

Totally. Right now, actually, in talking with some of my cistern from the trenches of canvassing in Phoenix, we’re like, you know what we need to do? What felt good though was being able to walk around in small groups of people that we trust and have real conversations with voters and sometimes change minds because we’re the first person that they ever even spoke to about real person that they’ve spoken to about the election in weeks. And so now we are joining an organization called Bay Resistance, and they’re basically creating pods of six to seven people in a text group that, and whenever there is a political action to physically show up at our support, you get a text and then you stay with that pod for months to a year.

So you basically create a political action click and it feels so much more accessible. I get a singular text, this is happening on Saturday, this is how you show up If you have these needs, this is how you can do it. If you can’t come, this is how you can also support. It’s bite size. It’s real life. It’s a small group. It’s essentially the way that our ancestors organized was on a smaller local visceral level. And I’m reverting all the way back to that. I’ve had too much internet the last six, seven years. I need to go to basically political internet rehab and touch a lot of grass with my small political pods. So folks can start there.

Chelsea:

But what you said about this is how our ancestors used to organize. I think it’s just so important to remind ourselves all the time, constantly when it comes to politics, we were not meant to be aware of, let alone to care about this many people. The democracy is the aberration, especially at the scale of the United States and especially given that unlike many other countries. We don’t have a thousand years of relatively stable ethnic nationalism like many, many countries. But a lot of countries who have very developed social democracies, they also have had monocultures for getting on a thousand years now. And in fact, most of what has put their monoculture or their democracy under threat is the incredible political backlash that happens when the monoculture is in any way disrupted. It’s all of Western Europe right now. Every single western European country is going through basically the same thing.

So I think the fact that it’s extremely far from perfect, but it is important to remember that a pluralistic society like America that doesn’t have that long national history, that doesn’t have that same sort of inherent community that many other countries did unnatural. And so the fact that it’s difficult is like that’s normal and it’s totally not sustainable for our brains to be as aware of things as we constantly are. So I totally agree with your thing about find one single thread and pull on it.

I will also plug US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. They’re the nicest people. Their organization is so wonderful. They make it so easy to work with them. They’ll send you merch if you volunteer with them after a certain point of time. And they’re very speed and they’re very accessible for a lot of different entry points because they’re more electorally oriented. So there’s a lot of entry points in different municipalities who have legislation on the ballot. I highly recommend working with them if you’re interested in Palestinian cause.

Berna:

The magic is sort of in keeping your grit and determination in being connected to the cause as opposed to being overly connected to the organization or overly identifying with the politics or the home or the structure and really staying rooted to that because things are going to make you sick. You’re going to be pushed out or feel pushed out of things. And to have political endurance means to sort of be able to not get too to the identity of any one thing, but be really attached to the heart of the cause and follow this vibes essentially.

Katie:

Thank you.

Henah:

Something that the three of you have been really, really brilliant at is using your platforms as much as you can. And I think something that people don’t realize about themselves is that they too have a platform, whether it’s on social or in real life with the standing in their community or their families or friends. And I think I would just encourage people to, Berna said, find that one thread, but also share about the one thread that you’re pulling on. I think Katie, a lot about what you said of there was no mandate at the Constitution that was like privatized healthcare for all.

Katie:

The healthcare CEO, and they’re there being like, yeah, add a 6% profit margin in that amendment. Thanks.

Henah:

Yeah!

Katie:

Yeah.

Henah:

We all have to believe that we could fight for better and know that that’s possible. So I’ll just throw that in there.

Katie:

Totally.

Chelsea:

I agree.

Katie:

That’s all for this week’s Rich Girl Roundtable. We will see you on Wednesday and a happy 2025 from all of us here at team Money with Katie.