How to Use Today’s Economic Uncertainty to Get Closer to Your Dream Life

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The economic uncertainty of March 2020 inspired me to think about what I really wanted to do with my life—and Money with Katie was born. Now in the midst of another bout of uncertainty, I wanted to cover the fundamentals of financial planning and the flexibility that can unlock for you to get closer to your dream life.

I invited investing educator Amanda Holden (aka ⁠Dumpster Doggy⁠) to talk about the slow-but-necessary process of unlocking golden handcuffs and pursuing financial freedom while preserving the parts of yourself that matter most.

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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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Mentioned in the Episode

• Get $50 off Amanda’s Invested Development Course with code KATIE, which includes 15 video lessons, office hours for Q&A for a year, and investing parties.

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Transcript

Amanda:

I know a lot of people right now in this moment feel like they have to break a part of themselves to work a corporate job. And it’s not just our fun loving, imaginative, childlike selves, but also our virtuous selves and ourselves that crave freedom and movement and thought. And so I do think that it will forever and always be about striking the right balance. And this is something that is going to move in waves for all of us.

Like you said, we need enough money to live free from daily economic anxiety. And if you are in that camp, I feel for you and I believe that you’re doing your best. But then on the other end, it’s about not becoming so attached to the material that you are unable to live your truest life.

Katie:

A recurring theme has woven its way through our episodes this year. It started with Kathryn Edwards noting that the real risk of a recession for most folks is job loss, an effect that’s felt acutely by a relatively small portion of the population, the rest of whom—those who retain employment and therefore income—go more or less unscathed.

Then the subject appeared again in my conversation two weeks ago with JL Collins who noted that during a couple turbulent economic periods of the early aughts, he was out of work for months, sometimes years. And this is a surprising reality for a man who we can assume is a millionaire many times over, thanks to his lifelong 50% savings rate. Typically, we don’t associate those who achieve top 1% wealth with long periods of unemployment.

And so finally it came up again in our Spotify comments after our most recent Rich Girl Roundup, in which I basically punted the question to all of you and said, do you want to do a best of series of tactical personal financial advice? And a listener named Joann responded and said, “I love the idea of a throwback series or maybe a recession-proof your finances episode.”

So I was thinking, since Rich Girl Nation comes out next week, my debut book, that’s part systemic critique, part robust financial independence roadmap, today’s episode will be just that. Now, Rich Girl Nation is the book that contains everything I wish someone had told me when I began earning money of my own and building my life. And it centers around developing a healthy pursuit of financial independence and addressing the six most pressing drivers of the gender wealth gap. And a special thank you to everyone who has already pre-ordered it. Love you, thank you.

But because of the Trump administration’s on again off again relationship with tariffs and the very volatile environment, it’s courting, it’s possible that a manufactured recession is in store for the global economy. Though as of this recording just night, a court has ruled that the tariffs in question in their current form are illegal. So it’s possible we may avoid the worst of it a little bit longer, and I guess we’ll just have to see what the Senate does with that huge deficit fattening bill. But when it comes to recessions, as Keds reminded us, the biggest personal risk is that of unemployment and therefore loss of income.

So I was wondering, what if you didn’t have to work for money? Periods of economic turbulence can paradoxically be the best time to reimagine your financial strategy and take back control. The huge market drop in March and April, 2020, though short-lived, the surrounding panic about the future at the time was partially what inspired me to cut my spending to the bone and become a part-time entrepreneur because I figured well, seems like the world’s ending anyway, my entire career just got sent through a rock tumbler, because I work for an airline. Why not do the thing that I have always wanted to do? Why not try to be a writer?

So I am Katie Gatti Tassin. Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show. Today I am going to be using a few parts from chapter three of the book to break down the simple savings rate math of financial independence. So that is how you can understand how long it will take to become financially independent, which is the point at which you no longer need to work for money, whether permanently or just temporarily based on your spending and your savings rates.

Then we’re going to talk to Amanda Holden, an investing expert known as Dumpster Doggy on the internet, whose story is to me kind of an inspiring reminder of how understanding money and locking in on a new vision for your future can really change your life. It’s a great conversation. We covered a lot of ground. I’m really excited for you to hear it.

But just a note before we cruise into mathland here. When you pre-order Rich Girl Nation, you will also get three free bonuses. One of those bonuses is a financial independence calculator. So if you’re excited to start reading before anyone else, you’ll also get a special bonus chapter that you can read today ahead of next week’s official release. But if you’re listening to the math and you’re like, I don’t know about this, that calculator is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

Because when I started learning about personal finance in 2018, I was earning somewhere in that $50,000 range, and I didn’t think that I earned enough to invest at the end of every month after I paid my rent and I paid my credit card bill. There just wasn’t a ton left over and I was paying close attention to what was coming in, but not really what was going out. So even if there was money left over, I really couldn’t have told you what it was. There was no real cashflow management happening. There was no plan for where the money was going until I did an audit to figure out how much my life costs, and I realized that I actually had hundreds of dollars that were essentially unaccounted for.

So why target a financial independence number? Well, at the time, numbers that were in the millions seemed so impossibly far away as to be basically imaginary, especially compared to what I was earning. I was like, there’s no way. It’s not even worth saving and investing this money because it is just so little compared to what people tell me I need to retire.

So when I discovered the 4% rule, which said that you needed 25 times your annual expenses, not income, but expenses to operate independently of income from labor, suddenly financial freedom felt accessible to me for the first time, which was a really invaluable revelation. And my original financial independence number was around $750,000. And don’t get me wrong, that still felt like a shit ton of money, but it also felt possible based on all the compounding returns charts that I had been staring at now almost, I don’t know, not quite 10 years later, but it feels like a decade has passed.

It feels like a lot has happened in the intervening years and now as a high earner and as an entrepreneur, this idea carries a different sort of piece for me, and that is a quantitatively sound target of enough. So the FI number target really grounds my instinct to hoard as much money as possible to be like, well, I just get a little bit more, right? It reminds me of the importance of keeping my expenses reasonable, even if our household income could support a more lavish lifestyle, if it could support higher spending.

So for me, I have come to see that decision not just as financially beneficial, but one that reflects my values and the code that I want to govern my life and the life that I want to live, the things that I value, intellectual curiosity, and generosity, and things like that. So I would say that an evolving belief system over the years has really complicated my perspective on what a good life looks like in both exciting and challenging ways.

But I really, really still appreciate the foundation that I have now to freely change course and make different decisions about how I want to spend my time from a position of real material security. And that is what I want more than anything for all of you. That is why Rich Girl Nation exists. So understanding the relationship between your spending and saving is a really critical piece of this.

When you are renovating or recession proofing a financial plan, the first step is figuring out what your personal cost of living is and how that relates to your income. When I did this for the first time, I created two different versions of the budget. One was, hey, if everything’s awesome, how am I spending? And if everything hits the fan, how much can I cut? And what is the delta between the normal life is good budget and the oh shit, I’m buckling down budget.

But that personal cost of living and your income will probably fluctuate on maybe as much as a monthly basis, which is why I like to use annualized data when I am trying to make projections. So all of my income and all of my spending from 2024, for example, sitting down with the entirety of it to determine the overall percentage of income that I am spending, and then by extension, saving and investing because money can really only go to two places. You’re either spending it or donating it, getting rid of it, or you are keeping it and you’re trying to make it grow. Because once you know this savings rate, you can translate that information to a timeline with relative ease.

So the beautiful thing about savings rates is that they apply to all incomes proportionally, which means two people who are both saving and investing, 50% of their income will become financially free in 14 years. They could start with $0 invested and get to total financial freedom in 14 years, even if one of them earns $50,000 and the other earns a million dollars, because it’s the percentage of your income that you are saving that reveals in a roundabout way how many years it’ll take for your investments to accumulate to the point that they could support that same level of spending.

There’s a chart in the book on pages 90 and 91 that lays this out for savings rates from 10% all the way to 90% in five percentage point increases. And the biggest takeaway that I want people to have when they look at this is the less you are saving now, the more impactful increases are going to be. So if you are currently saving 10% of your income, if you can bump that up to just 15%, you are going to retire seven years faster. Five percentage points, seven years off the timeline. That’s incredible.

Now that knowledge is extremely valuable when you are weighing your options about the slightly more expensive car, for example, because it attaches a real tangible consequence to a decision. And it’s also worth noting here that if you’re already contributing some percentage of your income to your 401(k) plan or something like it at work, that percentage absolutely counts toward this overall savings rate. So if you’re like, oh, I got 5% or 7% already going into that 401k, you are already chipping away at a chunk of this.

I have personally landed at around a 50% savings rate target more or less, and I anticipate that that’s probably going to go down pretty considerably as I begin to downshift my work obligations over the next few years and start to take advantage of the financial cushion that I’ve built over the last 10 or so. So in other words, I really want to start enjoying the entire purpose of working hard to earn and save more.

But if you’re saving and investing 25% of your income for the long term, you’re going to go from $0 invested to total financial freedom in around 26 years. If you shoot for 35%, you’re getting more aggressive. You’re now down to 21 years. At my peak level of extreme hardo commitment to the bit, my savings rate was around 70%, which meant $0 to financial freedom in eight years flat. Now, that was possible because I was earning a lot, but it also really wasn’t all that sustainable in my opinion. It was a little bit overzealous, but I think it was the right decision at the time.

So my example hopefully demonstrates you will almost certainly move around on this chart based on where you are in your life, how much you’re earning, what your other responsibilities are. Some people are putting kids in daycare at the same time that they’re paying for their own parents’ retirement, so it’s going to vary a lot, but I think that that’s why the bonus tool calculator is so useful for teasing out how your existing progress, the progress you’ve already made, mixes with your current savings rate or how much you’re spending and how much you’re earning right now to produce a timeline that can really be instructive for where you might want to make different decisions, whether that’s earning more or frankly earning less.

Sometimes that’s the decision you’ll come to too, is I want to save less than I am, and I am a really big believer in seasonality and cyclicality with all of these things. I think motivation, work, money, all of it is going to ebb and flow in your life in different seasons are going to call for different versions of you and different priorities, which is why I’m very, very excited to talk to Amanda today about her approach.

Recessions are inevitable in capitalist economies because contraction is the opposite side of growth. So whether we experience one this year or not, organizing your financial life in this way might mean that you can transform an unhappy layoff situation into a meaningful six month or yearlong sabbatical or starting a new enterprise. And regardless of how you spend the time or how much time you take, if something like that were to happen, that you can ride out a system-wide hiring bust with confidence and ease because you have the cushion to do it.

I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation. Something that I really love and appreciate about Amanda is her ability to thread the needle between the things that we do have agency over and how empowering it can be to take control, but also recognizing that bigger solutions are necessary because there are portions of the population for whom some of these things are very much out of their control. We’ll get to that conversation right after a quick break.

Amanda, welcome to the Money with Katie Show. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Amanda:

Thank you for having me.

Katie:

You used to work for a well-known investment firm in San Francisco, and that is one of the most expensive cities in the world as we know. So I’m going to assume that you were paid well, but my understanding is that you were quite miserable in this job and that you knew that you needed to find a way out. So tell me about how your career started, what this realization felt like.

Amanda:

Sure. So yeah, Katie, it does hurt me a little bit to admit that I am an ex-finance bro. From the moment I slipped my first sockless foot into a boat shoe, I probably could have guessed that the career was a bit of a spiritual mismatch for me, and that helping rich men get richer wasn’t going to be my life’s calling, but instead it took me five or six years before I fully accepted how unhappy I was at work. And yes, I was earning plenty, but it was also around this time that I realized that I would always be a finance bro because my cycle of spending was keeping me locked in the job.

And so a bit more background about the work. So I graduated in 2007. I started working at the investment management firm in 2008, and so I started out as a glorified admin, but with the events that transpired in 2008, we had the most spectacular stock market crash in our lifetime. Because we were working in markets, we were on the front lines of that. And so it was not long before I was ultimately poached and thrown into a client facing role. And so my job was to be on the phones with our high net worth clients, mostly men, and I was keeping them apprised of portfolio strategy. I was answering questions about the markets, getting to know their personal financial situations.

And also because we were working at this time, that was really characterized by widespread financial terror. I was a 25-year-old woman, and my job was essentially to let grown men yell at me about their money. So it was very stressful. The work itself was quite stressful. And then I also had quite a bit of disdain for the workplace itself, and both eventually curdled into this full blown disillusionment. And although I couldn’t quite put my finger on the oppression at the time, I couldn’t totally explain it at the time because I didn’t have the language then I didn’t have the knowledge to understand that what I was mad about was working within an ecosystem of institutionalized patriarchy. At the time, I was just like—

Katie:

These rich men are pissing me off.

Amanda:

Yeah.

Katie:

When you say your high net worth clients, how rich were the people that you were having to basically do financial therapy for day in and day out?

Amanda:

It was really a range. It would range from as small as $1 or $2 million up to $20 or $30 million because we were working on the private client side. The firm that I worked with did have an institutional client side as well, but I was working directly with private clients. I’m working with a lot of very successful doctors, business owners, your occasional engineer who has $10 or $20 million in the bank. I’m not working with billionaires, right? That’s an entirely different experience.

And even within the range of who I was working with, what I learned was, and this is probably pretty obvious, but that the more money people had, it’s almost like they were able to worry about it a little bit less, but somebody with $1 or $2 or $3 million who is watching their entire retirement be cut in half. I mean, this is of course going to be somebody that is very worried about the stock market crashing over 50%.

And at the firm that I was working at, part of our sales pitch was that we were going to move clients defensive during the next big market crash because we did move clients defensively during the.com bubble. And so all of these folks get brought in believing that we are going to be able to catch the next market crash, which we did not. And so not only are people mad that the market has crashed, but they’re also mad because they think that we lied to them.

And so this is one of my favorite stories. We are getting fired as the investment manager so often and so frequently at this time, because this was a million years ago, you had to send in a signed fax to fire us. And, in what feels like a very incredible allegory for the market itself, we were getting fired so frequently that our fax machine burst into flames.

And so that’s who I was working with. It was very difficult and very emotional and truly for good reason. And I was perhaps less worried about the way that I was being treated by clients and a little bit more worried about the way that I was being treated by the workplace itself. But I was stuck.

Katie:

I make the joke of like, oh, you’re tired of getting yelled at by all these rich old men. But to your point, that was a terrifying period. And if you are retiring with your $1 million or $2 million that you’ve just spent your whole life saving, and now these people were supposed to protect and shield your money who you trusted weren’t able to do so, which to be fair, that’s a pretty high bar to clear. Most of us can’t catch crashes before they happen. So maybe that was a bad expectation to set to begin with, but that’s a very compassionate way to think about it.

So I want to talk a little bit about what you noticed in this workplace, the leadership in this job, the way that you were treated by this workplace. And let’s just walk through some of the advantages that you noticed that some of these other people that you were working with had that maybe you were not benefiting from.

Amanda:

Sometimes I wonder if I even would’ve caught it if I did not happen to have a best friend at the firm. So my best friend, her name was Lisa. She was my first mentor. She also happened to be a single mother.

So when I was 22 and she was 23, she had a five-year-old daughter. And at the firm we were required to work 10 hour days minimum, “ass in chair” for 10 hours a day. We also had to be there at the market opens, which on the west coast is 6:30 AM. And then in addition to this, it was an extremely rigid workplace. And at the time, I didn’t really understand why. And now looking back, I understand it to be by design. It was on purpose to push anyone out who could not sit in an office chair for 10 hours a day, which is of course moms.

I will never forget the day that, at this time, her daughter was probably seven or eight years old, and Lisa had left during her lunch break to drop her daughter off at the dentist. And whoever was supposed to pick her daughter up bailed. And her manager at the time would not approve of her leaving to go pick up her seven-year-old daughter from the dentist. And this was such an eye-opening experience for me.

And I remember at the time having a conversation with another friend, he was like, well, I would’ve stomped out of there and I would’ve gone and picked up my daughter. But it’s like, would you have if it meant risking your job or your family’s only source of income?

And so I had this very visceral experience of being in it with Lisa, and then I would compare that to every other man who I witnessed get ahead at the firm. And what you notice is that having a family and having this type of work schedule is really only possible. Having both of those things is really only possible if you have somebody else picking up the slack, whether that person is working or not working. And so while eyewitness moms quite literally getting pushed out of advancing their careers in the most blatant way imaginable, some version of this is of course happening in much more discreet ways across the economy.

Of course, the flip side of that is that the success is then preserved for the mostly men who can find women who are willing to subsidize their careers in this way.

Katie:

Subsidize. That’s a really good word for what’s happening there. I can’t remember who it was now, but I remember reading a magazine profile of a woman who was really high up at some big bank, and she has a stay-at-home husband. And she would kind of joke about how all the other executives that she was kind of hobnobbing with at this level of seniority in the company were all men and all had stay-at-home wives. And it was like they all had stay-at-home partners because their careers were so demanding that that was really the only way that they could have the career that they wanted to have. And if you have to be in an office starting at 6:30am every single morning, other things in your life are going to fall by the wayside if you don’t have help in some capacity, whether that help is paid or not.

So it is interesting to think about just how, because of the gender dynamics, but also the economic patterns that we can observe and how people earn to begin with, and how little structural support there is for people once they start having children, just how that naturally is going to skew very male.

So you are in this workplace, you’re observing this. How long does this last until you realize you need to get out? And then when you realized that you wanted to get out, what was your relationship with money at the time of that revelation?

Amanda:

I made a very January 1st type of life-changing resolution where I said, I’ve really had enough. But the problem is I’ve also spent all of my twenties essentially honing just two skills, talking about the stock market and sucking up to rich men, neither of which I ever wanted to do ever again. I knew that I needed to walk away, but I couldn’t walk away without having a fairly significant sum of money.

And at the time, I didn’t have much. I was earning plenty. I wasn’t like a trader at Goldman Sachs, but I was also earning six figures by the time I was 24 or 25-year-old, years old. And this was in 2009, 2010. But I was burning through paychecks because I was young and fun and dumb, but I also hated this job and I was self-soothing. And for me, that was mostly taking place at bars. I was drinking like crazy. And I think it is probably more common nowadays to see this self-soothing take the form of self-soothing through convenience or through scrolling or through screens. I didn’t understand that that’s what I was doing at the time.

And so it did take me years of doing this job to understand that I was both very unhappy and that it did not have to be this way and that it was my reckless spending that was also keeping me tethered to the thing that was making me spend recklessly. And so what I needed to do was break free from this work consumption loop. Again, did not have these words for it at the time. It was really just intuitive. I’ve got to stop this. And it’s almost a little bit of a blessing that I hated the work so much that it forced me into making a really bold decision that I do not regret even a little bit.

And so on this January 1st, I decided that what I was going to do was I was going to save enough money so that I could quit finance for good. So I thought travel for a year and then figure out what was next. And I just really felt like I needed the space away from the job because I was spending so much time at work that I had no idea. I had no time to figure out what was next. And so I knew I didn’t want to hop into another job. I did not want to switch departments. I wanted out of there to do this.

I immediately began keeping relentless track of every single dollar I spent, which I had never done before because I had never been motivated to do it before. I cut all non-essential spending. My budget for daily splurges, for clothing, for socializing, for beauty was $0. And so between some really heavy metal budgeting and selling all my belongings, I had saved enough money to quit and walk away without this plan for what was next. And so this point, this period I should say of extreme restriction was very hard. But then again, there’s no drink or drug or material purchase that can match the high of peeling out of that parking lot for one last time, right windows down, probably Florence & the Machine blasting, ripping a cig, chair still spinning. It was really just like an incredible moment to be able to walk away.

And then a few days later, I was on a flight to New Orleans where I then began my meandering journey south. So I traveled through Mexico, Central America, and South America, mostly by bus, sometimes, sometimes by more creative methods like hitchhiking. But the point is I had plenty of time to reflect on how radical it felt to admit that I had made the wrong choice for myself, but then that I was able to change course completely.

And at the time, I frequently wondered, and I still wonder whether this is an insane privilege or if it’s the most basic human right. And whichever it was, I just wish that everyone had access to it. And so upon all of this reflection I was doing while I was traveling, I slowly began to walk back on my promise to leave finance behind for good. And it is because for the first time, I actually saw money and experienced money not as something to collect for status or because in your twenties it’s just like, okay, the olds are just telling me to do this, but I don’t actually totally understand why. But instead, I was starting to see money as a tool for second chances and as a means to question the default and for living a life that is true, and I wanted to talk to women about it.

Katie:

Wow, an insane privilege versus the most basic human right. This is making me think about something that I think becomes a challenge for anyone who tries to offer financial advice to other people, which is that there is an assumption of baseline security that is required for any of this advice to really matter for you.

There was an interview that we did back in 2023 with two women named Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman who wrote this wonderful book called Getting Me Cheap, and it was kind of coined as the 21st century version of the Barbara Ehrenrich classic Nickel and Dimed. And it was about how women end up trapped in the low wage cycle, a disproportionate numbers in part for reasons that feel sort of parallel to what we were talking about earlier with the caregiving and wage gap, which is that when young women grow up in poverty, they are more often the ones that the parents rely on to offer caregiving and to serve as babysitters and to get second jobs.

And so what happens is the opportunities that are available to them are kind of foreclosed upon before they even become adults. And something like, I don’t know, 20% to 25% of women in this country are in that situation where there’s really no amount of cutting that they’re going to be able to do to get out of it because they’re just being paid exploitative, low wages, they don’t have options. They probably have children of their own now that they’re responsible for, or in many cases, these two authors, their sociologists talked about younger siblings, that they would become responsible for adopting their younger brothers and sisters when they’re 18, 19 years old.

And so I think both of us probably feel some level of responsibility to keep that in mind and elevate those stories. When we talk about stories like yours or stories like mine, mine is very similar. Where I was a single woman living in a city, I was probably making $50,000 or $60,000, so I wasn’t as highly paid, but I was in Dallas, which is nowhere near as expensive as California. And I didn’t have any responsibilities besides myself. So it was easy for me to move into a cheap apartment that was kind of run down and split it with another person. It was easy for me to cut back in ways that maybe were a little bit unorthodox for someone who was 24, but not really putting myself or anyone else in danger. I was able to create that margin.

And so I think that there are a lot of people who listen to this show who are either in the, they’re making six figures, they have the world at their feet, and they may have responsibilities, but they do have that maneuverability and that optionality to where they could execute something like this. And there are probably people that are more in between those two realities and might be feeling like they’re backsliding a little bit. I just want to acknowledge the complexity of when we talk about the extreme sacrifice, how that version of sacrifice is going to look different for everybody.

I know that you spoke about “Freeganism” to Rachel Rogers, which jumped out at me because that was something that I did too. And I’ve told this story before when I was so fired up about financial independence that I worked with the EA at the office to figure out who was doing lunch meetings and what conference rooms those were in. And I would just loiter outside afterward and go in with my Tupperware and be like, cool, don’t have to pay for lunch or dinner today. I had no idea that that was also, I thought I was very creative for that. I didn’t know that was a strategy that we were all out here using and how to name.

Amanda:

Well, maybe that’s the reason that you and I are doing exactly what we’re doing, but I didn’t know that about you either. And that is so funny. And in fact, that is the origin of the name Dumpster Doggy, which for anybody that doesn’t know, despite the better advice of business coaches everywhere, I am at Dumpster Doggy on social media.

And it started out as a nickname from my coworkers. So when I was working at the firm and I had made this decision to basically cut off all spending, and it was again, my friend Lisa was talking to her, I was like, how do I supercharge this? What do I do? And she was like, Amanda, there’s so much food waste in this building. There’s always some food around. And to be clear, this was not Google. We did not have free lunch. We had hot coffee and Styrofoam cups and a good 401(k) match, but there was not extra food laying around.

And so Lisa had encouraged me to live off the excess of others, is what she said. And so then we started calling it Freeganism, which I think is probably something that we did not make up, but we called it being free, where what’s for lunch is determined by whatever is free. And so every morning I would do a lap around the building for leftover team bagels. On Fridays, I would raid the fridge before fridge cleanout. And so we were eating a lot of Chobani yogurts in those days.

But it was really these guys. So this crew of guys that I rolled with, and they were in on my plan, they knew that my plan was to exit and that I was saving as much money as possible. And so every single week they would go to a pizza buffet at Roundtable Pizza. Now I would not go because the pizza buffet was a little bit expensive and I wasn’t doing that sort of thing. And so they would always sneak out an extra slice or sneak out a few breadsticks for me. And so they started referring to the contraband, the breadsticks, as trash sticks. They started calling me Trash Sticks, which then morphed into Dumpster Dog and then into Dumpster Doggy. And it’s a nickname that is clearly still stuck. And so when I ended up coming back and started writing about money, the first thing I did was I started a blog and it was called the Dumpster Dog Blog named after this nickname I picked up after a very scrappy period in my life.

Katie:

Something that I am thinking about now reflecting on that is I don’t know how you felt about it. You seem upbeat when you talk about it. When I look back on that period of just being so on fire, pun intended for the idea of being work optional, I actually have very fond memories of some of the weird things that I was doing. I remember I was working as a fitness instructor, that was one of my side hustles. Once I heard about side hustles, I was like, wait, people be making money outside of work. That’s a thing. And at the time, it was a little bit more novel. Now it’s like we’ve all kind of seen through it as the dystopian Band-Aid that it is, but at the time, there were other young people in my office who were, oh, I babysit. Oh, I nanny. Oh, I do all these things after work or before work or on the weekends to make extra money. And I didn’t know that that was something that you could do.

So once I start working at these fitness studios and being paid, I don’t know, $12 an hour, it was not much. But one of the benefits that you got was you could go to other gyms in town for free. You could be basically like a standby person. So I would go to SoulCycle or Barry’s Bootcamp for free as a drop in and then use their showers so I didn’t have to buy shampoo and conditioner and Q-tips for a while. I don’t know how much money I thought I was saving, not buying, but I remember feeling like I was really getting away with something. It kind of turned into a game and I wouldn’t want that for myself now, absolutely not. I think that that is something that’s fun, an abbreviated period of time when you feel like there’s a really valuable and meaningful goal on the other side of it, and it kind of represents freedom.

But it is funny sometimes when I look back on that period, I’m like, I really only think about it fondly. I don’t look back on it and think, oh, you were just eating conference room food whenever you could get it. I was like, it was fun. I liked it.

We’ll get right back to this conversation with Amanda after a quick break.

Amanda:

When I look back on my periods of very low consumption, it is not the consumption that I miss. And I’m very sensitive. I generally don’t like to tell people to cut back their spending. I think people are very understandably sensitive in this moment about being told to spend less, especially if they feel like if they don’t have a lot of other options, if their iced coffee every day is what makes them happy, then get your iced coffee.

That being said, I never miss the consumption that I didn’t do. And I should also say, don’t get me wrong, I personally love buying stupid shit so much, but I have now seen what happens when you come out the other end of having made some sacrifice. And now looking back on my life, it’s really only the opportunities that I fumbled to make a bold change, to learn more, to exercise creativity, and to live true to myself that I regret.

That’s what I regret. And so I just tend to think it’s okay to try techniques that allow you to get excited about accomplishing a tangible and specific goal, even if it means going really hard, even if it means that “everything in moderation” sluts will come for me on this one. If moderation works for you, you should definitely rock with moderation. It is a healthy way to exist, but it’s also kind of not how I personally operate. I operate very much in these energetic seasons. Some months I’m curled away in my cave with my Netflix, my blankie. Some months I’m barefoot on rooftops, howling at the moon, glitter in my teeth. Things come and go. And I think it’s okay to work with what you are feeling energetic about in any one given moment.

Katie:

I love the way that you put that, and I think that freedom feels really nice. I agree. I think I have an obsessive personality. I don’t think that will surprise anybody who listens to this show. And for me, really turning it up to a hundred felt really good, even though on the outside it was like, oh, I’m not going out to bars or shopping anymore. And these were things that I thought I really enjoyed. They were the things that I was doing to pass the time.

But it was kind of weird, and I talk about this in the first chapter of the book about the hot girl hamster wheel where you start pulling away all the frivolous stuff on the side and I’m thinking, ooh, I’m making these sacrifices. I want to save money and I don’t want to spend 10% of my take home pay on beauty.

And then I realize after the fact, wait, I have so much more time. I have so much more mind space now that was being formerly devoted to consumption. And that is something that I think we don’t always address head on, which is that consumption can also be kind of a chore. It does take energy and thought, and sometimes pulling it out cold turkey can really reveal that stark contrast.

Something else that you said really jumped out at me, which was that the reckless spending was a coping mechanism for the fact that you did not like how you had to spend 10 hours a day, five days a week. I recently did a guest author series for another newsletter where I was answering reader questions about money, and one of the questions that I had to answer was, what if your career change involves a substantial drop in income? It would still be livable, but I will not be able to have the lifestyle I’ve gotten used to. And I think that’s a really challenging crossroads.

And I sat there reflecting on the question and my initial instinct was to be like, well, it’s really important that when you’re young, this is the compound and that you’re working really and you’re saving and you’re investing. And then I was like, you know what though? I think we need to think a lot bigger about our definition of lifestyle because a lot of times the extra money that we earn doing the lucrative miserable job just get spent trying to make the life outside of the lucrative miserable job more manageable or enjoyable. And so that was sort where I guided that questioner of, do you think that your lifestyle habits might actually change if you are enjoying the way that you’re spending your time during the day? This career change it sounds like is something that you really want to do, so much so that you’re willing to be paid less for the work that you’re doing.

Amanda:

I love this question and absolutely I would without a doubt be earning a lot more money right now if I had stayed on the path that I was on, but I diverted because I was not having a good time and it was worth it to me to prioritize my happiness. And even now in my business, I find myself with the flexibility making a lot of choices so that I can live a life that is more aligned with what I value even beyond money.

So for example, I really don’t ever sacrifice my social life to work on my business because I genuinely believe that relationships and friendships give us what we really need, give us what we are searching for, not necessarily earning more and more money. And so I have made a really cognizant choice to never sacrifice my social life for my business. If you want to hang out, I’m always down to clown.

Or even more recently, for the last nearly two years, I have more or less turned my platform over to talking about what is happening in Palestine because I believe that we are at a critical inflection point in history along with the rise of US and global fascism. I have foregone a great deal of sales and audience and connections and partnerships and opportunities because of it, but that is okay. It’s okay because this is the life that I believe in. It’s upsetting to me that there is a price to pay to be a person who calls for peace and an end of arms to murderous regimes, but I say let it be paid.

My nightmare is not losing out on some income. My nightmare is not temporarily stepping off the path to financial independence, which I have done. My nightmare is losing my humanity right now. Y

eah, there are plenty of lifestyle factors that to me are just as important as income. And so for me, intellectual freedom, the ability to make bold moves even if they don’t make perfect financial sense, right? The ability to be creative, to prioritize my relationships, to be generous, to run what I consider to be a mostly ethical business, to be able to speak up even when it’s unpopular.

Katie:

I mean, just want to interrupt you because you aren’t just using your platform or putting your platform on the line, but how many times have you been arrested at protests now? Three?

Amanda:

Three. I can’t stay out of jail.

Katie:

You’re putting your body on the line too. You have been, I think one of the most courageous and outspoken people that I have seen throughout this time put lifestyle, money, physical safety on the line, and you’ve really risen to the occasion. I think it’s worth lingering there for a moment. Everything that you’re highlighting.

I wrote down “my nightmare is losing my humanity.” I think that is so profound. I think even the intellectual freedom that you highlighted, that all of these things have a value so far beyond income potential, but that you really, at this point, you are in a position to be able to make those bold and courageous choices because you’ve gotten yourself to the place where you aren’t tethered to the 50 hour a week, six figure, consumption hamster wheel. Either you built a business that you run and you own and you can spend your time the way that you want to and weigh the sacrifices against the trade-offs. It’s truly something to behold.

Amanda:

Thank you, Katie. I appreciate that. I feel the need to clarify that I’m not some perfect person, but I share because I know a lot of people right now in this moment feel like they have to break a part of themselves to work a corporate job. And it’s not just our fun-loving, imaginative, childlike selves, but also our virtuous selves and ourselves that crave freedom and movement and thought. And so I do think that it will forever and always be about striking the right balance. And this is something that is going to move in waves for all of us. Like you said, we need enough money to live free from daily economic anxiety. And if you are in that camp, I feel for you and I believe that you’re doing your best, but then on the other end, it’s about not becoming so attached to the material that you are unable to live your truest life.

Katie:

The time period that we’re in right now. I was watching an interview you did early in the pandemic with Chelsea Fagan and she asks you in so many words, what do you say to the people who are like, well, the sky is falling, the world is ending. Nothing will ever be normal again. So why should I prioritize investing when the future is fucked anyway?

And I had this moment watching being like, oh my God, this interview is five years old and it could have been recorded last week. I’m like, I kind of hate that we keep finding ourselves in this position as a society where the future feels so hopeless that this is becoming kind of a universal feeling. But it also gave me this sense of there might always just be a reason to be like, fuck it, who cares? I’m not going to sacrifice for the future because I don’t believe that the future is going to be there. And it just really struck me as sometimes I think that that’s almost an instinct. We have to find a way to overpower in a way to do what our future selves need us to do even when it feels hopeless.

Amanda:

Yeah, I can’t remember the specifics of that interview, but I’m guessing my response was timeless, iconic, advice along the lines of stick to the plan. The market is incredibly resilient. And even if you look at what has happened since then until now, the market is up an incredible amount. And that’s even despite the pandemic, even despite everything that we’ve seen so far this year with a second Trump presidency.

And if you are going to be investing, you have to take the long-term view and when the market gets worse, because whether now or later, at some point it will get worse. This is actually, and this always feels a little bit dark, but the worse it is and the longer it is bad, the better it is for young investors to be able to collect shares at lower prices. That doesn’t mean that anybody needs to be wishing for a bad market because whether a market is good or bad, it’s all about our vantage point.

If you are a young investor and you are trying to collect investments, then a bad market is actually good. If you are somebody that is trying to retire off of your investments, then a bad market is actually quite bad. And so again, nobody needs to be rooting for this, but we do have to understand if we are going to be investors, we have to peel away what is a bad economy and what is a bad market because these two things actually require very different handling on our behalf.

Recession planning a bad economy requires that we do engage in some conservatism. We have to buckle down, pair back our spending, maybe consider adding an additional source of income if that’s possible, to protect ourselves against the worst. But this type of pullback or conservative thinking is actually exactly the opposite of what we should be doing in terms of investing in the markets.

And so we have to hold these two things in two separate hands. And so that’s first and foremost what I always try to teach people and just remember that a lot of really scary stuff has happened over history and the markets still rip. Now, that being said, and you’ll have to tell me what you think, but my read on the situation now is that people are even more nihilistic now than they were even five years ago, which I think is a pretty reasonable response to what we are watching unfold in the world around us.

And so whenever I hear something like this like the fuck it, who cares? The apocalypse is my retirement plan. I always really want to get in there and have a real conversation with this person about what specifically they are scared about because I think that there are plenty of personal finance creators that will not engage seriously with the question of the future under the current and what I would argue unsustainable model of capitalism. And so I always want to get in there. And so I always find that it helps to ask people if their concern is more along the lines of the long-term viability of the stock market, or if it’s more about not wanting to prop up a system we hate because these two I think require slightly different handling. And so I’m wondering, are you hearing more of one or the other, Katie?

Katie:

My instinct is that I think people intuitively sense that something is broken and cannot go on forever, and I think people get that whether they are very financially educated, I’m thinking in particular of a Michael Green type. Michael Green is a chief strategist and portfolio manager at this place called Simplify Asset Management, and he has been kind of ringing the alarm bell over the unsustainability of index fund investing as more and more of the market goes passive. Because his point is that it makes it less elastic over time. And so you do tend to see bigger volatile swings because people aren’t engaging in the market by actually looking at a price and a value and judging it and then deciding whether they want to buy and transact or wait for a lower price.

But because we are dollar cost averaging in and following the correct personal finance advice for getting the average return, that market pricing signals aren’t working the way that they should be and we’re kind of trending in the wrong direction, that’s his thing. So that is someone who is an avid capitalist who still thinks that the current model for US retirement is going to break if the demographic model changes such that you have more people pulling out of the market, meaning boomers retiring and living on their assets than you have young people working and contributing to it, that it is in his mind kind of a pyramid scheme, which I think is actually a really, really interesting overlap between long-term sustainability of capitalism and then people panicking about the birth rate and what have you.

 And so he makes a very compelling case for this. I think someone like him, you have a high level of sophistication. You recognize something cannot go on forever. Then you have somebody on the opposite end of the spectrum, hypothetically speaking, who might not know anything about money, might not know anything about investing, but still has to live in this world and live under capitalism and might recognize something’s off something is not right.

I think that when we look at the anger and pain and sense of unfairness, that has been boiling under the surface, I would say rightfully so for a long time, Donald Trump as a politician who tapped into that and captured it for nefarious ends, I would say, but still managed to hit on something that was very real. And I think that the people that I hear from are experiencing a bit of that hybrid where it’s, I don’t want to prop up, I feel conflicted maybe, or I feel cognitive dissonance about propping up this system because I think there’s something about it that’s inherently exploitative. And also because I see what’s exploitative about it and I see the writing on the wall, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I also maybe don’t have all that much trust that it’s going to continue this way and that it’s always going to work the way that it has.

When I look at this and wrestle with it myself, there is something a little bit interesting about the incentives where I remember when the tariffs were announced and oh my God, I can’t even how many news cycles ago it was, but people were really panicked that everything was going to go to shit.

Somebody had asked me, do you think that the stock market is going to basically, or is this going to push us over the edge? Is American capitalism going to collapse? And I kind of had this weird moment of like, well, it kind of feels like both a win-win or a lose-lose depending on how you look at it, because if this is the thing that finally breaks it, we are finally going to be in a position to build something better. And there is going to be a lot of pain, but it’s got to end before something else can begin.

And if it doesn’t, you probably want your interests aligned with that of the capital class because the most rich and powerful people in this country depend on that stock market line go up. So when I have people asking if things are going to, or should I be worried about my investments, I’m like, no, that’s probably the safest shit you got right now, because that’s the stuff that’s aligned with the interests of all the very rich, powerful people that kind of pull the strings in this country.

So that is paradoxically like the safest place. I would assume the safest part of your financial life is probably the part that’s tied up with the interests of the people that are running the show. They have every incentive to make sure that that thing does not go down.

Amanda:

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say something very similar to my students, right? Well, first of all, if the entire thing goes up in flames, warm your hands by the fire, maybe let’s open—clear the airwaves for something better.

But I do tend to believe that our political system, which is of course heavily influenced if not outright owned by wealth and corporate power, will do whatever is necessary to preserve the financial status quo. I think that the most likely case is that the financial status quo is preserved. Like you said, there are no two classes in the United States more zealously protected than the ultra-wealthy and corporations, and there is no right more fiercely defended than our right to profit. And so I feel pretty reasonably certain that should it ever come to a true reckoning that the government will rescue the financial system at all costs gladly sacrificing the environment and a functioning society.

There used to be an old either beater Civic or Subaru or something that was parked on my street when I lived in San Francisco and it had a bumper sticker that said, “If the environment was a bank, we would’ve saved it already.” And I think that that’s actually pretty accurate, right? Very powerful people and institutions are playing in the exact same sandbox as we are with our 401(k)s and Roth IRAs, which is on the one hand terrifying. But also if your primary concern is about your 401(k), well then lucky you, your sandbox buddies to share your concern.

And we are worried about this possible potential financial calamity. Yet really the only thing that guarantees calamity is doing nothing at all. If you choose to do nothing out of fear, you will self-fulfill your greatest fear of having nothing. And so it really start with what the fear is. The fear having nothing. And so we’ve got a couple of paths. There are not that many paths to take and the only path that guarantees that you have nothing is doing nothing.

Katie:

I think the other piece of this besides basically aligning your interests with that of capital is the international side of things, because I think you are one of the only other personal finance voices that I know that kind of from the jump has been talking about diversifying internationally. That has not been very popular advice for the last five years because the US stock market, because of its relationship to the US government has been ripping. And what do you know when a political system exists to prop up wealth and power is pretty good for a stock market, but I think that something that I have been feeling lately is maybe all my diversification preaching will pay off because the international stocks are actually looking quite attractive. Now I am curious what your investing philosophy is on that front.

Amanda:

So much of my investing philosophy is influenced by my experience having worked through the greatest financial crash in modern history. It really changed me on a cellular level. It’s hard to put into words how stressful it was to be on the front lines and to be managing the emotions of, I think I had a book of 150 clients who were rich men as we watched bank after bank, after bank collapse, as we watched their hard earned money be cut in half. And so my job was not only to help absorb their fear, but it was also to beg them to hold on, beg them not to sell out, and to remind them of good investing practice, which means stay with it. These things tend to bounce back. They tend to bounce back with a vengeance, which it did. But in that moment, what you are watching is people who are otherwise very rational, completely lose grip on their own rationality.

And so because of this experience, I have always taught investing with an emphasis on diversification, understanding volatility and setting realistic expectations. And this nuance is, in my opinion, very missing from the personal finance education landscape because investing is being taught by people who don’t have any experience working in the industry and specifically during a big market crash of which it felt like a once in a lifetime event, but it is a guarantee that we will have another one of these. And so I feel like a lot of personal finance education isn’t giving people the tools they need to succeed long-term.

Now that being said, there are much worse methods of investing than buying a total US stock market index fund if that’s the only thing that you did. Well, congratulations, you did great. So no stress there. Your performance has been incredible. But what we know with investing is that just because something has been one way does not mean it will always be that way, right?

Maybe US continues to kick international ass, maybe it doesn’t, but diversification doesn’t really care. Diversification is about playing defense and what I always tell my students is this is that you cannot have it both ways. You can’t have only the performance of only the best performing category and protection if something goes really wrong within that category, you don’t get to have both. And so if this is a risk of being only invested in the US is a risk that you want to take and that is your choice. Well, cue up the Toby Keith, right? Shotgun a Bud Light in the back of your truck. America, baby.

That is fine, if that is the route that you want to go, but I do not personally as a teacher assume that the riskier option should be the default way to teach. I always start with a diversified strategy as the default, which happens to include international stocks and this is also unpopular in FIRE or personal finance circles. I also teach integrating bonds for a lot of reason, but primarily because they provide profit by a totally separate mechanism than stocks. And I teach that as the default.

A lot of the teachers who are telling you to only invest in US stocks, in my opinion, especially if it’s coming from older men, these are folks that are often already inherently diversified in that they probably own real estate that they bought for a handful of circus peanuts. I’m guessing a lot of folks that are listening right now do own some real estate. It’s a little bit different. And if you are buying real estate at a much higher cost, it was a much better investment presumably to buy your real estate in any decade prior to this one. And so they already have some inherent diversification.

But because part of my business mission is to take what I learned about investing and to bring it, to democratize it, to bring it to the masses, I am assuming that my students are starting at the starting line. I’m not assuming that my students already have real estate and already have a business and have multiple sources of income or have a pension, and so therefore, it is my opinion that it is a complete disservice to them if I don’t teach them proper diversification in the ways that they can do diversification now.

Katie:

Something that you said that jumped out at me that if you only want to buy US stocks, if that’s the risk that you want to take, then okay, that is a risk reward calculus that you can make and a decision that you can make. But I think that’s the issue with the way it’s being taught is that there is no introduction of the idea that it is risky, that you are taking on risk and it’s a weird line to walk because you want to assure people enough that this is worth doing and investing is not gambling. There is a real value creation mechanism happening there that you are capturing, but it’s also not a high yield savings account. You do have to be prepared for the 40% haircut, and that feels way different when you’re actually watching it happen to your money and things feel very uncertain than when you’re reading about it on a page and someone’s telling you it’s going to happen or you’re hearing it right now that it’s going to happen.

That is one of the hardest lines to walk and why I have always hewed toward the international diversification side of the coin because I just, to me intuitively, it never felt safe to have your entire future tied up in the future of one singular country. Again, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t invest in the US at all. I have a lot of money in US stocks, but when we present that as a guaranteed, you’re going to get 8% or 10% per year over time and it’s going to be great. It’s always going to come back and say, well, we actually can’t say that with certainty. And I just think that that is one of the most complicated lessons to learn. It is worth the risk, but it is a risk. There is a risk that you are taking by doing this.

Amanda:

Everybody, take it with a grain of salt. Granted, me and Katie are probably a bit more suspicious of the American experiment than your average finance bro. You’re also welcome to listen to Warren Buffet. Ever heard of him? He’s a lot richer than me and he would tell you to only invest in the United States, but to me it just doesn’t such—

Katie:

Dude, have you heard his—in his last, in his retirement speech, the fact that someone that old and that wealthy is kind of being like, yeah, we’re on a bad path, and it says it can’t keep doing what we’re doing and the debt is getting out of control and they should not pass this. I’m like, it’s bad when the send to billionaires are maybe no more tax cuts. Maybe we’ve actually had enough tax cuts and we shouldn’t be doing more of them.

Amanda:

The point you had made before about worrying about some whole scale financial collapse, I think that the much more reasonable expectation is that the markets are just going to do worse in the future than they did in the past. And that’s for a couple of reasons. We are talking in exponential terms and for the market to see as much growth, the US stock market in particular, to see as much growth in the future as it has in the past, we would need an incredible amount of growth, which do we even want that, right?

Katie:

Yeah.

Amanda:

And obviously this is not about my wish list, but it is hard to believe that this could go on forever. And right now in particular, we are in a very interesting moment where being invested in even a broad US stock market index fund really means being invested in US tech and specifically in seven tech companies. And so whenever I hear somebody say, just buy one S&P 500 index fund, whereas maybe 10 years ago I would’ve been like, great advice. Let’s keep it simple. When you keep it simple, you are also giving yourself a gift. You are creating less room for error. You are focusing on what you can control, which is how much you can invest. And so I love it. I love just the one single index fund method. But nowadays with those seven big tech companies making up so much of the S&P 500, I do think it necessitates a conversation about what it is we’re actually investing in right now.

I come from the world of portfolio management. You would never invest 5%, 10% in a single stock because any single stock is an incredible risk. And so if what you want to do is diffuse some of the exposure you have to single tech giants, then a very easy way to do that is to invest internationally.

Katie:

Yeah, I would say that to shout out a few specific tools, I really like M1 Finance and their investing portfolio pies. I don’t know if you’ve looked into them, but I buy their aggressive portfolio. I think it’s 27% or 29% developed markets, and then maybe 24% to 25% S&P 500 and then maybe another 15 emerging markets. I want to say that there is more international actually than domestic in some of those aggressive portfolios.

But I have found even if you just want to build your portfolio once, maybe you take Amanda’s course, you take her class, you learn from her, and then you figure out what you want your portfolio to be, you can set it up so that those percentages are going to be maintained. And then anytime you want to add more cash, it’s just going to automatically sprinkle it amongst those holdings as needed. So it doesn’t mean that you have to turn into an individual portfolio manager with the six screens, but it does take a little bit more work. It’s not as simple as just buy one thing. And so I agree. I think that the just buy one thing, advice can be very helpful. If somebody that is what’s going to make the difference between someone investing at all or staying on the sidelines, then just buy the one thing, it’s fine.

But if you are able to do more, I think there’s a pretty strong case for doing more. On that note, you started teaching a free “Money under Trump” class this spring, and something that you wrote when you announced that you were doing this was, “I am seeing fear and confusion translate into harmful financial decisions and horrible investing advice. Before you make any big decisions, join me so we can talk through it first.” I’m curious what harmful decisions and horrible advice that you were seeing, what made you want to raise your hand and be like, hey guys, we need to talk actually.

Amanda:

Yeah, so it really ran the gamut. So on the one hand, in this same vein, I was seeing folks making recommendations about how to be strategic in response to this moment, which is almost always pandering. An example, there is a very popular influencer and she has a very large following of mostly women. And at the beginning of the year, she was telling her following to double down on crypto, AI, and American tech stocks because those are industries that Trump likes. This is extraordinarily dangerous advice for all of the reasons that we just said, right? The average person is already loaded to the gills with American tech stocks.

And so although adding, let’s say you added another tech stock index fund, that might feel like diversification because you’re adding an additional fund, but what you’re actually doing is it’s a sort of doubling down on tech stocks. So you are not diversifying, you are narrowing, you are making a more concentrated bet on tech stocks, American tech stocks specifically. And this is the type of pandering that is like, it sounds so good to the ears. People want to feel like they’re in on something really cunning, that they know something that no one else knows. But it almost always takes the form of speculation and a very specific form of speculation that’s too late. It’s too late to assume that that’s how, and maybe it ends up working out, but there’s also a chance that it doesn’t, and you will be very concentrated in such a position. And so there’s this type of pandering that is happening.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, I know of and I am seeing people that are selling out of their stocks to move to cash. This was especially happening at the first tariff announcements. That was a very scary moment. But I’m even thinking about my friend who has an accountant, a CPA who sent out an email to every single one of his clients telling them that he was moving to cash, and so selling out of all of his stocks and moving to cash and that he recommended that everybody do the same.

Katie:

Oh my God, that’s like professional malpractice.

Amanda:

It’s so harmful because first of all, what are you doing? You’re an accountant. But I think it’s very enticing to people who share his ideological belief system, which I am guessing that I actually do share an ideological belief system with this man, but the advice is really, really quite dangerous. And so that’s why I started throwing these free, hey, let’s just get together, let’s talk calmly through what is happening and let’s talk about what it means to invest in our future because it’s not just investing for investing’s sake. This is our system of elder care in this country, and it’s something that we have to take very, very seriously in the way that we take feeding ourselves today. Seriously. This is how we are going to feed ourselves when we’re 80. And so investing or learning about investing is not optional in the way that I think many of us think that working is not optional. And so I just wanted to make sure that we all got into a room together and talked about how to handle this moment calmly and how to give ourself the best chances of success over time.

Katie:

How do you feel like it was received? Do you think it helped?

Amanda:

I think so, but also I think that my students are trained pretty well. I spend a lot of time talking about volatility, and I spend a lot of time talking about what causes it and how to handle it. And so for a lot of the folks that show up to my workshops, it’s not the first time that they’ve heard this information. For the most part, it goes pretty well. But again, I think people are feeling some sort of way about investing in the future and adding to this mess. I know that investing can feel like you’re adding to the capitalism and—

Katie:

I’m just imagining just throwing more shit in a bowl, being like, all right, fine, I’m in too, God.

Amanda:

I have to remind people that when you don’t invest for your own future, you’re not actually creating less capitalism. You’re just making the capitalism someone else’s problem. And like you said earlier, Katie, knowing what we know about caretaking responsibilities, that person is probably going to be your daughter.

You can’t make the system go away by not participating in it. And so that is why even as a person who really has her qualms with the system and really believes that we need collective solutions, that individual solutions like investing are not going to be enough. But I also need people to, this is the system that we’ve got and these are the tools that we have, and please understand how to use them so you don’t end up harming yourself or giving unnecessary money to the finance industry in the process as we try to build these lives of dignity that we all deserve.

Katie:

Wow. Something that I come back to sometimes is if one of my closest friends texted me and was like, what should I do? This happened to me recently, where somebody I know had received up to the gift tax limit. They got money from a parent and they were like, I don’t invest. What do I do with this? And I had that moment of, oh, I am going to tell them everything I know. I absolutely want them to invest this money. I want them to be comfortable someday. I don’t want them to have to work until they die. I don’t want that for anybody.

Sometimes I grapple with the fact that if you make the status quo too comfortable for too many people, we will lose the impetus to actually do something about it and make it better for everybody in a more sustainable and large-scale way. But I can’t deny the fact that the people I care about, I’m like, no, I want you to know what you’re doing. So I’m like, I feel like that’s the responsibility that I also have to bring to anyone who wants to listen to what I have to say. It’s like, I want you to know what you’re doing too, but it’s necessary, but it’s insufficient.

We have to go further and figure out how we go further. And I don’t know how we go further yet, but it’s something that I’m actively in the name of intellectual freedom and curiosity. It’s something I’m trying to figure out. I’m like, how do we get to that panacea, fully automated luxury communism future? It’s possible. I know it’s possible, and I want to be somebody who pushes us closer to it and doesn’t pull us back from it.

Amanda:

I really look forward to you figuring that out for us and I’ll help.

Katie:

I know, I’m like, such a lofty note to end on. But thank you so much for joining me today, Amanda. That was so fun and so wide ranging, and it was just truly a delight.

Amanda:

Well, thank you for having me, Katie, and you have done such good work over the years, and you have given your audience so much education and time and care and respect, and I really hope that everyone listening returns that love and buys your book. I can’t wait to read it because I just got it today. I wish that I had read it before this call. I can’t wait to read it because I just know it is going to be exceptional.

Katie:

Oh, thank you for saying that. I can’t wait to hear what you think, but like I said, if you hate it, don’t tell me. And that will for all of you too, all of you listeners, if you hate it, don’t tell me.

That is all for this week. We’ll see you next week, and by then, Rich Girl Nation will be out in the world. So man, I really hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you learn as much as I learned while creating it.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, 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 for the show comes from Scott Wilson.