How Do You Stack Up in #RichGirlNation? What Our Community Makes, Saves, & Spends

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Comparison is human nature, so trying to prevent yourself from noticing all the success portrayed in your feeds and social circles is an uphill battle. Instead, learning how to compare productively works with your nature, not against it. And where better to start than with #RichGirlNation? See what hundreds of you submitted about your incomes, budgets, and net worths—and what surprised us most.

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

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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

• Episode on How to Define “Enough”

• Blog on the “Feeling Bad for the Joneses” Economy

• IPUMS US Census Data on median family incomes for the 100 largest metro areas

• Average net worth for people in their 50s

• Average cost of housing in the US in 2022, per the Motley Fool

• Episode on the “Perfect” Save Rate

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Katie:

A couple of weeks ago we did an episode on the concept of enough and I talked with our guest, a career coach, Cynthia Pong, about the insidious comparison game. So we’ll link to that in the show notes, but for now the jury is still out on the psychological net effect of comparison. There have been times in my own life where seeing someone else’s financial choice inspired me to right size to make a better different choice. Like when I was prepared at 22 to shell out $1,500 per month for a one bedroom apartment on my drum roll, $52,000 a year salary while my friend who earned a $100k refused to spend more than a thousand dollars a month on housing, that comparison was a huge reality check that allowed me to keep my housing expenses around $900 a month and contribute to a Roth IRA instead.

There have been other times, and if I’m being honest, more frequent times when comparing my financial position to someone else made me feel less than. As I shared in that enough episode, often I did not earn as much or have as much as some upwardly mobile peers in my comparison games chosen set, which by the way, isn’t it funny how we tend to only compare ourselves to people that we perceive as doing better than we are. We gloss over everyone else, all the lesions of people who we perceive to be doing worse. I know this emotion is also common because some of you have told me. So when we started sharing interesting findings from Rich Girl Nation, we received a handful of messages from people who said, seeing how much more other people were earning made them feel like a failure, and at first this really broke my heart. Then I thought maybe this could be an opportunity. Could we explore these numbers in a way that is expansive and insightful so we can see what else is possible? All that to say comparison can be fraught territory. That’s why initially I was a little on the fence about producing this episode. While we’re calling it something like how do you stack up because we’re trying to appeal to your baser instincts and get you to click on it. Did it work?

It’s crucial to remember that no two financial situations are the same. Still, we have so much interesting data about Rich Girl Nation from our budget breakdown survey and I thought it would be fun to level set in the beginning of 2024 with some of the more interesting learnings from the data. Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Girls and Boys. As always, I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and today we are taking a tour of your accounts, assets, and liabilities because I’m nosy and I assume you are too because well, you clicked on the episode,

Now’s probably as good a time as any to come clean that your girl did not major in statistics or proper survey formation, so I will not pretend that my data is clean in the traditional sense. That said, I’m armed with a high school senior’s level of understanding of numbers, an Airtable account and an Instagram audience. So I pushed out a request for your budgets a few months ago. I wanted to know how much you make, where you live, how old you are, what you spend on housing, what you’re contributing to retirement, and if we’re being honest, I wanted to know your net worth. 318 people responded to the survey hailing from both single income and dual income households all over the US and our team was amazed by the results, so amazed in fact that in instances where numbers seemed too good to be true or totally out of left field, we followed up and we asked how did that happen? So you’ll hear from anonymized voices in Rich Girl Nation today too. Plus we’re also going to have some non-Money with Katie team members share their thoughts today as folks who do not think about money 24/7. So please welcome some Morning Brew team members to the show.

Kelcee:

Hi, this is Kelcee. I’m a reporter for Tech Brew.

Matty:

My name is Matty. I am a daily writer for the Daily Newsletter, the Morning Brew flagship.

Elyssa:

Elyssa. I’m the VP head of Creative Studio.

Nya:

Hi, I’m Nya and I’m an associate account executive here at Morning Brew on the growth and performance team.

Katie:

We ask them to read through our findings and react to any interesting takeaways they learned, whether about the info itself or about their own situations. If you want to follow along with your own numbers, gather your info, including your income, net worth debts and biggest monthly expenses, and make sure to calculate the percentages of your expenses in your budget too so you can understand how your take home pay is divvied up compared to our respondents. We’ll get into the data after a quick break.

I’ve mentioned this before on the show and elsewhere, but we were particularly flabbergasted by the number of six figure households in the mix. It’s one thing to see this in big data sets. It’s another thing entirely to see the numbers tied to people’s names and ages. People like 39-year-old Kristen in Louisiana, a single mother who earns $145K, or 27-year-old Sarah who’s part of a dual income household in Portland bringing in $230K. Naturally, when we first published some of the aggregate results, one of the most popular questions we received was did all of your respondents live in New York or the Bay Area with those high salaries? No. In fact, the highest single income earner in our dataset who earns $305,000 in annual income is a 34-year-old woman who lives in Detroit, Michigan. So we followed up with her and we asked her about her career.

Anonymous:

My income is entirely from my salary W-2 job. I work for a publicly traded tech company, but I am lucky enough to do my job remotely. I’m a director level doing communications. To break it down further, there’s two main parts to my compensation base, pay and equity, and I fought really hard to get to this level of income. My first job out of college was an internship making $10 an hour. Then came many years of working way more than 40 hours a week, and with that came severe burnout, but 10 plus years later, safe to say that the hard work paid off. Today I’m in a role that allows me balance and I feel really well compensated.

Katie:

The other single earners who cracked the top 10, all earning incomes above $200k per year live in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York, Colorado, the Bay Area and Maryland. The median respondent age was 31 years old and we found the median single earner income was $111,000 per year. So out of our 131 single earners, 49 of them earned less than $100k and 77 of them earned more than $100k. And a reminder we’re using median here instead of averages as high averages will skew the dataset, whereas medians are the literal middle of the pack numbers. Here’s what Matty, a single earner shared after she saw these numbers.

Matty:

One of my goals for next year or within the next couple years is to pass that a hundred thousand dollars income level, which is kind of hard when you’re a journalist. There’s a lot of people in Money with Katie that make that much money, and so I think that was more of just like, yeah, girl, you’re allowed to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. You can do that. People your age are doing that, but also slightly less shame because I think the median age was 31 and that’s a little older than me, so maybe I’m going to make a new goal that’s like when I’m 31, I want to be making a hundred thousand dollars.

Katie:

This info also inspired Elyssa, a mother to a teenager.

Elyssa:

When I read through the results of the Rich Girl Nation survey, I felt wholly inadequate at times and also really inspired by the youth and also slightly worried for my future retirement. I was really inspired by so many people that were younger and how much they save and how frugal they are, and at first I thought they must live in big cities. They must have money, they must have their parents be paying for everything. And then the more that I got into it, the more that I saw how people really are just so dedicated, which I know Katie said they’re obviously following a personal finance expert, but it just was really, really amazing to see so many people that are starting that at such a young age because I feel like I’m really playing catch up and as a mom to a teenager, it left me really excited about the kind of skills and support that I could provide my own kid to start young.

Katie:

And as for our dual earning households, this is where even more impressive numbers came into play. The median income for our 179 dual income respondents was $186k ranging from just $15,000 per year to $1.8 million per year in income. Now that latter couple, a 34-year-old and 40-year-old with one child has a monthly take home pay of $108,000. Interestingly, the second highest earning couple was also in Michigan at $650k per year. Guys, what is in the water at Lake Michigan? I am genuinely so interested.

The top 10 households overall in this dual income set were in Michigan, North Carolina, Minnesota, New York, Texas, Colorado and Oregon, so this isn’t what you would expect to see, right? We really thought that all of the highest earners were going to be clustered in these extremely very high cost of living cities, but that was not the case. There were some but not the majority, and this time we wanted to talk to someone in a household earning something closer to the median. So we reached out to a 22-year-old couple in North Carolina earning a combined household income of $85K.

Anonymous:

Hey Henah and Katie, I’m 23, my wife is 22 years old and we make about $85,000 a year and that translates to about $5,000 in take home pay a month in a low cost of living area in North Carolina. I work in the field of tax avoidance, otherwise known as tax accounting. My wife is self-employed pursuing her passions, which is teaching dance performing arts classes and sales makeup. $5,000 a month stretches a long way in North Carolina. We pay about $1,500 to rent and we keep our other fixed expenses low to give us a savings rate of roughly 40%. My wife went to a local community college and I was grateful enough to have parents that allowed me to graduate college in three years debt free as 23 and 22 year olds were grateful to say we have roughly $65,000 in investments.

Katie:

We had a conversation with this individual and saw how they’re tracking their progress and man, it was so impressive and that leads me to another point about being pleasantly surprised as we covered on moneywithkatie.com last month. We’ll link it in the show notes.

The income picture in the US might not be as bleak as we initially thought, not because of our data, but because of data sets that come from the US census and remove the elderly who are presumably kicked back, dying their hair blue, and playing bunco from studies about household income. For example, in 2021, the median family income in households with two full-time earners was $130,000. Now an interesting note about the statistic, it draws from the IPUMS US census data, which includes median family incomes for the 100 largest metro areas and when you sort the two full-time workers column in ascending order, so you start with the smallest, you go to the biggest and go to the 50th spot, AKA, the median you find where else?

Grand Rapids, Michigan at $130,000 per year, along with Colorado Springs, Virginia Beach, Albuquerque, and Akron, Ohio of all places. And if you remember, the money with Katy audience for dual earning households had a median closer to $186k. So an impressive jump, but still $130k at the median is pretty great. So the median for a household with only one individual working full-time was $86.5k. That figure was smack dab in the middle from Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the US census dataset, whereas our stats showed the median of, if you’ll recall, about $110k. In that US census data, not one of the largest 100 metro areas had a median household income below a hundred thousand dollars when both individuals were working full-time, which absolutely stunned me. For example, in San Jose, California, the median household income for families with two full-time earners was $261,000.

It’s of course almost no surprise that an audience following a personal finance brand would have higher incomes than national medians, but incomes and locations were not the only thing that we found interesting in our survey data. We also wanted to know what people were contributing to their retirement accounts. Every month was our constant drum beating about the importance of long-term planning working.

We will be right back after a quick break.

Of our single earner submissions, the median monthly contribution to retirement was a thousand dollars a month and the median save rate was 19%. Only seven respondents were contributing nothing and the top contributor was a 43-year-old single mom living in Maryland with three kids who puts away $16,500 per month for retirement — go off queen, she’s a doctor.

But even the counts fingers seven respondents who are not contributing to their retirement accounts, we’re still saving anywhere from $136 to $3,500 a month. So my hunch is that that crew of seven is either paying off debt strategically while also saving whatever they can or they’re still in the process of building up an emergency fund. Here’s how this insight inspired Kelcee.

Kelcee:

It was really illuminating to, for example, hear how much people are saving each month, and I think those are the sorts of things that are very attainable as long as you are being mindful of taking those steps. I think it’s so easy to make the extra Amazon purchase if you don’t have a savings goal in mind, whereas maybe if you do have that savings goal in mind and if I do adopt more of a monthly savings goal, I think it would make it easier to be more strategic with my finances. I think it mostly just emphasized that I don’t really know what my spending categories are. I think this is kind of a good wake up call going into 2024 for me to really take stock of where my money is going and think more strategically about it.

Katie:

Nya shared the same sentiment.

Nya:

Last night, I actually did a full audit of my year in my expenses. I actually did use the Wealth Planner to do so. Funny enough, this is my second year using it, but I had to do some soul searching and there was just so much that I realized that I could cut down on. It helped me get a snapshot of my spending habits and just kind of reassess where I didn’t make thoughtful or I didn’t purchase with intent. There was so much beauty and maintenance. I kind of sat there and I was like, I work from home transparently. There’s so many things that I don’t need. There’s no reason for me to get my nails done every two weeks. There’s so much discretionary spending that I could just cut out because I’ve been in places where not having money has affected my mood and just affected my overall performance. And so that’s definitely something that’s motivated me to live more of a secure life. In terms of my financial freedom.

Katie:

I went hunting through the single earner data set to try to find the person contributing the largest portion of their income to retirement or other savings and I came up with Caitlin, a 27-year-old living in Madison, Wisconsin who takes home about $7,000 per month and saves 4,000 of it. Her rent is $1,750 and she only spends about 6% of her take home pay or around $420 per month on fun stuff. This puts her save rate at nearly 60%, which as we know from our save rate episode, which we’ll link in the show notes will allow her to become work optional after just 11 years.

I was also really impressed with Carol, a 26-year-old in Chicago who takes home $5,274 per month and saves $3,350 of it or also around 60% though her housing expenses were listed as $0, which leads me to believe she might live with family.

There was Ashley, a 34-year-old in Los Angeles who earns $80,640 per year before taxes takes home about $5,400 per month and saves $1,200 of it. Her rent at $1,725 is her biggest expense, but she also spent $550 per month on groceries, $250 on cleaning and $400 on whatever I need from Target and Amazon, which hashtag feeling seen, but she’s still socking away 22% every month. After comparing her situation, Matty felt inspired to update her own retirement contributions, so see why this can act as a productive comparison?

Matty:

There are a lot of people saving a lot more than I save for retirement and I thought I was doing a good job, so I felt a little bit like, oh, maybe I need to actually look at how much I’m saving retirement.

Katie:

So how did our dual income couples do? Do we have double the income, double the fun in this crew? There’s only one couple who is saving nothing for retirement and it seems to me they might be getting a later start on their financial journey because they’re in their fifties, it appears they do have a paid off house but have less than a hundred thousand dollars in savings. This is by the way, more reflective of the average person in their fifties who has a median net worth of around $360k. As an aside to calculate your own net worth, remember it is assets minus liabilities. So if you have a $600,000 home, you have $200,000 in investments, but $400,000 left to pay back on your mortgage and no other debt, your net worth is about $400,000.

Okay, so back to savings. In a statistical happy accident, the median monthly retirement savings across our dual income respondents was drum roll please, $2,000 or exactly double that of the single income crew. The median save rate was 23%, so a little higher than the single income folks at 19%, but not by much. The most aggressive savers in this group, Kim and her spouse, a 37 and 41-year-old couple living in where else? Auburn, Michigan with two children, they collectively earn $650,000 per year and they save $30,000 per month spending about $8,000 per month. It appears they own their home outright because they listed their mortgage expense as zero, and this is a prime example for how leveling up your income can easily unlock reaching your other financial goals.

On the more, well, normal side of the income spectrum, we have Ellen and her boyfriend in Seattle, two mid 30 somethings earning a combined $129K per year, almost exactly in line with our national median of $130k, saving $4,638 per month and spending only $1,700 per month on housing in Seattle. Yeah, Ellen, tell us your secret. So rich listeners, how are you feeling hearing all of these numbers? And if you’re wondering about moving to Michigan, so are all of us…

Elyssa:

And one thing was what is happening in Michigan? Michigan

Kelcee:

Seems like the hotspot, should we all be moving to Michigan?

Katie:

So let’s talk about housing because this data specifically around people’s housing expenses really surprised us.

And by surprised us, I mean it made all of team Money with Katie collectively feel like we are all paying way too much for the roof over our heads. I’m not sure if all of Rich Girl Nation is either roommated up or bought modest homes in 2019 with 3% interest rates, but these numbers amazed all of us. And for context, per the Motley Fool, the average cost of housing in the US was $2,025 a month in 2022.

For the single income earners, median housing expenses were only $1,600 a month. The most expensive housing expense for a single person was $3,900 a month by a 40-year-old woman living in San Francisco earning $246k per year. Christina, a 33-year-old in Miami, came close with $3,750 per month in rent and a $160k per year income. The most impressive housing expense, so the person whose housing costs were the smallest percentage of her income while again removing people who reported paying nothing, was Rebecca, a single 30 something in Pennsylvania who earns $102,000 per year but pays only $875 per month for housing.

Then there’s Caroline, a 27-year-old in Houston whose housing costs initially gave me a heart attack at $3,295 per month on about $4,000 of take home pay. Then I read her notes, she told me she’s house hacking. So based on her other numbers, how much she’s saying she’s saving, it appears that some or all of that expense is covered. Overall, the median percentage of income spent on renter mortgage was Chef’s Kiss in line with best practices at 28% of take home pay, which is literally exactly what we recommend in the Money with Katie Wealth Planner.

There were a couple of Rich Girls though notably both interestingly 25 year olds in Washington DC whose housing costs were high as a percentage of income. One is spending $2,000 per month on $3,500 per month of take home pay. The other is spending $1,600 on $3,200 of take home pay each month.

It’s worth noting that both of these respondents are saving less than $200 per month, which should surprise no one who has ever been 25 years old in a high cost of living city. And as we mentioned in our save rate episode, these high percentages when we’re just starting our careers and mandated to work within a certain region are sometimes normal. It’s often a season of life, and as you earn more, those percentages will likely fall to a more median number similar to how childcare costs can become the largest expense when folks reach their childbearing years. But still, it’s something to be aware of. You don’t want to be house poor, rent poor if you can help it, which is why you often see people in expensive cities getting roommates when they can.

So as for our dual income households, the median housing expense was only $2,000. The median percentage of take home pay, our dual income couples spent on rent or mortgage was 20%, which is pretty incredible to me. Only 10% of the 187 couples had housing expenses over $4,000 a month. And of those they lived in Orange County, California, New York City, Maine, Virginia, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Hampshire, Seattle, Portland, Charleston, Huntsville, Alabama and Dallas. So no real rhyme or reason to those.

There was only one Bay Area couple in that crew, $4,125 per month in monthly housing in SF. The most expensive housing costs were for the couple I told you about earlier who earned $1.8 million per year. Though as we all know, they can afford it. Their housing costs were $6,500 a month. The second highest was $6,100 a month for a couple that’s making $330,000 per year. So I would say our millionaire couple is still living pretty handedly beneath their means.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, some of the locations where people were spending the highest amount on housing as a percentage of take home pay surprised me: Dallas, Maine, Chicago, New Hampshire, long Island, Seattle and New Jersey. Couples living in these areas were spending between 38% and 58% of their take home pay on housing. But interestingly, the media net worth for those spending objectively too much on their housing expenses as we have defined “too much” was $418,000. The highest net worth in this dataset was $4 million. So I don’t know, it seems like even the folks who are stretched thin with their largest fixed expense tend to be doing okay, family money maybe, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Compare this to the media net worth of those spending 30% or less of their take home pay on housing, $380k, compared to, again, like I said, $418k.

So I’m not really sure what to make of this. The only explanations I can think of, again, either inheritances that are boosting your net worth or people who have maybe already amassed a lot of money and so they might feel more comfortable splurging on housing like, well, I don’t have to save as much. I’ve already saved enough. I don’t know. But it kind of highlights that you can’t judge a book by its rent or its cover.

13% of respondents with low housing costs were millionaires compared to 20% with high housing costs as millionaires. It’s interesting that you saw more millionaires in the group that were spending more on housing as a percentage of income. So where do you listen or fall within this measure and what do you think is going on here? Email us at moneywithkatie@morningbrew.com and tell us your theory.

And to close out this section, the couple whose housing costs the least as a percentage of take home pay. Again, we are excluding people with paid off homes or people who live with family. It was Liz and her spouse in upstate New York. They earn $450K per year and they pay just $1,600 a month for housing. So 6% of their take home pay each month, perhaps unsurprisingly they have a $1.5 million net worth. So on that note, let’s talk about transmuting income to assets, shall we? What is the net worth situation in Rich Girl nation?

Well, the short answer is you’re killing it all of you. And yes, that goes even for those of you with $0 to your name because guess what? You’re spending your time listening to a podcast about personal finance, which tells me everything I need to know about the direction you are headed up and to the right. But here’s a little factoid that blew my mind. Of the 318 submissions we received the collective net worth as in if we pulled all of our money together and we bought an island is $126 million more than one 10th of a billion dollars. I cannot wrap my head around that and the stock market has gone up since we last checked. So just imagine how rich we are now.

Now for my single earners, y’all are clocking in at a median net worth of $130K, but you range anywhere from $2,000 all the way up to $785K. For dual income Rich Girls and Guys, the median net worth is $400K.

So interesting little efficiency there. More than twice as high than the single median, which I thought was very fascinating, with a range from $84 (the note for that submission said I just graduated from grad school) all the way up to $4 million. Notably, there were no single millionaires in our dataset but there were 26 millionaire couples representing about 8% of respondents. The average age of our millionaires were 37 years old, but there is a range from 25 to 58. There are only two couples in their twenties, the 25 year olds who have $1.3 million, which based on a household income of $125K I’m going to assume is at least partially inherited. And you know what? I’m going to say the same for our 29 year olds with $4 million as their household income is $280k and according to a note in their submission, they pull $5,000 per month in income from a $1 million bond account.

So unless these are like post exit founders or they own an apartment complex in Los Angeles, I am going to guess that both of these couples, again, just given age and income, are wielding some family money.

Pause. This type of information is precisely why you cannot compare yourself to other people based on age alone and why the smokescreen of social media is such a dangerous place for lifestyle content. Because if I’m sitting here watching another 29-year-old who’s somehow worth $4 million just living it up and I’m like, oh my God, I’m a failure. Well, not necessarily. It’s harder to make assumptions about the rest of the millionaires in this dataset because they’re all in their thirties and forties and they all have household incomes above and sometimes well above $300K and appear to have decently high savings rates that would more or less map to the net worth.

So perhaps the most impressive millionaire next door style earner in this list is actually not even in the us. It’s an anonymous 41-year-old single income individual living in Sydney, Australia. They earn $142K per year, take home $7,600 per month and save…are you ready for this? Around $6,000 of it. They own their town home outright and they have very low fixed expenses and spend about $500 per month on food. Their net worth is $1.3 million. So we’ve got a super saver who has had some time in the market.

One thing that became very clear to me in doing this exercise is that you can learn a lot about people by looking at their numbers. I learned one 26-year-old dual income couple in Atlanta is $10,000 over budget this year because one of them is undergoing cancer treatment. I learned a 58-year-old divorcee with a million dollars in assets is struggling to get by on $69,000 per year in income. I need help and hope, she wrote.

I learned that the 25 year olds worth $1.3 million are giving $6,000 per year to charity. I saw travel budgets that ranged from shoestring to several thousand dollars per month, like the 40-year-old Dallas sites with $404,000 in income who will spend nearly $40,000 on travel this year.

Food was another interesting category where I noticed a trend amongst the millionaire crew. These folks like to eat. Nearly all of them spent at least $1,000 per month on food with a Portland couple in their forties who earned $268K taking the literal cake with $2,400 per month in grocery and dining out expenses. One person simply wrote “dining, it’s awful.” Of the entire dataset, the lowest food expenses I saw were $200 per month per person.

I saw a mid twenties couple earning $65,000 per year in Augusta, Georgia who are investing $500 per month in personal training. But don’t worry too much about them because their net worth is approaching $500K. So I don’t know, perhaps they bought property near Augusta National.

I learned that one 33-year-old woman in Milwaukee spends $400 per month on wellness, which she categorizes as therapy and Botox. Many, many have dogs who cost them on average between $300 and $700 per month. Though some are quick to note that the dog is “pampered.” And as a dog owner myself, I feel your pain. One late twenties couple in Minneapolis listed out their dog expenses and some were expected. We’re talking food, we’re talking treats. Others like indoor swimming we’re not so expected. But respect.

At this point, you might be wondering about the tiny little elephants in the room and their associated daycare costs. The average number of children for survey respondents was 0.3 kids. Yes, one third of a child.

Now to be fair, we just asked people to tell us about their living situation. So we didn’t explicitly ask if they had kids, but some people volunteered that they were dinks or dink wads, dual income, no kids with a dog or they listed off children’s ages. 81% of submissions either did not mention children or explicitly said they had none. 9% of submissions had one child and 10% of submissions had two or more children, but three kids was the largest family size in the dataset.

So any interesting findings about this group, this is wild. The average net worth of families with two or more kids was $786K. The average net worth for families with one kid was $650K and those with none was $473K. And while it would be easy for me, a person with no formal training in statistics to go, wow, if you want to get rich, just start popping out kids. The correlation is likely the opposite that people with more money might have more kids because they can’t afford to have more kids.

So how are the families with three kids doing it? That was eye popping for me. The highest income in the group was $384K in Massachusetts, and the lowest income was a family of five earning $90K in South Carolina. Here’s what that family shared.

Anonymous:

Hey, Money with Katie. I’m a part-time executive assistant. I make a whopping $18,000 a year. My husband is an associate pastor and he makes $72,000 a year. So our combined salary is about $90,000. We have three kids, six, four and two all in private school. But we have quite a unique financial situation as we only pay 10% of our kids’ tuition and the rest is covered by our employers, which totals each month of only $180 total. So we are so grateful for this and it cannot go without saying how big of a help it is.

Katie:

Another interesting finding of all the people with at least one child, nobody was under 30 with the exception of one couple where one member of the couple was 29.

Now regrettably, we did not ask for daycare data since the original survey was just going to be used for a fun budget breakdown series, but perhaps a next iteration will target parents specifically and ask how having kids has changed their finances still, I was really amazed to see how high the net worths were for the parents in the group.

Alright, so some parting words to close today, I will share how parsing this data made me feel because like I told you at the beginning of this episode, it’s impossible not to compare. In some ways comparison is kind of the point of talking about data like this. And as I reviewed the cost of living data for households that roughly paired with mine, I was reminded of Chris Hutchins words in our conversation for the HENRYs and HENRIETTAs episode that when you’re earning a solid income, you might know people who are earning as much or even less than you are who are spending a lot more lavishly than you.

And his point was, just because you’re making good money does not mean you should start spending like it. In a few key areas of my life, I have totally made this mistake. My is on the high end of this dataset, comfortably in the top 5% of most expensive. Our monthly expenses were in the top percentage too. We spend a lot of money and it was a really good reality check for me to see the median rent for households. My size was less than half of what we’re spending as if our survey was saying, Hey Katie, your sense of what’s normal is really out of whack and probably needs to be right-sized.

And while we don’t know what the 300 individuals who responded to our survey do for work, it’s probably safe to assume that they’re in a variety of fields. Seeing a lot of people earning solid incomes, like literally 90% of whom would’ve been making more money than I was earning just a couple of years ago when I started Money with Katie, and I know this because I counted, reminded me that these mythical jobs with six figure total compensation are out there and knowing they’re out there in the first place is the first step in finding one.

Here’s what Nya shared.

Nya:

It also was really assuring to see that there were other women making that much money or just people in general across Katie’s readership and her listeners. I didn’t think that was something that was possible, especially now I grew up lower middle class, but I didn’t realize it until I got to college. It’s one of those things where a lot of my friends that they had trust funds or they had parents that were upper middle class territory, higher socioeconomic status, I didn’t think those were things that existed outside of fiction or outside of tv. So kind of going through it and just seeing people that made well over $200k, I thought, well, what are you doing and how can I also be doing that? I’d say more so for me, it felt very motivating. I’ve always believed that I could also achieve this type of success as long as I worked hard enough for it. And from what I read, it didn’t seem like those people came from, they inherited this wealth or it was something that they came into. So it felt like something that was attainable.

Katie:

So if you’re listening and you’re not quite there yet, keep on trekking. Finally, I want to close with a really powerful narrative that Nya shared with me.

Nya:

Transparently. I lost my mother to cancer a year ago when I was 25 years old, old. That whole experience was just a whirlwind. I had recently been laid off from my last role and then it just all happened at once. And so she did not have a will and luckily because of the state that I live in, because she was in married, I was her sole heir. Everything immediately went to me and so overnight it increased my net worth, which was insane to think about, but it also gave me a serious sense of dread and anxiety because my mother was my personal financial advisor. My mother, she delivered the mail for the postal service. So she always kind of emphasized to me that I don’t want to live paycheck to paycheck. She went to business school, she studied accounting. It was something that she did in her free time.

So I just went on the internet and I was like, what do I do? I came across, I can’t even remember how I specifically came across money with Katie. I think someone might’ve mentioned her on YouTube. So I went and I started listening to the podcast and I binged it. There was just so much learning about Roth IRAs, learning about 401ks, which I’m still figuring out. It kind of helped me begin the healing process also in a way because I was able to say, okay, I can handle financial decisions on my own without my mom. I would call her for everything. And so it was just like, okay, I can handle this on my own. I can pay a mortgage, I can assume all these bills I can budget for the month.

Katie:

Thank you so much Nya, for entrusting us with your story and for showing just how powerful self-education and taking ownership of our money narrative can be. And thanks for listening to this deep dive into Rich Girl Nation’s numbers.

Let us know what you think at moneywithkatie@morningbrew.com. Alright, that is all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place on The Money with Katie Show.