On Worthwhile Side Hustles, Financial Tradeoffs, & Frustration with American Politicians

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

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In today’s Rich Girl Roundup, we’re discussing a wide range of alternately nerdy and controversial (sometimes both) topics:

• 🩹 The role of insurance around the fear of impending doom
• 🏃 When side hustles are worthwhile
• 🧮 How to calculate opportunity costs when you have both savings and loans as options on the table
• 🤑 The theoretically rigorous case for wealth taxes
• 👀 Where the current economic discussion about Trump’s immigration policies is self-defeating
• ⚖️ Why my perspective on state-run universal services has become complicated by the last six months 

…and more, including a temporary and especially thrilling new segment called “Airing Your Grievances.” 

📙 RICH GIRL NATION  IS HERE—GET YOUR COPY.

💰 THE 2025 MONEY WITH KATIE WEALTH PLANNER IS LIVE—GET YOURS NOW.

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 feedback on: The Powerful 0.01% Spending Rule, Making Career Shifts, & When to Adjust Your Asset Allocation with Nick Maggiulli, How Others Countries Used Their Darkest Hours to Radically Reform Their Economies with Natasha Hakimi Zapata, & Understanding the Big Beautiful Bill’s Repercussions, with the Highest Ranking Woman in Congress with Representative Katherine Clark
• The Money with Katie Show episode on disability insurance
• Henah’s Substack on travel
• Recent essay: Panic at the Airport Lounge

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Transcript

Katie:

Welcome back to another Rich Girl Roundup, yeehaw, on The Money with Katie Show. I am, of course, Katie Gatti Tassin, and in every few episodes my executive producer Henah and I sit down. We discuss your feedback, your questions, any new considerations that come up and Henah, I’m curious where you want to take us today first. Where are we starting today?

Henah:

Well, first I wanted to read this review that came in because it really made my day and I loved it. So I want to say thank you to MissSarChasm, which whoever you are, that is a great username. They said, “I’m a personal finance junkie and I’ve listened to podcasts for years and even have my own. They tend to all talk about the same thing in different ways now and it has gotten boring. But Katie’s podcast goes to the next level. She shows us how our money not only impacts us, but impacts an entire global economy and society. This is advanced level personal finance and I’m so here for it. Also, I’m not the only one who wants to be BFFs with Katie.” MissSarChasm, unfortunately for you, she already has a bff: me, but if it’s my time to go early, then I’ll let you swoop in.

Katie:

That truly means a lot. Thank you so much. Advanced level personal finance is definitely how I like to think about what we’re trying to do here, or money as an extreme sport. Either one, take your pick.

On that note, let’s kick off with our personal finance episode and then I actually want to answer a couple specific money questions that have come in over the last couple weeks just because it feels like thematically we’re in that spirit of our friend Data Daddy, Nick Maggiulli, he texted me other day. He’s like, Data Daddy’s hilarious by the way. I was like, good, I’m glad that you weren’t perceiving that as low grade sexual harassment all in good fun Nick, but it’s all about climbing the wealth ladder.

So we actually weirdly saw a spike in downloads that week. I wasn’t really sure why. I think we’re kind of under the impression that that might mean y’all want some more of the math goods, so we’re bringing that to you today.

Henah:

For sure. Y’all have got a hankerin’, so I definitely want to start with a note of clarification. So the episode title was, “The Powerful 0.01% Spending Rule, Making Career Shifts, and When to Adjust Your Asset Allocation,” and I think the 0.01% really threw some folks off. So one listener wrote in 0.01% seems tight…that’s $50 for someone with a net worth of $500K.

And then someone else responded, “I think it’s 1% not 0.01%. The headline is confusingly punctuated.” And so I went to go comment to clarify that actually it is correctly punctuated.

Katie:

Henah’s eye is twitching. She’s like, no, it’s right. The headline is right.

Henah:

Listen, we triple checked our numbers. So Raine did as a solid and they came in to say, “It is 0.01%, but I think this is most useful for someone living off their assets. If you have $500,000 invested, you could spend about $1,500 per month with this rule without ever dropping below $500,000. So you would likely need more income in this case and are not ready to retire yet. It’s basically a more conservative approach than the 4% per year rule. I like it.”

Katie:

So first of all, Raine, you should be on payroll. Thank you. And yes, it is meant to be 0.01% or one/10000th. And so as Raine mentioned, it is supposed to serve as shorthand for essentially translating how much progress you’ve already made to what sorts of financial decisions should not stress you out anymore when you are making a one-time decision.

So to be clear in that example of $50 for someone with a net worth of $500K, that seems really low. It’s not $50 a month, it’s $50 per day. So it’s like if you are going to the grocery store, and I think Nick’s example was eggs, right? So let’s say your net worth is $20K, you’ve got $20,000 and you are really on the fence at the grocery store about whether or not you should buy the caged free organic eggs and they are $2 more. This is a little heuristic that you can tap that’s like, okay, $2 that is one/10000th of $20K. This decision to buy eggs for $2 more is not going to make a lick of difference to my net worth. My money that’s invested is going to grow faster than this today. And so it’s really just about being able to right size, what sorts of financial dilemmas you are actually paying attention to and where you’re going. It’s fine. I’m going to get the eggs.

Henah:

And I want to clarify here people, so if you are multiplying, let’s say, in this case, $20,000 net worth by this one/10000th rule, it is 0.0001. So that’s a decimal point, three zeros, and a one, because I think when you hear the 0.01% rule, your instinct would be to multiply it times 0.01, but that’s just 1%. So it’s actually you have to add two more zeros and that is how you would accurately do it.

Katie:

Yes.

Henah:

I think another bigger example of this and something to remember, like you said Katie, this is per day. And so for example, I was debating where to stay on vacation and the price difference between a nice hotel and a nicer one per night was actually about 0.01% of our net worth. And so we made the decision to stay in a nicer location and honestly it ended up being one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed at. And at first when I was in the little checkout thing and I saw it was a few hundred dollars difference, I was like, oh God, I don’t know, is this a bad idea? But then I remembered that 0.01% is per night added up and so your girl balled out and I felt less guilty about it.

Katie:

I feel like there is something in the tax code that would suggest that you should be able to write that off now as business expense using it as this example.

Henah:

That is true. It’s a write off.

Katie:

It’s a write off. So I think this is just a helpful reminder that was echoed in that episode. Sometimes spending slightly more money, a la lifestyle creep, can let you actually enjoy the life that you have worked toward and are continuing to work toward. Obviously you want to make those decisions intentionally about work and spending, you’re increasing your net worth. You don’t want to totally slide back down the ladder like Nick said, but we heard that echoed in Jani’s comment as well. Jani is a popular listener of the show.

Henah:

Hey Jani.

Katie:

She said, “I love his POV on the 1% when making job financial decisions. I want to definitely dive deeper and understand how to make that calculation, but it was incredibly insightful to hear the reasoning for this framework. I think learning how to use your assets to live meaningfully is such an important skill that has been neglected in the pursuit of more is more.”

So yes, there’s the 0.01% spending. The 1%. I understand this is kind of confusing, less confusing in the book because it’s padded in a bunch of other stuff, but these were just two things from the book that I lifted out. I found them useful and so they were in closer proximity in the episode, but we’re going to talk shortly about that 1% income and side hustle slash work guidance because I think we heard some questions about side hustle specifically and when something is worth it and when it’s not.

Henah:

Yeah, so we’ll come back to that in a minute. But I wanted to address the biggest point of feedback that we received first. So it was around the lack of planning for life’s curve balls. So Amanda S.K. wrote, “Would love to hear more discussion about being prepared for terrible twists life can throw—illness or needing 24/7 care as an older person. The 4% rule in this kind of thinking is appealing, but definitely assumes few curve balls.”

And then LBee chimed in to add, “Agree. Katie already did an episode on long-term disability insurance.” And sidebar for me this episode was so important I think everybody would benefit from listening to it, so we’ll drop it in the show notes, but LB continues to say, “I found Nick’s stat about the number of retirees who die with four times more interesting. More data please. So what level of saving for a rainy day is appropriate? When does practicality beer into anxiety? What amount of assets is truly enough to weather that chance of catastrophe? When should you fear the toll of staying in that shithole apartment or that stressful job more than the fear of draining your ample savings?”

Katie:

I definitely understand that anxiety around planning so far out and just not knowing what might happen in life. Interestingly, I was on NPRs Life Kit yesterday and one of the questions that came in was about a woman who had been diagnosed with cancer at 30 and it was stage four. She didn’t have health insurance and so her friend was writing in to be like, I want to give her money to help with this. How do I decide how much to give her?

And the other guest and I, Wendy De La Rosa, we basically had the same perspective, which is like, well at that point a stage four cancer diagnosis is not something that you’re going to be able to float someone $5K to handle. That can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if you’re uninsured. So we ended up spending a lot of time talking about getting on Medicaid through the disability criteria rather than the low income criteria depending on where she lives and whatnot.

But all that to say, I actually think that a lot of these conversations about curve balls and catastrophes really comes down to the role that insurance is meant to play. That is what insurance is there for to give you a defined sense for your downside. Obviously not every curve ball that’s going to come at you in life carries a form of insurance that you can buy ahead of time, but I think it can really help to get specific about what you are afraid is going to happen long-term if it truly is some sort of disability or illness, disability insurance makes a lot of sense. If it is about, well, how am I going to afford care when I’m older? I do think long-term care insurance could be worth looking into. Although those policies have been degraded over time, they’re a little bit harder to find economically.

Now, not saying they don’t exist, but they’re less easy to just go out and get a good one. They’re a little bit harder to come by, but I think that it can be akin to purchasing peace of mind. Maybe this would be something where if you actually looked at the numbers and mapped out the premiums over time, you would be farther ahead by just investing that money and self-insuring. But if this is something where it is preventing you from living your life because you feel so scared about the chances that something might happen, I really think that looking into the appropriate types of insurance might be worth the money.

Henah:

Something I think about a lot is that anxiety because of the healthcare system. I think about the fact that how much less would you have to hoard if you didn’t have to worry about paying out of pocket for end of life healthcare a lot. And in other countries with universal healthcare, governments usually actually subsidize the cost. You’re left with just a small portion to pay and so it’s not nothing, but it’s far less than what you’d be on the hook for. And so maybe you wouldn’t have to worry about keeping $3 million in your bank account when you’re 75 years old because you’re not worried about, well, what happens if at this age? And so in turn maybe that lets you give to causes you care about, live your life a little bit more now, give to your heirs earlier in life so they can enjoy it, whatever that is.

And then you envisioned, Katie, you already kind of called this out, there was some Pushback Lite on the well ladder levels that he had laid out. So as a reminder, Nick had used levels of 10 to determine what level you’re on, so it’s not the most factually accurate. He called that out, but he kind of said it’s the easiest way to remember things.

So level one would be you have a net worth of $0 to $10,000. Level two is $10,000 to $100,000, level three is $100,000 to $1,000,000 and so on. And so one listener wrote in and said, “I’m sorry he lost me right from the beginning when he said he wasn’t trying for accurate. I feel he’s extremely out of touch in life if he thinks someone living off of $50k a year has the same life as someone with $200,000 a year.”

 And I just want to clarify, I don’t think he was saying everyone within levels one to three for example, lived the same life. Just that when you reach a certain level, some of those marginal net worths, like between $300,000 and $400,000 net worth, or $4 million to $6 million in net worth, it means that your lives generally look the same, which is I see the case for that. What do you think?

Katie:

Totally. His point was that it is about wealth and how much wealth is meaningfully going to change the type of life that you are able to live. So I agree.

I understand that that comment maybe was not phrased in the best way about like, oh, I’m going for easy to remember, not specific accuracy, but I do think if you know Nick, you read his stuff, he is incredibly evidence-based. He spends a lot of time building narrative value around data. So to me, his perspectives are actually a lot more trustworthy or more on the trustworthy side of the spectrum than most people who are out there pushing hot takes on personal finance stuff on the internet.

So regarding level four and higher, anyone with $10 million or more we heard from two listeners, Jezzie29 said, “I agreed with his stratification of US economic classes, which makes a lot of sense to me as someone living in a high cost of living area. One point I would add to the discussion about how the upper class or those with $10 million plus is distinguishable from the rest of us. Plebeians is not only the things they consume like private drivers, but also the way in which they use money as a means of accessing influence and power. They stop caring about the cost of things, but they care about the cost of power then.”

Henah:

Hard agree. I also love being called a plebian.

Katie:

The proles.

Henah:

Serfs.

Katie:

Down here, toiling away, toiling away in the content coal mine.

Henah:

The other note came from MMM756, so I’m going to go say, mmm noodle soup. If you know, you know. They said, “I’m glad you asked him about values. I still can’t fathom when so many people/geography/issues need financial support, why it’s ethical for anyone to have more than $10 million. I think his presumption that more money is better, which equals more power deserves questioning.”

Katie:

This just reminded me of that Hamilton Nolan piece that’s like confiscate their wealth. It’s so straightforward. He is like the marginal tax rate. I think he uses a hundred million. He’s like a marginal tax rate over a hundred million dollars of wealth should be a hundred percent. He’s like, I don’t want to hear it. This is embarrassing that we have to be having this conversation right now.

Okay. I don’t think Nick’s perspective is that more money equals better, and maybe that was on me as the interviewer for not drawing out his true point of view clearly enough. Obviously he works in wealth management in New York City, so he deals with super rich people all the time. I definitely think he traffics in circles that are approaching asset allocation. It is a sport. He’s not like a Marxist dirt bag like me who’s concerned about, well, who owns the means of production.

But speaking of dirt bags, speaking of money as power, I’m actually super happy someone gave me this opening. I have been digging into Jason Hickel’s work a little bit this week. I just kind of stumbled onto this, so depending on scheduling, I actually think it’d be really fun to have him on the show. He was explaining how the point of taxing the rich is not because we actually need their money to pay for stuff, and this is where we get into the crazy monetary abstractions of it all.

Henah:

Is that like a Stephanie Kelton, MMT type thing?

Katie:

Yeah. He’s basically like, no, no, no, you create demand for currency. That’s how we pay for things. It’s not like you’re paying taxes and those taxes are being turned around and spent on something, but we tax them because it is bad for an economy and a democracy for anyone to possess that much power over labor that instead of labor being allocated to stuff that everyone needs like bridges and agriculture and shit, it’s getting allocated to building somebody’s third yacht and custom frescoes and guest bathrooms and other stuff that ultimately doesn’t do jackal for a population. And so essentially Hickle was making the point on this podcast I was watching that extreme wealth just represents an inefficiently disproportionate power over labor power, which is bad for an economy. So more to come I suppose.

Henah:

I don’t know about you Katie, but Trump’s gold plated toilets have really improved my life. So did you see the Oval Office recently?

Katie:

Oh my god. Is it like him and Vladimir kissing with tongue in just—

Henah:

In a gold plated room? Yeah, it is hideous. Then we got a question that we’ve gotten quite a bit over the years and it was related to Katie as you mentioned, the 1% rule that Nick mentioned. So again, this is not the 0.01% rule for spending, but the 1% rule for earning. So basically as your net worth increases, you want to take on projects that improve your net worth by 1% or more, and if it’s less than that, it may not be worth it financially. Now, if you love it and want to do it, I think that’s a different story, but when he was saying kind of how to allocate your time, that’s the heuristic that he had offered.

So Alina T wrote in, “Hi Katie and Henah, please disregard if I haven’t gotten to this episode yet, but I’m curious if you have opinions or resources for realistic side hustles using the 1% rule. I struggled to find a side hustle worth my time when researching. It seems like all the suggestions are: sell AI slop, use my referral code to fill out surveys, monetize the only hobby that brings you joy in this chaotic world or opportunities that are saturated like selling stock photos. The last six years I’ve focused on cutting spending, increasing my salary and investing well, but I’m at the point where I don’t see where to go next on my wealth building journey.” Katie, you said that almost everyone nowadays has a side hustle outside their nine to five. So what kind of hustles are you hearing about these days?

Katie:

A lot of my friends’ side hustles are things that they do because they’re trying to pave a different path. They’ll work full time, but they also play three musical gigs a week in town and they’ll make 50 bucks doing that. It’s stuff where money is coming in, but the end goal is not just, hey, this is an efficient use of my time. It’s like, well, I want to be a musician, so I’m trying to make that happen and it’s going to make me a little money on the way. In one of my first episodes ever, I interviewed my friend Ben Miller. We literally sat in my attic, my attic that was made of wood and concrete.

Henah:

Nick’s eye starts twitching,

[Katie clip:]

Which if you know anything about audio production is the worst place to film anything, and we just passed the mic back in film.

Katie:

It was so heinous, do not listen to it. But we talked about something very similar and he said something I will never forget. He said, the value that you are generating in a side hustle should be accretive. So in other words, rather than a straight up time for money, swap your side hustle ideally is going to be something that can compound.

I think Nick’s story is really illustrative of this. He wrote that blog for three years for no money. He liked doing it and it ended up opening new career paths to him. He got a different tire paying job in a different industry. He has now sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his first book. He’s a New York Times bestseller, but it didn’t happen fast. I would still categorize what he was doing as a side hustle, even though for years it was making no money.

But I think I have gotten to the point where I feel very, very skeptical of side hustles that do not feel as though they’re additive to your life in some other way. If the energy around doing that thing is, oh man, I’m AI slop selling stock photos just like freaking nose to the grindstone, I have to find something. I think it’s probably going to be more misery than it’s worth to you energetically, unless we’re talking about foot pics for $150 a pop and then go off.

But it also sounds to me like she is increasing her salary. She is keeping her spending in line and she’s investing. So there’s the other piece of this, the flip side, which is if it is that difficult to find something where another opportunity is going to add 1% to your net worth per year, then your net worth might actually just be really high. That could also be the situation here.

So to me, it almost sounds like she’s more of a candidate for flipping on autopilot mode and just keeping your brain space open in the event that you are sometimes struck with an idea for a side hustle that feels so obvious and so naturally alluring to you that you can’t help yourself, but go and try to do it.

Henah:

Do you remember that reel we made where your foot was in it and I was like, Katie, we have to move the caption over this?

Katie:

You’re not giving this away for free, no free feet on the internet in this economy. Hell no.

Henah:

So what you just said is also exactly what you said to me when I was debating keeping an older side hustle and you said maybe you can keep your brain space open for work that you’re truly energized by versus this work that I’d been doing as a side hustle for several years. It was kind of monotonous, it wasn’t going to scale, and so I actually did step away from doing that side hustle and a couple months later I ended up launching my Substack and as of today, actually, I just launched my first paid sponsorship. I mean, we’re not talking thousands of dollars, but it’s something that I’m able to monetize very slowly.

I am excited to write about travel. I’m excited to do these things that I wake up with ideas in the morning, and I think if you’re not feeling that level of passion about it, it may not be worth it. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot actually when you shared Nick’s story that he wrote for three years without a single dollar, I’m like, you have to be so energized.

Katie:

Yeah, you got to be into it.

Henah:

Writing into the void that, yeah, I think that that’s something to weigh a little bit. And then funny enough, kind of my immediate thought was similar because my underlying question was do you actually need a side hustle? If you’re six years in, you’re doing all the right things. If a side hustle is just going to supercharge your worth 1% and you’re not really interested in it, or if it zaps you have your energy to earn actually more income in your nine to five, then maybe it’s not worth really pursuing. I understand that wasn’t necessarily the answer you probably wanted, but I hope that that lends some perspective to it.

We had a question from a listener, we’ll call H about whether it’s better to take out a loan or withdraw from a brokerage account to finance a home project. So I think this is one of those things about opportunity costs that pops up with net worth conversations. So they said, “My husband and I have about a million dollars invested for retirement already between the both of us. I’m 40, he’s 45. We also have a brokerage account for big purchases with about $110,000 in it currently. In the past we took $30,000 out on two different occasions. We make $220,000 before taxes and investments, but we need $30,000 for two different home projects we’re doing soon and my husband wants to take it out of the brokerage again, and I want to take out a loan between the loss of gains in the brokerage account and the tax implications. I’m worried about making the wrong choice, but when I talk to my husband about it, he wants numbers and facts and I’m just not that math savvy. So my question is, is it better to take out a loan for $30,000 or take it out of a brokerage account? He’s worried about loan payments every month and I’m worried about losing money.”

Katie:

I’m obsessed with, he wants numbers and facts. I have concepts of a plan. Okay, I want to pencil this one out because I think it can be really helpful to illustrate how to think about the trade-offs, and so this is how I would think about this. I think the short answer here is going to lie mathematically in the interest rate you can get for this loan.

First of all, you want to just calculate, you noted this already, right? The tax implications of a $30,000 withdrawal from this account. So you’re going to calculate the capital gains taxes on that $30K that you would be withdrawing, assuming that it is all gains, right? If it’s principal, you’re not paying taxes on it, but assuming it’s all gains given your income, you’re going to pay 15% on that. So call it $4,500 in capital gains taxes. Then you’re going to just quickly eyeball the opportunity cost of that $30K.

So if we’re talking over the next couple of years, something that’s commensurate with a loan term, let’s say you are averaging a 7% return, real return annually in that account, that means this year that $30,000 would have earned you about $2,000. Next year you’ll have $32,000 and that $32,000 will earn you $2,240. The following year you would have $34,240, and that’s going to earn another $2,400. So you get the point it is compounding, but we’re talking about an average for the next couple of years of at least around, I don’t know, $2,000 to $2,600 per year in investment gains. Again, that’s not literally how this will happen because the market’s going to go up and it’s going to go down.

Henah:

We are not licensed professionals. Please do your own due diligence.

Katie:

You can think about it like a $4,500 hit upfront at tax season and then a couple thousand dollars each year that would’ve continued to compound. Now we can compare that to taking out a loan.

The challenge with the loan is that the money that you are paying back every month for those loan repayment payments is probably money that you would have invested. I assume that this is extra money that you would’ve just saved if you can afford to do this. But let’s say that you get a 6% interest rate and a three year term, so you have 36 months to pay back $30K at 6%, you’re going to pay about $913 per month. So it’s a pretty substantial loan payment, $900 a month for three years, and you will have paid a total of $2,855 in interest. I just did a little debt payoff calculator to quickly get that number.

Henah:

Do you have those in your bookmarks like that and the compounding calculator from the Fed?

Katie:

No, I just Googled debt repayment calculator and then click whatever one’s paying the most for Google AdSense Spawn con. I’m like, alright, you win. You get my business.

So you could go deeper and you probably should if you’re like, especially if these numbers are really big and consequential to you, you could go deeper now and figure out the opportunity cost of that $913 per month if you would have investing that money that you’re going to be repaying the loan with. So say you plug that in at 7%. If you do that for three years, if you would’ve invested that money instead, we’re talking about $36,340 had you invested it. So the reality is that just keeping the $30,000 intact and keeping it invested now to just continue growing is going to have you coming out slightly ahead in this example.

But all that said, it really does come down to the interest rate. The capital gains taxes matter for sure, but the debt in this case is just simply growing slower than the invested money. Again, I usually use 7% as my comparison standard of investments. I don’t like to get too presumptuous about how fast that money’s going to grow. So debt above that, I’m like, I’d rather just not have the debt.

But I think there’s an argument to be made that, and now I’m going to argue against everything I just told you. I think there’s an argument to be made that the market is probably pretty overvalued right now. We just hit an all-time high. I’m not one for timing the market, but if you’re really going back and forth on which one, this would not be the worst time in the world to sell and realize some gains if you need to get that money somehow some way. But this is a case where it’s close, right?

Henah:

I also think in any case, you’re going to pay the tax regardless at some point in your life when you take it out. So in this case, it’s like you could take it out for something you need and it is so close that it may not even make a huge difference.

Katie:

Unless you’re using some super duper—if you’re planning on using that taxable account as a bridge account in early retirement and you’re going to live on what, less than $130K per year and do the fancy schmancy, I’m going to keep everything below the 0% capital gains rate. There is a way to get that money out tax free later when you don’t have any other earned income, but I don’t think most people are planning with that level of intensity or really care that much. So I don’t know.

Henah:

I mean you could also add in like, okay, well the value of your home grow, buy more than 30,000 or whatever the cost basis is that you take out to fund these projects, depending on what the project is that you’re talking about and when you want to move and all of that. So lots of things to consider, but I think that that’s a helpful way to walk through it.

Katie:

Yeah. The other thing that I guess just to throw this out here, you mentioned that your husband is afraid of the loan payments every month. You have the money to pay it off at any time. So if six months from now one of you loses your job and you’re like, oh crap, how are we going to keep paying off this loan? We don’t have the extra $900 anymore. At any point you could just go to the brokerage account and pay that loan off so the money is there, right? You’re not stuck in that decision if you decided to go ahead and go the loan route. But like I said, it does feel because we are at all time highs that it’s not a bad time to take out a chunk of money if you are in the position where you need a chunk of money. Okay, we will dive right back into more episode specific feedback right after a quick break.

Welcome back. Okay, so we are going to move to our episode with Natasha Hakimi Zapata titled How Other Countries Used their Darkest Hours to Radically Reform Their Economies. And I know I said I would avoid Norway, I still am, but I chuckled at this comment from RemoterCharm who said, “Finland is not Scandinavian,” and then BigRedDog wrote “Scandinavian, Norden, mehhhh with the little shrug.”

Henah:

The shrug emoji.

Katie:

Okay, guys, I talk on the internet for hours every single week. I don’t think we can all really fairly expect everything I say to be correct, especially if we’re talking about geography. So I’m keeping you on your toes. I think my issue is that I use Nordic and Scandinavian interchangeably a lot to just gesture at that region of the world where they think people should have rights. But anyway, I’ve learned my lesson, I guess.

Henah:

Yes. And to be clear, Scandinavia is Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. So hopefully that clarifies. But Katie, let’s remember that you also thought Spain was in the Americas and you told me the other day that you were confused about North Central and South America. So…

Katie:

Okay, first of all, I was 13, and second of all, I thought Spain was in South America, and I don’t think that that’s that bad.

Henah:

But you weren’t 13 when you learned about North Central and South America, correct?

Katie:

No that was last week. Okay guys, I’m an idiot. We know this. If you listen, if you continue to choose to listen to me, that is on you. I am just talking into my mic in my house, okay?

Henah:

We all have our strengths like pronouncing Uruguay.

Katie:

You just said it wrong. No, it’s Uruguay or Uruguay.

Henah:

Is that true? Wait,

Katie:

Yes, Uruguay. And you better not cut this. You better not cut this where you’re dunking on me for saying shit wrong.

Henah:

Well, I was going to say it was funny because we had you retake a few mentions of saying this country because you’re pronouncing it both incorrectly and correctly at the same time, which I guess I just did.

Katie:

Hold on. I am pretty positive, I am pretty sure in Spanish class I learned that Americans say Uruguay like a at the end.

Henah:

Uruguay,

Katie:

In Spanish, it’s Uruguay.

Henah:

Uruguay, yeah, you are correct, Uruguay.

Katie:

Alright,

Henah:

At bottom we are two morons with microphones.

Katie:

It worked out. It worked out

Henah:

Well. Apparently people liked hearing about Uruguay. Nevertheless, we persisted.

So before we dive into the longer feedback, I just share my favorite comment from this go-around, which came from HollisAdele who said, “Perfect timing on the release of this one. Just ruined my boyfriend’s birthday by getting in a screaming match with my mom’s boyfriend at a bar about how and why a country is wealthy as ours must and can do better. Someone’s going to sit down and have a listen.”

Katie:

Let’s fucking go. I love when we make people more unbearable at family gatherings. And you know what? The reason that we can’t have nice things is because drone strikes are expensive. Okay? Someone’s got to pay, someone has got to pay for the US military to have helicopters that can fly upside down, and that’s why you don’t get to go to a hospital when you need help.

Henah:

You know what Hollis? I’ll just say, I appreciate you taking one for the team. Okay, and happy birthday to your boyfriend. I guess we are Leo twins. I think we all want to feel helpful and see that it’s actually possible to improve things and that a wide range of countries are actually doing stuff, many with lower incomes than our GDP and that sometimes focusing on what’s wrong all the time can make the options feel really narrow. A

nd so what I really liked was something that Tina M wrote in. She said, “Thank you for bringing hope and information to disprove the notion that the US is ‘too special’ or ‘too complicated’ a country to enact sweeping social reforms that would keep people housed and healthy.” Which also reminded me of BigDog’s comment, which did numbers on Spotify. It said, “There’s a stupid irony from the right when they say we can’t fix education, healthcare, clean energy, et cetera with more money, but then at the exact same time, think we can solve the immigration problem by 4xing the ICE budget.”

Katie:

What’s funny is the only group that stands on business about that is the Cato Institute. They are the one group.

Henah:

S Remember that shock when you saw that?

Katie:

Yeah. They were like, guys, this is a bad idea. Do you know how much? Do you know how expensive it is going to be to do all of this shit? And for what I know, I was like, okay, Cato, stand on business. One unit of respect allotted for this.

Henah:

Then I got two questions that are essentially the inverses of each other. So the first came from Bill S. and they said, “I enjoyed the discussion with Natasha and found myself wondering if there is a place in the world where all or most of the policies discussed on the show are available to the lucky public of that country. While I suspect not, it would be interesting to see which countries do check the most boxes.”

And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, Shaunah G. asked, “I love this most recent episode, which definitely fills me with a little hope and inspiration. It got me thinking about how on the left we often point to countries like Norway”—I’m allowed to say it, Katie, sorry—“when talking about policies we want to or should have here in the US as examples of them working and wanting to know if the right does anything similar, are there countries they point to that are showing the policies they want to enact here?”

Katie:

Yeah. I think Donald is, he’s really tracking closely what Daddy Vladi is doing.

Henah:

Not Daddy Vladi.

Katie:

You all know my answer to this question. It is the country that I’m not allowed to say, so I’m going to punt to Henah. What do you think?

Henah:

I have a different N country I’ll throw out there. It’s Namibia. They’re a leader in renewable energy and they’re offering for university tuition as of next year. They’re working towards universal healthcare. They do struggle with affordable housing. But I think it’s important that we’re looking at a broad scope of countries, not just Scandinavia and the Nordic, the Norden countries.

Katie:

Norden.

Henah:

And as far as countries that the right looks to, I mean it’s probably no surprise. There’s been a far right movement surging around the world from India to Brazil to across Europe. So I’m not entirely sure that they’re sitting in a lair with one shared playbook since all of these countries have vastly different circumstances.

Katie:

Well…

Henah:

But they all seem to be moving towards authoritarianism, xenophobia, a consolidation of power. I do think it’s important to remember, as Tressie pointed out, that the US was founded by imperialists, built by enslaved people, and we continue to be imperialists to exploit smaller countries to retain our dominance. So in some ways, I’m not really surprised that we’re at this moment, but what I really loved about Natasha’s work is looking at those worst moments and kind of saying like, okay, if we’re parallel pathing this and we’re kind of in the same moment, there are ways that people can go for better policies or systems.

Katie:

Yeah. Natalie emailed us with a good point about government trust that sort of came up in this episode, but I think it’s relevant. I want to spend a little time talking about that and I hope nobody takes me out of context here. She added—

Henah:

There’s the cold open.

Katie:

Yeah. I’m like, don’t clip me guys. You’ll see why that matters in 20 seconds.

Henah:

Oh, good.

Katie:

She writes, “We need trust in order for any of these programs to work. I wonder if there have been examples in US history or other nations of efforts to build trust in the government, and if so, how it was accomplished in Nordic theory of everything. Thanks for the rec. The author mentions almost offhandedly that, of course the finished government is making choices that would support the wellbeing of its citizens. In the past few years, policy decisions have only enforced to me that the good of the people is not the US government’s priority. And if we can’t trust the government to ignore corporate lobbying to provide basic online services that would benefit everyone (looking at you TurboTax), then how can anyone believe that new progressive policy won’t just crumble when a higher bidder comes along? I promise I’m not trying to be cynical about one of the more positive episodes in recent months, but something about hearing about how other nations have solved basic issues that the ‘greatest country on the planet’ can’t seem to outsmart, has me discouraged and definitely envious.”

Okay. Like I said, hear me out before you react. Have you ever heard the phrase, if you go far enough left, you get your guns back?

Henah:

I have. I’m a little scared.

Katie:

It is in reference to some statements that are attributed to Marx because basically revolutionary left writers believed that armed struggle against the state is inevitable. So if you look at the political spectrum, it’s like the far left. Not everybody. I’m painting with a broad brush, but in theory, in political theory, the far left would think guns are good, the center left liberals thinks guns are bad, the center right conservatives thinks guns are good, but the far right conservatives think guns are bad because if you have a fascist dictator, you don’t want your populace to have the means to rise up against you.

So it kind of complicates the narrative of the right likes guns and the left don’t. Okay, so I bring that up to borrow that sentiment here, which I think actually describes how I have been feeling about the US government lately, especially over the last six months. Not the armed up rising part, yet, but the idea that liberals love the idea of a big government and conservatives allegedly hate it. I mean, obviously it’s funny that Trump is nationalizing steel companies and deploying the National Guard domestically. So LOL, small government love it, but I feel like I am in that you go far enough left and you start to question how much power you want to give the state and how much control you want to give the state phase of my journey.

And I think witnessing how easily, and this is going to be a beautiful segue for our final topic, our final episode with Representative Clark, how easily our government has been totally taken over and how little power the population has had to do anything about it where they’re doing incredibly unpopular things. People are protest—it doesn’t fix anything. And so I am feeling I will say a little more ambivalent about the idea of imbuing the American state with even more power than it already has, which I think is where this feeling of trust comes in and where I come down to, okay, this actually raises new questions for me.

What does true democracy look like? What does it mean for power structures to be genuinely decentralized? Because again, not to go all Das Kapital, but Natalie is right, as long as we are relying on the good faith intentions of individual people within a system where money is legally speech, and the United States is essentially a corporation with a military, I am hesitant.

Henah:

Oh, the US is essentially a corporation with a military. Bars. I see what you mean. But going down that line of thinking scares me because I feel like we’re in a catch 22 and I can’t really see the way out.

Katie:

Well, I think it’s about keeping that consideration in mind of how do we provide public services? How do we expand public goods, but without consolidating and centralizing the power around who controls them, like truer checks and balances, I think the last six months especially have really shown that the checks and balances are not there. And so within that current context, I would be wary of giving that state more power that is kind of actively proving right now that it is not democratically controlled. So I don’t think it’s that we don’t do these things, but it’s that as you move toward building them, keeping that in mind of this is possible in our current system and we don’t want this to be able to happen again.

Henah:

Yeah. I think about how every day I get a notification that’s like Trump moves to ban mail-in voting, and I’m like, well, somebody will fight back and then nothing happens and it goes through. So I’m like, well…

Katie:

The court’s like, no, stop.

Henah:

I’m baby. Please.

So I feel as helpless as our audience did, but we could talk about that episode in a little bit. I wanted to add a few notes that came up in this episode regarding the education system. So first Sumodumozi, I’m going to hope that I said that right, they wrote, “FYI. Charter schools are public schools,” and that’s related to a point in the episode where Natasha said, “I didn’t realize that a lot of the GDP on education was going to private education where a lot of people are getting school vouchers to send their kids to private schools. That’s public money. Some of it is also due to the fact that we’re having a lot of charter schools instead of public schools. That comes back to how underperforming schools are treated in certain areas.”

So yes, charter schools are a type of public school, but I think what Natasha was getting at there is that charter schools don’t really follow the same curriculum or have the same accountability practices as public schools do. Public schools have district-wide guidelines, they have school boards, things like that. Whereas charter schools come with more autonomy and less accountability around performance schools, and I think that’s the underperforming that she was referring to.

Katie:

Interesting. Yeah, thank you for that. Actually, this is an area of policy in our economy that I have not spent much time reading about. I do know it’s generally part of this wave of privatization and the divestment from public goods that I do find alarming writ large, but I didn’t know many specifics about how the mechanisms there work.

Henah:

Yeah, I think Phil C. actually, he wanted us to do kind of an unpacking between Finland’s private school abolition against the thesis of the Nice White Parents podcast from the Times, which kind of piggybacks off of this privatization note that you had said. So for those unfamiliar, Nice White Parents essentially dives into the choices that white parents will make for their children and the education system. So taking them out of a public school that might be struggling and putting them in a private school and how it inadvertently contributes to the socioeconomic and racial segregations already present in public schools.

But because Finnish schools all adhere to the same curriculum and standards and private schools in Finland cannot actually turn a profit, there’s actually less incentives for parents to look elsewhere to take their kid out of one school and put them in another. And because of that, the resources are all distributed more fairly.

So I thought that was a really nice thing that Phil pointed out, and Phil, like your brain is an encyclopedia, and I feel like it’s always just bridging topics together that we wouldn’t even think. So thank you for that.

Katie:

Truly. PC is like my pen pal at this point. I have never liked someone who disagrees with me so frequently, so much.

Henah:

To close this out here, Katie, you actually recently wrote an essay on the US housing crisis and you quoted Jerusalem Demsas on how housing cannot be both a human right needed for survival and a constantly appreciating asset for building wealth. And that came to mind for me when Remy shared this clarifying note on Singapore’s public housing system. They said, “Yes, it’s ownership, but with some nuance, apartments are sold a 99 year lease at the end of 99 years. In theory, the apartment is returned to the state with a value of zero and practice so far. The government has at their discretion, taken back older apartment blocks before 99 years and provided new apartments in exchange.” So if you were in Singapore and you were trying to build generational wealth, I don’t think you would look to real estate the way that Americans do.

Katie:

Yeah, I was thinking about Singapore a lot when I was working on that essay because it is, to my knowledge, one of the only places that has taken a really unique and heavy handed approach to housing that appears to really be working for them. I’m not sure how to resolve that paradox, by the way, as I made clear in the piece, I think I do think we’re really kicking the can down the road with continuing to try to poke and prod the private markets and be like, please do something. I almost didn’t even write about housing. It is legitimately so complex. I know I’m not an expert on it, but there was just this broader underlying tension that feels like it goes unacknowledged in a lot of the popular conversations that are happening about housing right now and what we do about it.

And beyond that kind of this bizarre brushing aside of the clear income disparity problem that is fueling this. So I think the very last paragraph in the essay, the first sentence is like, and the fact that houses cost five times median wages is as much about wages as it is about houses. These problems are so intimately connected and we can’t really talk about one without talking about the other. And I mean, absent intervention wealth will flow upward. That’s how capitalism works. And if housing is wealth, that is going to—

Henah:

Sorry, Katie, haven’t you heard of trickle-down economics?

Katie:

Milton, where’d you come from? But if housing is wealth, that’s also going to flow upward. There’s no way around that.

On that note, Henah, we do have one more housing related reader question. I don’t want to open a huge can of worms, but it’s basically about how weird it feels to choose something different for your life and how culturally embedded the pro homeowner culture is. I’ve really shortened and summarized this email. It was quite long, but I do think it’s an interesting predicament and I want to quickly talk about it. They write, “I loved your recent roundup and especially the threads on home ownership in light of Henah’s home purchase. I’ve been thinking about the social pressures around buying versus renting, how they can feel a lot like beauty standards shaping what we think adulthood should look like. Here’s my situation. I own a home I don’t really love.

“It’s pretty, but too far from everything. The neighborhood doesn’t feel like me. I spend a lot of time caring for my aging parents. I would love to live closer to them. The idea I’m exploring is selling my house and building a small apartment above their garage. It would be simple, lower cost and would free up a lot of money for savings. But when I mention this, people freak out friends, colleagues, even my financial advisor react like it’s outrageous. They say things like, how will you feel at 50 living in your parents’ garage? I honestly don’t care. To me, it seems smart, practical, and I’m really excited about the simplicity of living smaller. Again. Yet the pushback has me wondering, am I missing something or is the real issue that my choice just doesn’t fit the social script for what a woman in her forties should want? Am I missing something here or do I need a new council of experts? The pushback against this non-normative idea has astonished and dismayed me. Is it financial bananas?”

Henah:

I think that’s actually one of the most beautiful emails I’ve read in a long time. And I say that because I think first they’re excited. You could feel that they’re excited.

Katie:

I know I picked up on that too. I was like, oh, they seem so pumped about this.

Henah:

And to me, that’s the most important thing. Against any advice Katie has given mem I decided to do the thing that didn’t financially make sense. It probably still doesn’t make sense, but I am excited and happy to be here. If that is the thing that brings you joy and you are this excited about it, who cares what anyone else thinks when you’re 50 and you’re living above your parents’ garage, but you also have enough money to retire early to go travel and do what you want because you have lower housing costs, the world is your oyster. Whereas these people that follow more standard societal pressures might not have that flexibility because they have these other things that they have to spend all their money on. So I don’t know about you, but hell yeah to whoever this person is.

Katie:

I know. Alright, we’re on the same page in the full email. They kind of laid out more specifics about home value and interest rates and how much it would cost to build the thing. And I mean, I actually don’t even think a lot of that really matters because the numbers made sense. But I had the same reaction of when I was reading the email, I was like, oh, they just sound excited about this. And it’s interesting sometimes to read someone else’s question asking you for advice where your initial response is, well, it sounds like you already know what you’re going to do. It sounds like you already know what you want to do. You have made up your mind that you’re going to do this. And so I was really, really touched by their attraction to simplicity and downsizing. I was like, look, I get it. I completely get it.

So okay, we will discuss our final episode that all of you hated and your other open-ended questions right after this break.

So our final episode from this batch was our conversation with representative at Catherine Clark on the Big Beautiful Bill Act’s repercussions. The general consensus from the audience kind of seem to be split between like, “Hey, I’m glad we’re talking openly about how this is going to impact people.” And, “I am frustrated because I feel really helpless hearing this.”

Henah:

Which was basically what I said 12 minutes ago. So I will rapid fire some of the comments that we heard that kind of echoed these sentiments just so we can get a sense for what we’re talking about before we dive into specifics. So Robin F said, “Thank you for voicing our frustration and getting at least someone in government to admit to reality,” which I think speaks to the fact that we’re all very nihilistic about all of this, but…

Katie:

Gaslit nation.

Henah:

KClark198, who said, “Please keep up the good fight. I’m feeling so pessimistic about our ability to get out of this mess without hitting rock bottom first.” Michael S. said, “Great episode, you should do Bernie or AOC if possible,” which hey, if they ever call us, let me know.

Clara L wrote, “It’s always so important to hear how legislation, which most people won’t read, even some reps voted for it without reading it, how it has real effects with day-to-day examples. Thank you.” Kajun said, “This was so illuminating. Thank you. I’ll be following your podcast.” And then MrC28 said, “Another great episode, Katie. Upset with what I’ve been seeing from our elected officials lately. Learned quite a bit from this episode. And pissed after hearing about the work requirements and cuts to our social nets.”

Katie:

Our social safety net, that’s like three pieces of yarn tied together. They’re like, we don’t need this one. This one can go actually. Yeah. So regarding that work requirement piece, Spyke said, “I honestly hate the bullshit work requirements for any sort of assistance. The thing is the people who do need that help live in areas where jobs are stagnant or non-existent. On top of that, we don’t have public infrastructure to enable people to work outside of their communities. In many rural communities like my own, you are SOL, if you don’t have a car, but in order to get a car, you need money. It’s a cycle to keep those in poverty, even more stuck while also punishing disabled and elderly people.”

Henah:

Yep.

Katie:

I have talked about this before in Rich Girl Roundup, how my dad does volunteer work in rural communities and just he has talked to me about the reliance on the vehicle and how it ends up costing a staggering amount of people’s monthly incomes because they often don’t have good credit or credit at all, so they can’t get approved for loans. Their income is very unstable and so the high risk of default, they have no other choice is the point. If they want to be able to navigate where they live, that is their only option.

Then Hannah M. added this, “Public transit is one of my focus interests and passions. I see the lack of funding for transit, especially prevalent recently as a further extension of a system that is designed to keep people in poverty and worsen economic inequity.”

Henah:

Did you see that post [meme] recently that showed that there’s a flight every six minutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco for 18 hours a day and they’re like, this is the case for public transit. Think about that. But we’ve just got money for ICE. So comical.

Katie:

I am really resisting the urge to say something just like horrifyingly misogynistic about Kirsti Noem right now. Are you allowed? Okay, question for the feminist PhDs in the audience: Can we be mean to women who put humans in cages? Yes. Is that okay? Cool.

Henah:

Kosher.

Katie:

Alright. On a brighter note, I loved this comment from Marie D. It nicely illustrates, I think at least at the local level, what you can do to meet this moment. She says, “The only good thing this recent president has done is activate me politically. I updated all my voter registrations. I put on my calendar, my local school board meetings. I’ve joined the PTA, I have my city’s meetings on my calendar. I signed up for our city’s newsletter. I signed up for the five calls website and I have joined two organizations to volunteer with. I am still a little lost on what else to do from here, but I know it’s a start.”

Okay. To me, this is like best case scenario, right? And I agree I think frequently about what Chelsea Fagan said in our January roundtable with Berna Anat that yes, Trump is a monster, but there are a lot of people in this country and around the world who did not have it good under Biden and probably would not have had it good under Kamala. And no matter what, the status quo really did need to change. This is not my preferred method of changing it, but on my sunnier days, I think I can make an argument that a continuation of Biden style policy also would have just continued to delay the inevitable. And I think we are all—

Henah:

Do you think we’re at the inevitable right now?

Katie:

I think we’re being forced to confront it. Yeah. I think we are all feeling frustration with our elected officials writ large right now, understandably so. Now we are going to have a section called Airing your Grievances.

Henah:

Sorry, I’m laughing because I’m thinking of when you watch a show and they have a game show and they have a section with its own jive-y music and it’s going to be us.

Katie:

Yeah. Nickm hit the soundboard on airing your grievances theme music. Okay. Hopefully it’ll have some cathartic value for some of you listening. Some of this is going to be a little brutal, which I ordinarily would not read on air for a non-politician guest, but I think politicians are fairly subjected to a higher degree of scrutiny and I think that there is some value in recognizing that nobody is coming to save us. So here we go.

Brittney S. said, “If a bill said income earners below $500,000 had to pour spiders in their eyes for three hours a day, we should not have to make it known that we don’t want the spiders in our eyes. Our reps should just be motivated enough to block that bill. That is how I feel whenever I hear our elected officials say that we need to make our voice heard about obviously harmful proposals like this bill.” Which LOL, the spiders. I think that is actually a provision on page 900 of the, okay.

Someone else added, “Clark is my rep, and the advice on calling your reps is especially laughable since I call her office constantly and I yet failed to see much leadership in fighting back against the speed run to the end of our democracy.”

And then finally, Claire emailed in, she said this, “To me, this episode showcased the astounding lack of accountability and action that our elected officials have been pushing since the inauguration. It felt like a lot of tired talking points of ‘blame them not us’ mentality and demonstrated fully why younger left-leaning folks are so fed up with the way things are being handled. But is it really Trump and the Republicans that have our Congress people on the verge of a ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli’ scenario or is it the corporate PACS and super PACs that fund everyone’s campaigns? Please tell us more about how voting makes a difference when y’all’s collective resistance to the administration amounts to little more than whining. This conversation did not make me feel any better. It just left me looking at literally any elected official going do something.”

Henah:

It was actually that meme with the stick figure guy poking your rock that was like ‘do something’ that they sent in. So y’all aren’t wrong. Hopefully the outro of this segment musically will close us out there.

There was also another thread of criticism that we’ve heard before and I want to bring it up. I think it’s important to clarify. So Tony B. wrote, “Well that was uplifting. Would it be possible to get someone from the other side on your show?” And then Doughboy wrote, “This episode sounds a lot like bashing the current party in office. This is the same stuff that all parties have done in office year in and year out, both Democratic and Republican. I was disappointed there wasn’t more discussion on the actual implications of the Bills parts.”

And so to be fair to you, Katie, we had a last minute very limited open window with Rep Clark. So I think that we covered as much ground as we could have, but as for the, this is the same stuff all parties have done. I think you can make the argument that one party is worse than the other, et cetera, whatever. But even the founding fathers warned about this hyper-partisanship within a two party system 250 years ago and well, I don’t know, bulldozing your way through is kind of how things seem to get done nowadays. And maybe that’s exactly why—wait for it, wait for it, Katie—a better world as possible if we work towards it.

Katie:

On the both sides-ism thing, let me make it abundantly clear to everybody listening that I dislike both major parties. I don’t say that to be like, ooh, cop out, edgy, contrarian, internet girl doesn’t like anyone, not that, but to me they are more similar than they are different. I think the Democrats were proposing a more intense border bill than the Republicans were last year. It was like we had just given up on reforming the immigration system entirely. It was just like, who is going to be cruel at the border and vote for me? So is it fair to say they are less flagrantly evil on some social issues? Yes, but the bar is in hell at this point.

For example, last election cycle, I think trans people got thrown under the bus the freaking second that it became obvious that the country had moved, right? And so I think just at a high level, I don’t find the positions even on the center left to be principled on a lot of these things.

So all that said, though I don’t feel the need to both sides of my podcast. I think my perspectives are reasonable and well-founded. Representative Clark was the politician who was willing to talk to me about this, but you’re going to be waiting a long time for the JD Vance interview to drop if that’s what you want.

And I will say a final note in my interview. I did point out that the studies that said immigrant crime rates are lower than those of native-born citizens and how those studies had been scrubbed from government websites and Sam L. came through and said, “I work in immigration and civil rights law and I first came across this report in November right after it was published. As you note, it was deleted by the Trump administration, but I found a copy and a public web archive. I saved the attached PDF of the original NIJ report plus the underlying research. Let me know if you have any questions and keep fighting the good fight.”

So in the PDFs that Sam sent us, the study was funded by the National Institute of Justice and it’s studied Texas criminal records from 2012 to 2018. And Henah, why don’t you come on down and tell the people what they’ve won, tell ’em what they found.

Henah:

In news that will surprise no one, “The study found that undocumented immigrants has substantially lower crime rates than native born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony cases relative to undocumented immigrants. US-born citizens are over two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, two and a half times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes and over four times as likely to be arrested for property crimes.”

So I mean we could sit here all day and pick apart the study sample size or if we believe it, but to me this is just another example of Trump’s distorted revisionist history. So I’m really glad that Sam could help us find the original data points. So thank you for that, Sam.

Katie:

Sometimes I see videos that are like, I don’t care if people are undocumented, I don’t care. And I get the point of like, oh, it doesn’t bother me if people come to this country, but I do think we should care about people not being able to get documentation because being undocumented is a major problem for why migrant workers are so easily exploited and there’s no punishment. But I do think that it is a huge driver of exploitation and so it just kills me that we’re funneling all this money into this program to just violently crack down instead of just reforming the freaking immigration system and making it easier to get documentation.

So anyway, to be honest, I do think the fact that democratic politicians, and this is free consulting for the Democratic party, take it or leave it. I think the fact that they’re even discussing immigration in the context of crime is a loss. You are accepting the right wing framing that these two things go together. The framing matters. The framing matters. And if all conversations that we’re having we’re debating them on the terms of, well, but we got to get the criminals out, it’s like, okay, good. They’re all on 4chan waiting for you. Go get them.

We know that the biggest threat of domestic terrorism are white supremacists. Here is a little Diabolical Lies crossover moment for you, Henah, will you please read this reporting from the New York Times in the summer of 2020?

Henah:

Sure. Okay. It said, “As the racial justice demonstrations intensified, justice department officials began shifting federal prosecutors and FBI agents from investigations into violent white supremacists to focus on cases involving rioters or anarchists, including those who might be associated with the Antifa movement. One Justice Department prosecutor was sufficiently concerned about an excessive focus on Antifa that the official went to the department’s independent inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, telling his office that politics might’ve played a part. Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized according to two people who worked on justice department efforts to counter domestic terrorism. They were told to do so even though the FBI in particular had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well organized far right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the President. White House and Justice Department officials stifled internal efforts to publicly promote concerns about the far-right threat with aides to Mr. Trump seeking to suppress the phrase ‘domestic terrorism’ and internal discussions according to a formal official at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Katie:

Yeah, so, I think that there’s nuance in the conversation when we talk about even if you read the Cato Institute thing, it’s like it’s bad for the economy to deport all these people because they form the underpaid low wage workforce. Those people deserve better. And so it’s interesting when the economic angle of the immigration question or will things get cheaper, will more jobs appear for native born people? It’s like, anyway, remember when this show is about Roth IRAs?

Henah:

Finally, I will close this part of the episode with a v. nice comment from Phil for you, Katie, and he said, “Katie, I don’t know if there was an invisible barrier to cross moving from talk show host to journalists, but in your truth to power approach here, I’m pretty sure you crossed it. Hell of a job.”

Katie:

Oh, thanks. I wonder what he’s even referring to maybe when I was like, so yeah, I don’t feel like the elected officials are doing anything. What say you? He is never afraid to hold my feet to the fire though. So I’m going to take it. I’m going to take the compliment and run.

Henah:

Take the win where you can get it.

Katie:

Okay, so let’s address some episode agnostic questions that came in. We’ll start with a fun one. This one came from Renee. Hi Henah and Katie, would you mind doing an updated deep dive into your favorite travel cards? I’m sure you’ve seen the Chase Reserve is getting updated with these new benefits. They’re upping the annual fee to match that of the platinum, the Amex Platinum that is, it’d be great to hear whether your recommendations have changed based on these recent updates.”

Henah:

Renee, a girl after my own heart. So if you were newer here, in past Rich Roundups, I think maybe it was like two years ago now, Katie, we had shared our favorite premium cards and travel reward strategy—and fun fact actually our new website that launches, I think in 10 days, by the time this episode comes out, we’ll actually have a travel section for this—but at the time Katie was very Amex Platinum. I was very Chase Reserve and I have both good and bad news.

Katie:

Oh, have the tables turned? Tell me more.

Henah:

The turn tables. A little. I think so. I talk about both cards pretty frequently on my Substack, which we’ll link in the show notes if you want to dive deeper. But I still have both the Chase Reserve and my husband has the AmEx Platinum, but we’ve actually definitely used more of the AmEx offers in recent years.

However, given the new Chase travel features that they’ve been rolling out to kind of go with the higher annual fee, I’m interested to see how we use them because I still think that Chase points are exceptionally valuable.

But the last thing I’ll say here is that Chase has been offering more generous signup bonuses again to offset that higher fee. And when I tried to see what Amex would offer me, so for example, if I were to downgrade to a preferred, Jovanni would get the Chase Reserve in that place and then I would get the platinum, it was only 80,000 points, which didn’t really impress me. I saw offers for like 105,000 115,000 points.

So I think it also depends on what signup bonus you’re seeing to figure out if that’s worth it for you and where you’re going to be redeeming the points and kind of offsetting how much you’re paying for the card in that sense. But what about you, Katie? I think you wrote recently about the Centurion lounge and feeling kind of less than enthused about the AmEx nowadays.

Katie:

Yeah. For one thing on the Chase note, before I dive into my strategy, did you see that they got rid of the 48 month churn rule?

Henah:

I did, yeah.

Katie:

Yeah. It used to be that you could get a new Sapphire product every four years and get a new signup bonus and they have now done away with that. So now their rules match the Platinum, or they now match AmEx signup bonus rules where it’s like once in a lifetime. So it does kind of raise the stakes a little bit of when you get the card, the signup bonus that you get is the one you’re going to get. So if you take it when it’s low, you don’t really have the chance to re-up at a later time.

Henah:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Katie:

I still feel like I get enough value from my Gold card, especially for food because 4x points on food and I spend a lot of money on food. I use Platinum for most everything else still and Sapphire Preferred kind of intermittently to keep the Chase portal and rack up some points there. I also have a Chase Inc business preferred card. So I guess theoretically, I mean the Sapphire Preferred annual fee is not high enough that I would be like, I’m going to cancel this. But I do have a Chase business card. I like Chase. I bank with Chase as well.

So I feel like there is a little bit of ongoing loyalty there, but I did recently lose my sunglasses actually at the Rich Girl Nation launch party. It is a third time that I’ve lost this pair of sunglasses, and so I always keep the receipt when I repurchase them. And again, I submitted the receipt to Amex and just selected on the purchase protection reason for submitting lost or stolen as a category and within two days they had credited my account for the cost of the sunglasses. So that peace of mind to me, I will probably always have platinum for that reason because it just means that if you buy something and something happens to it, they’re really good about that.

There was also this other time I got ripped off where long story, anyway, I thought something that was going to be like $100 was closer to $500 and it was kind of a shitty situation. I don’t know. So because of that and I was in the moment scared to push back on the person, they allowed me to do basically a chargeback on that I could prove no, that was not what I was told this was going to cost. I actually was told this and without asking any questions, they basically just reimburse you. So I don’t use the chargeback feature. I think that was the only time I’ve ever used it, but it was such an egregious situation. They’ve been so lenient about when and how they let you use those benefits or my experience has been so good that I think I’ll probably continue to use them.

Henah:

Yeah, I think it’s funny because I had that same kind of experience but with Chase, which I think is probably the loyalty that I had for them, is we dinged my car a little bit to rental on a vacation and it was going to be like $1,200 to Hertz or something, and I just submitted the paperwork and they covered all of it. I never saw a bill.

Katie:

Dude, that’s amazing.

Henah:

I do think Chase is a little bit more complicated with trying to get those claims through. I mean probably because it’s a $1,200 claim I was trying to do, but I think the loyalty of either of our experiences says a lot about which cards we’ve preferred over the years. But in any case, I don’t think you’d go wrong with either one of them, but I definitely should leverage that lost purchase thing more. I’ve never done or used the chargeback feature either, so it’s a good reminder.

Next up, we have a philosophical follow-up from Tanya after the last search roundup. So you and I were kind of going back and forth and we discovered that your need to externally seem smart. So she had said quote, “Such an interesting personal revelation on affirmation coming from intellectualism or the performance of it, the juxtaposition of that versus the affirmation that comes from being perceived as beautiful via participation in the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel is intriguing, especially when considering how much of that performance is for public consumption is one any more or less acceptable than the other, particularly considering that there’s a financial cost associated with intellectualism as well.”

Katie:

Okay. Why are you laughing? Why are you laughing?

Henah:

Because it clocked you.

Katie:

This makes me feel uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean there’s probably something in there about some fucked up system that I have internalized or there’s some woke explanation for this. Okay, I’ve realized that I recognize that, but I also think some of it is just a defense mechanism from years of being told by strangers on the internet that Finland is not in Scandinavia. So you know what? I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is it’s your fault. It’s all your fault. Next next question.

Henah:

Deflect! Deflect! Fine, we’ll move on. But we have Lauren P. who wanted to know, it’s another toughie: “I have a genuine question. After following you for a long time, how do you stay sane? Delving deep into top—”

Katie:

Flattered.

Henah:

How do you stay sane delving deep into topics that for me cause nausea and existential crises from even the most cursory glance? I’ve been in such a state of avoidance. I’m truly in awe of people who are still able to look reality dead in the eyes. Do you feel optimistic that we’ll turn things around or is understanding the chaos a way of coping with it?”

Katie, I think you had said in your interview with Tressie that you have to deconstruct things in order to understand them. And so I think maybe that’s partially what’s happening here. But I do think you and I are in a bit of a different position than most people because it is our jobs to stay up to date, to ask questions, to bring this to the show. And I also think it’s a privilege to just kind of avoid it when so many others don’t have the luxury of just continuing on with their lives. But what’s happening right now does keep me up at night and I genuinely have a much higher base level of anxiety than I’ve ever had before. I don’t know if you feel the same.

Katie:

I do think that the way that I metabolize things is by trying to get really close to them and break them down and feel like I can tease them apart and make sense of them. So I think some of that is just personal. I think that’s what drew me to this job. I enjoy learning about things even when they’re messed up. I like making sense of systems and seeing how they’re connected and tying what’s happening now to stuff that’s happened in history. And I do get a lot of fulfillment out of that process.

We did do an episode recently on Diabolical Lies, and it kind of reminds me of this question. It came out last Sunday and it’s about celebrities who have not spoken up about the things that are happening in the world in particular Taylor Swift and something that we came to at the end of the episode, and this is a paid episode, so y’all are getting a free sneak peek here, was about how people react to experiencing or witnessing injustice in the world and how there is a range of human ability or just your nature to whether you compartmentalize it really easily and you can kind of just move on from it to how much it fucks with your head.

And to me, it just feels like a scab I can’t stop picking at, I can’t look away. I do feel tremendously fortunate to be in the situation that I am in and relatedly an intense guilt that everyone’s life is not as easy as my life is. And so there feels almost like a spiritual atonement or spiritual obligation to try to use that good fortune for something that is even a little bit positive.

And I think talking about these things online, the amount that I’m actually spending offline reading about them, I looked at my laptop screen time the other day, Hannah, I don’t tell you how much time you spend on your laptop. I spend an average of 60 hours per week looking at my laptop and I was like, that is bad. That is not good. But sometimes I wish I could disappear for six months and just read a hundred books and then reemerge more enlightened. And I guess that comes back to the intelligence thing earlier.

Henah:

Did you see the meme that was like, your honor, I need three weeks of PTO to catch up on all my books. That is me.

Katie:

Exactly. So I don’t know that that directly answers the question, but that’s what comes up for me with that opening.

Henah:

When you say there are people who are good at compartmentalizing and then how much it kind of messes with your head, which party are you in?

Katie:

Oh, I mean it messes with my head. I am not good at compartmentalizing it.

Henah:

I think I’m really, really good at compartmentalizing, but I think the thing that’s really hard here is that it seeps into every part of your life—whatever the headline is, it is going to affect me in some way. And so it’s really hard to just unplug and be like, whatever, this is too hard to pay attention to.

Oh, California House to Democrats push through redistricting

Katie:

Immediately pulling up the headline.

Henah:

Me talking about how great I am at compartmentalizing—here we are. We have two questions that are in the same vein, so I’m going to pair them together. A few Katie. The first one is from Holly H. They said, “I have a genuine connection or response to this week’s in Katie’s words article: if FIRE is so dependent—so they’re referring to financial independence, retire early—If FIRE is so dependent on making passive income off of the stock market, is that not reliant on a capitalist structure? Are those publicly traded companies not increasing their profits and therefore the shareholders by relying on a labor force? This seems contradictory to me, but perhaps I’m missing something along the connection. I’m also reminded of a podcast you did discussing Bernie Sanders and his making money off of the stock market. It’s a system we currently have. So what does a future non-capitalist FIRE system, country or societal structure look like?”

Katie:

First of all? Well, I’m going to answer that too. I know you have another one to read, but I love that the nut in the center of this question is like what is comes after capitalism? How do we replace it?

Henah:

I love that they gave you the benefit of the doubt, which was you’re also doing this, but maybe I missed something and you’re doing it better than everyone else. And then Brittni O. emailed in to say, “I love reading your weekly emails, your perspectives on finance and capitalism vibe hard with me. I was financial advisor for six years and ultimately left for many reasons. Which leads to my question as someone who seems to be disenchanted, Katie, with our current capitalist society, how do you grapple with your interest in ultimately your career in finance? I can absolutely understand having an appreciation for the mechanics of the economy and finance without endorsing or even disavowing capitalism. Anything you have to offer would help me greatly. As I’m driving myself crazy, I want to get back into finance, even learn more and go deeper thinking about my MBA, but it makes me stick to feel like another cog in the crushing machine of late stage rampant capitalism.”

Katie:

Yeah, so the essay in question was called Panic at the Airport Lounge. We’ll put it in the show notes and it was basically my attempt at linking the experience of being in an AmEx lounge to a class analysis. So to answer the first question, yes, a hundred percent, you’re right. You’re not missing anything. It is entirely reliant fire that is on a capitalist structure of separating owners and laborers into two classes. So you’re not missing anything there.

My point was not that reaching financial independence and then living off your assets was some socialist utopia. It was that the philosophy which underpins fire that you are not free if someone else controls your time and labor. That is deeply Marxist in my opinion. That understanding of power and that understanding of labor’s relationship with things like coercion and time and how much autonomy you have over your life.

Now clearly the FIRE solution is okay. Yeah, so that’s how that is. That’s what work means, and you can become an owner too. You can go from being a laborer to an owner by buying this little thing called the S&P 500. And so your understanding here is correct.

I don’t think that answer is satisfactory as far as, and what does it look like if we get rid of that? I don’t know yet. I don’t know how to resolve that cognitive dissonance, but it was just something that I noticed about the similarities in the rhetoric between the FIRE movement and deep cut political theory. That’s aside on the note of how do you grapple with your interest in these things into career in finance? I guess I don’t really consider myself having a career in finance. I think of myself as a writer who writes about finance, but I don’t know that we get super far by purity testing a lot of those things.

I do think that there is a balance to be struck of in different ways that you can use that knowledge in a career in finance. I think there is a wide difference between I’m going to go be a CFP who works on a fee only basis to help people figure out how they can send their kids to college, and I’m going to go work for a private equity firm that buys nursing homes. There is a wide range of careers in finance, and so I think if it is something you’re interested in, there might be a way and what my entire career culminated to and what I’m still really feeling like I’m in a liminal space with, and what I’m trying to figure out is how do I pair this trait or this skill that feels like I’m good at this practical thing that has value with this evolving perspective and theory about how the world works. So I don’t think it necessarily has to be this binary of like, oh, but I’m an evil capitalist if I study finance.

Henah:

Right, like ‘finance bad.’

Katie:

Finance bad. Right.

Henah:

On a related note, I guess I’ll say, and on the Sydney Sweeney of it all…

Katie:

Oh, goodie.

Henah:

Blake M. posed to this question. They said, “Great newsletter. The segment about Sydney Sweeney’s dedication to royalties via advertising made me think about ads I’ve been seeing lately. I’ve seen ads lately, especially from phone companies, mint Mobile, Verizon, et cetera, that are advertising their services by identifying how affordable it is compared to everything else in today’s economy. They’re literally leveraging the chaos of the economy and the inability for people to live properly to sell their product. It just makes it feel so dystopian, like 10-Ks that have the sections identifying potential impacts to profit and revenue. It feels like these companies likely have a healthy and affordable economy as an item. As long as companies can take advantage of economic downturns like this, do they care to be a part of a solution to reverse it, I’d like to think that Ryan Reynolds is sincere when he offers that they actively work to shrink the price for Mint Mobile because they care about people. But when I hear it through an advertisement for his product, all sincerity is a facade.”

Katie:

Yeah. Well, I mean Ryan, he has a lot of lawsuits to pay for right now, so I don’t know how much they’re concerned about that. Listen, I feel torn because I love my $30 per month Mint Mobile plan. I’m like loyal customer, do not want to mess with a major provider. But I do like pointing out this contradiction of handing the solutions for affordability to the people who profit from things being on affordable. I do think that that is an interesting call out for sure.

Henah:

And I think it’s kind of to go off of what Brittany was saying, I think there’s a difference in the work you choose if it chooses to go down this route of exploiting other higher cost goods versus trying to make, I don’t know, more public goods available to people.

Katie:

You’re going into Labubu black market sales, the Labubu derivatives market.

Henah:

When I was in Colombia, I saw both the Sydney Sweeney ad on a bus stop in English where GJvanni and I just looked at each other and said, not here too. And then we were in this Comuna 13 market and there were all these people screaming Labubu! Lababu! I was like, I’m good, thanks.

We have two book emails and one more that we’re going to save for next time from Sean and his wife. So we did clock it. I am tracking it, but in the meantime, here’s a question that I actually answered via email, but I think it’s worth sharing again because it’s kind of a common question that we get. So reading Rich Girl Nation and in the chapter Don’t Outlive Your Assets, you mentioned the approximate tax savings of $5,640 you can achieve through maxing out your 401(k). My question is where do you find this money? Where has it contributed to the Roth IRA from I feel like the answer is obvious and I’m just missing it somehow. Please help. So I wrote back probably an insufficiently helpful answer though. They did say that it was clear, but I think Katie, you’ll do a better job.

Katie:

No, I’m like, all right, you want to give this, you want to take a swing at this one? No, I love this question. So if your W-4 withholding form is correct, the reality is that this is money that’s either going to show up just on your monthly paychecks. So for example, you might set your 401(k) contribution to be at or around that $1,900-ish per month that will max it out for the year, but rather than your paychecks being lowered by that $1,900, they’re only going to go down by about $1,400, give or take. So another way to think about it I guess, is that the extra $500 is landing in your 401(k). If your W-4 is not correct, it may come back to you in the form of a tax refund in April.

But the practical effect of this, if you sit down and you send your income through an income tax calculator and then you compare the before and after of putting $23,500 into the 401(k), is that you will have net more investible income making its way to you in some capacity, whether on your paychecks or in the form of a tax refund.

$23,500 of it is going to be going into that 401(k) before you even see it. So it should feel like a raise if you’re currently contributing the maximum to a Roth 401k, or if you’re just taking the money home and then putting that amount of money in a savings account or a brokerage account. But that is sort of how I think about it.

Another way to put it or the reverse is that you can look at that income tax calculator before and after and see that your overall tax liability is just lowered by that amount. So your overall income stays the same, the tax liability comes down, and then more of that income will make its way to you.

Henah:

I do want to just add the clarification that it is by tax bracket. So it’s not like if you’re in a specific 12%, 20% tax bracket that you’re going to take home the same amount as someone in a 37% tax bracket.

Katie:

Right, it is almost not exactly $23,500 times your marginal tax rate because it depends on how much you earn and whether you’re splitting that top $23,000 is splitting two different brackets, but assuming your entire $23,500 contribution is in your highest marginal tax bracket, the quick math is to just multiply it by that percentage and that will tell you roughly what you’re going to save in taxes.

Henah:

And your girl’s been doing it for three and a half years despite her immense fear of not having enough money. So if you want to listen, go off to that episode.

Katie:

Good little throwback. Katie Pressures Henah.

Henah:

I think it’s called Katie Forces Henah to Max Her Retirement. Okay, so finally I want to close with a story from Rachel. So as you all know, last Rich Girl Roundup When we’ve alluded to this before, we talked about my decision to buy a house and how it was kind of less of a financial decision for me. So Rachel emailed in with a money story about how having kids and dealing with her health radically changed her perspective on money and spending more on a home. So it’s a little long, but I think it’s illustrative on spending on the things that make sense to you.

So she wrote, “I spent my twenties being frugal. I contributed to my 401(k) even when I was making $30k. I got married and in my late twenties I got a tech job. Money was fine, good, but not anything to write home about. My spouse and I bought a reasonable house for our current income. This was pre 2020. After a few years at the company, I accepted a new job on a different team for a higher annual salary, more stock, et cetera. Due to a mix of things that can mostly be attributed to being in the right place at the right time, my salary increased a hundred thousand dollars. Within a few years, I pushed for promotion. I ended up getting, my company was preparing to unveil gender pay equity and thus gave large pay increases to women like myself that weren’t yet at equity with their male counterparts. And I had a great boss who advocated for all of this.

“Suddenly, our household income had tripled and annual household income was above what we paid for our house. Our life didn’t change much. We stayed the course maxing out our 401(k), HAS, backdoor Roth IRA and our brokerage account. We took overseas trips, had fun, spent time with our loved ones, nothing extravagant. We also downsized to one car during this time to save money. My spouse’s 20-year-old car was too expensive to continue repairing. We just didn’t meet another car. Things looked similar to when we made one third of what we were currently making. This wasn’t a bad thing. We didn’t feel deprived by any means.

“At the same time, in my early thirties, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer during a routine visit to my doctor. Stage one, fortunately caught early through routine medical care. I went through treatment and went into remission. It was really hard. It made me realize that despite a healthy lifestyle, I exercise daily, eat healthy. I don’t drink or smoke. Cancer doesn’t discriminate. Tomorrow was not promised.

“My spouse and I had long talked about starting a family. Once my cancer surgeries were over, we decided now was the time we were fortunate to get pregnant right away. Friends jokingly asked me when we’d move out of our starter home, despite losing my office, we both work from home, our guest room and living on a busy road not fit for a young child to run around. I was convinced we weren’t moving, not with these interest rates. We repaired my child’s nursery, brought our baby home to our house.

“Well, five months into my baby’s life, something in me changed. A decade plus of frugality made me glitch and a flip switched. I was tired of optimizing my life for financial benefit. Why would we stay in this house without a room for me to work with no guest room for family to come visit us and our child on a busy street? I felt like Scottish Scheffler saying, what’s the point of winning? For me it was, what’s the point of shoveling thousands into a brokerage account every month? Was I really going to retire that early? What is this money for exactly? I’m not sure if I’ll feel comfortable retiring early. Given my medical history and high cost of healthcare in America. I have a flexible remote job that affords me a great life, even if the work isn’t my absolute favorite.

“I started looking around for a new house after some time searching. We found a beautiful house on a treelined street with multiple screened porches, a greenway through our backyard leading to a walking path around a lake, a guest suite for our friends and family to visit. Despite five offers in 24 hours, a significant offer over list price and dealing with our house, not appraising. We got it and we love it so much.

“We talked to our fee only financial advisor shortly before purchasing, and he looked at us. Matter of fact, can you make an observation? You both seem guilty about the house, don’t be. You’ve been incredibly responsible with your money. You can afford it, buy it, and don’t feel guilty.

“Now in the house, we play at the lake with our toddler, walk our dog around the greenways, our neighbors walk on the greenway and pop over for happy hour while we’re out in the porch or in our backyard. It’s an incredible design that allows us to better get to know our neighbors versus being isolated in a typical backyard. We’ve hosted big parties, holidays, and many loved ones for overnight stays, and it’s a dream come true.

“It isn’t the perfect updated house. We’d need $200,000 more for that, but it has many incredible features and we’re making it our own in a not notoriously walkable area. We can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, workup studios, et cetera. We feel like we won the jackpot. I know we’re incredibly fortunate to afford this home while also maxing out our 401(k), HSA, backdoor Roth IRA, putting money into our brokerage every month and contributing what we anticipate our child will need for college for their 529. We also live in an area with family and the same city as our company’s offices. If return to office were to ever occur with many other similar companies nearby, if we were laid off, we expect to be in this home until we downsize one day. I’m always advocating for responsible home ownership. Make sure you can afford it or planning to stay in the area. The longer the better, but sometimes I found it’s okay to just care a little less.

“But optimizing financially and more about living your best life, your episode on money dysmorphia made me realize more people than I realized likely could be in a similar situation. The numbers work on paper, but struggling with something like this in their mindset, and this was me for a long time. I haven’t stopped caring about finances by any means, but I’ve accepted if I’m overpaying for somewhere that makes me and my family so happy, that’s okay.

“Three years past my initial cancer diagnosis, I’m facing another surgery next week actually, to find out if I have cancer. Yes, again, a different kind. And amongst my feelings of, oh, this again, are you fucking kidding me? I’m also thinking how grateful I am that I chose the bigger life for us, the lovely community, for whatever amount of time I have here on earth with my family.

Katie:

Wow. Wow. That is beautiful.

Henah:

Yeah.

Katie:

Thank you. We are really rooting for you. And I think that is the perfect note to end on. So that is all for this edition of Rich Girl Roundup. Thank you as always for listening, for sharing your thoughts. Hannah spends many hours going through them all after every episode so that we can pull this together for you.

And to give you a heads up on our schedule in the upcoming weeks, we are sitting down with a CFP next week to answer some money questions, questions that we have not talked about on this show before. So even if you are someone that has listened to every episode, we’re really going to be talking about some things that I don’t think we’ve actually covered. And then we’re going to be diving into about two weeks’ worth of episodes that dig into how personal finance is broken and we can do to fix it. And then a conversation with a top Harvard researcher about how black women and white women experience the economy differently. So that’s going to be fun. I think?

Henah:

The famously light and happy Money with Katie Show.

Katie:

The famously light and happy of money topic of intersectionality. Okay. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. It’s produced by head of Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content, and additional fact checking for this show comes from Scott Wilson.

[Katie clip]:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money with Katie podcast. And honestly, I think today’s episode might be my favorite yet. Dare I say, I’m like champagne taste on craft beer budget of this big pile of money that I’m going to go out and get Scrooge McDuck Swan dive into my pile of breaking bad a hundred dollars bills. Exactly. And financially woke was very demanding, and—

Ben:

That’s where all my hair went. Still—

Katie:

Going to learn how to play the game and not just move the pieces around. Kate, yes, me, Kate, and say, well, what is the, I don’t want to be asking what the horse does ever again. And that’s how I play chess. I’m like, does this one move this way? I want to hire a coach. My OCD is salivating right now, and you have a list of everything. You over my ancient MacBook Air being like, please don’t explode into Smiths before I can make sure this recording is locked in. And I can’t stop laughing because—

Ben:

You just, I’m going to have to cut this out. I’m dying because—

Katie:

You just told me that. Alright y’all, we will see you next time. Thank you for listening to this very wonderful conversation.